Disaster in DC Continues with Benching of RG3

If it wasn't bad for Washington Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan before, it is now in disaster mode.

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Coach Shanahan decided early this week that he will be benching their franchise quarterback Robert Griffin III for the remainder of the season and backup QB Kirk Cousins will be taking control of the offense for the teams last 3 games. Shanahan said Griffin has been hit too much in recent games and the coach wanted to make sure that the quarterback reaches the offseason healthy.

Shanahan would go on to justify his benching of Griffin stating, "When you take a look at a quarterback who is your franchise quarterback, he's your future. If you miss two offseasons in a row it'd be the hardest thing to recover from."

There has been plenty of backlash over the whole situation, and now two of coach Shanahan's former quarterbacks have come out against him and have took the side of the 2nd year QB.

Photo: Michael Conroy, AP

Jake Plummer, a former Shanahan QB in Denver, has come out to say, “I don’t think there will be a Shanahan future there. I think there will be a different head coach for this franchise quarterback who had a great year last year, and the knee injury played into this because I have not seen another quarterback this exciting, maybe other than Randall Cunningham.”

Plummer was in a bad situation when it came to his head coach as well. He went on to say, “I just know from my experience sometimes Shanahan would ask too much of me,.. I was pretty good.  But I was no Peyton Manning. I had to fight every day... A similar situation happened with me, and it happened with Donovan McNabb because we had our own styles, and it didn’t mesh with what Mike wanted.  What I see happening there isn’t the same, but it is similar... Mike definitely rubbed me the wrong way in some ways. Also, he did some great things in resurrecting my career. Overall, I was grateful to be coached by him. But I was a square peg in a round hole. I didn't fit what he really wanted me to be, and he moved on to somebody else.''

When Plummer went thru the same type of situation with the coach, and was benched a year after going 13-3, for then rookie Jay Cutler.

Donovan McNabb also has come out to RG3's defense. McNabb feels that coach Shanahan would rather have Cousins as his starting QB regardless of Griffin's ailments.

Shanahan pulled the same kind of move on McNabb as well, benching him for Rex Grossman, yes that Rex Grossman, and why would he do this you ask? Simple, the same reason as Griffin, because Shanahan felt the other QB gave them the best shot of winning... So basically this is Shanahan's specialty, if you don't fit his system or be the kind of QB he wants you to be, you will not be playing on his team.



There was also a man in the Hall of Fame who had his own take on this issue. You may have heard of him, he has an overall record of 103-32-7, that's a winning percentage of 76.3, he was the winning head coach of Super Bowl XI, and has the best selling football video game of all time, which this year dropped its 25th edition.

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Yes you guessed it. John Madden had his own thoughts on the situation, saying, "I do know this: when the going goes tough you don't quit... And you don't fold up And you don't go in the other direction. I think you stay with what you believe you stay with who you are, you stay with what you are. And we have an integrity piece here, too... You can say well they're 3-10, they're out of it, so now they can do these things. No you can't. This is still regular-season football. Draft order, that's one small thing, but you still owe it to the people that are playing, that are still in the playoff picture. And when you can affect that and you don't affect it with an all-out performance, then I think that affects the integrity of the game. ... If you're in the regular season, there's only one way to play, and that's to play your best people to win the game, every regular season game."

Well fortunately for the former rookie of the year he should have a new coach coming sooner than later. I'm sure there are plenty of names that will start popping up as potential candidates, and I found a page where you can attempt to figure it out yourself thru a 64-candidate tournament, The Washington Redskins Next Head Coach Tournament

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