• Pairs of Slip-on Shoes Being Worn: 17
• Level of Tension Between Jim Harbaugh and Pete Carroll: 6 out of 10
• Number of Coaches Who've Spoken to Marc Trestman: 0
• Number of Coors Banquets Jeff Fisher Had at Last Night's Bob Seger Show: 4
Robert Mays and Ephraim Salaam discuss keeping injured players in games, the Alabama offensive line, and all the weekend's divisional round games.
"Coach Shanahan didn’t lie about it, and I didn’t lie ... I didn’t get to examine [Griffin’s knee] because he came out for one play, didn’t let us look at him and on the next play, he ran through all the players and back out onto the field. Coach Shanahan looks at me like, ‘Is he OK?’ and I give him the ‘Hi’ [sic] sign as in, ‘He’s running around, so I guess he’s OK.’ But I didn’t get to check him out until after the game. It was just a communication problem. Heat of battle. I didn’t get to tell him I didn’t get to examine the knee. Mike Shanahan would never have put him out there at risk just to win a game." — The Washington Post
Don't get me wrong, the next time I shred my ACL bending over for a Pop-Tart, I'm going straight to this guy to get my knee fixed. But is giving someone the high sign really ... like really? I gave the high sign?! You're the most respected doctor outside of Princeton-Plainsboro! Hi! Hello!
With Tom Brady and Peyton Manning still dissecting defenses, this weekend’s game between the Seattle Seahawks and Washington Redskins might not produce this year’s Super Bowl winner, but it may still be the key to the NFL’s future. Since their 3-6 start, the Redskins are on a seven-game winning streak, during which their already potent offense stabilized into one of the best in the league. Seattle, on its own five-game winning streak, has coalesced into arguably the best team in football. After outscheming the Chicago Bears en route to a dramatic overtime victory, Seattle pulled off one of the greatest three-game stretches in league history by bludgeoning the Cardinals, Bills, and 49ers, a stretch during which they outscored their opponents 150 to 30.
Among similar dominant stretches in NFL history, one that comes close was by the 1940 Chicago Bears, whose streak culminated in a 73-0 victory over the Redskins in the NFL Championship. That record offensive output followed totals of 47 and 31 points in the previous two weeks. The success was the direct result of a switch in offensive scheme by legendary Bears coach and owner George Halas, a switch that helped turn a 7-3 Bears loss to the Redskins earlier that season into the most lopsided championship game in any major professional sport. Halas, frustrated by his offense, turned to good friend and Stanford coach Clark Shaughnessy for help.
At the time, every NFL team ran the single wing offense, a shotgun-based attack with an unbalanced line where the ball was typically snapped directly to the tailback. Shaughnessy — first at the University of Chicago, where he and Halas became friends, and later at Stanford — had revived the old T-formation, which placed a quarterback directly behind the center. Shaughnessy updated the T to include a variety of motions and misdirection to buttress the running game and bolted on an all-new passing attack. The combination made the offense nearly unstoppable — at least in college. Even as late as 1940, most pro coaches viewed the T formation and its reliance on the quarterback making fakes and dropping back to pass as a bizarre gimmick. That is until Chicago ripped through the latter part of its schedule, and, with Sid Luckman as the prototype for a new era of "T-formation quarterbacks," built a dynasty.
Jalen Rose reacts to Mike Shanahan's comments, after a mid-season loss, about shifting focus to the future of the franchise rather than the current season, and explains what it feels like to be a player on a losing team.
In case you were out living a life of leisure, here's what you missed in sports on Monday.
In an otherwise grim day for rookie quarterbacks, Robert Griffin III's debut against the New Orleans Saints went about as well as it could possibly go. He went 19-for-26, threw for 320 yards with two touchdowns, and, most importantly, led the Redskins to a 40-32 Week 1 win. Following the win, many were quick to applaud the Redskins’ approach, which seemed to allow Griffin to get comfortable with quick, easy throws. But the real hero of Washington’s offensive success wasn’t Kyle or Mike Shanahan. In fact, he isn’t even on the staff. It was Art Briles, Griffin’s college coach at Baylor, and, based on what the Redskins showed in Week 1, the team’s de facto co–game planner along with Washington’s head coach.
Coaching is about putting players in positions to succeed. Griffin’s potential is nearly limitless, but as a rookie playing his first game, he’s not Tom Brady just yet, and asking him to throw 40 or 50 traditional drop-back passes was not going to give Washington its best chance to win. Shanahan has clearly gone into this year with an open mind — something many otherwise excellent pro coaches don't do often enough — and he’s blended his tried-and-true West Coast/zone-blocking offense with some of the best and simplest principles Griffin executed so well at Baylor.
Back in November, when Robert Griffin III insisted he was keeping all of his options open, he sat in a windowless conference room and told me he was seriously considering a return to Baylor for his senior season so he could enroll in law school, and that he had not ruled out the possibility of making a go at the 2012 Olympic Games as a hurdler. All these possibilities laid out before him seemed to brighten his spirits, and yet when I asked specifically about the NFL, pragmatism crept in.
“With the NFL, if they come knocking at your door, you’re not going to tell them no,” he said, and then — largely because my question nudged him in this direction — he said that the NFL didn’t like smart guys who knew what they were worth, and that pro football was a bottom-line business that was “just about the spectacle.”
