Thirteen games into the season and the dysfunction in Washington has already exceeded Jay Gruden's expectations. Robert Griffin III has been benched, the entire defense should be, and there's no reason to think this gets any better in the coming months.
Griffin watched from the sidelines in Week 13 as Colt McCoy got the start, but the former first-round pick made a brief appearance last Sunday after McCoy suffered a neck injury. Gruden says that McCoy will start this week if he's healthy, which again makes you wonder about Griffin's future in Washington.
Griffin's struggles have been well documented -- and can be summed up in this one screen shot, when he had five (!) open receivers and a clean pocket and managed to find none of them.
But there must be an offensive system in which RG3 can survive, right? If there is, Gruden has yet to find it.
“I don’t know what offense they are talking about,” Gruden said, via the Washington Post. “As far as offenses that I have studied in the National Football League, we all run similar dropback concepts. Not everybody runs the zone read.
“We run the zone read to try to help him out. We run a lot more play-actions and bootlegs than most teams. ...If you play quarterback in the National Football League, you’re going to have to drop back and throw it.”
We'll mention again what we said 11 months ago when Gruden was hired: Back in 2011, when Gruden was the Bengals' offensive coordinator, he had a chance to take Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback whose style is similar to Griffin's, but went with Andy Dalton instead.
Dalton had success in Gruden's scheme, one that relied on getting the ball out quickly and letting his playmakers, well, make plays. That's not Griffin's style, though he struggled prior to Gruden's arrival.
The Post's Jason Reid encapsulates Gruden's predicament in just two sentences: "(Redskins owner Dan) Snyder and (general manager Bruce) Allen want to see (Griffin become a dropback passer), and those are the right people to have in your corner. Gruden is merely the coach. And at soul-crushing Redskins Park, that’s one of the worst jobs to have."
