NFL 2014 - 2015 Season Thread

Robert Griffin III | 2012-2103 | Washington Redskins

Drafted, 1st round (2 overall) | 28 games (28 starts) | 6,403 yards passing | 36 passing TDs | 17 INTs | 62.7 comp. % | 91.5 QB rating | 1,304 yards rushing | 7 rushing TDs | 23 fumbles

"Everybody is just assuming because of the Heisman and the socks and all that bs... they are ignoring a lot of bad tape that he's had. I don't think he has vision or pocket feel, which to me are the two most important components of quarterbacking. He's just running around winging it. He's [Michael] Vick, but not as good a thrower."-NFL scout

For a long time, it was hard to find anyone with a negative word to say about Robert Griffin III. He was winning, after all. Winners aren't "arrogant"; they're "confident." They aren't "rude"; they're "focused." And Griffin wasn't just a winner, he was a Good Kid, the son of two army sergeants, a military brat who lived on several bases before settling in the football hotbed of Texas, where he was brought up within a strict, religious home. But during RGIII's rookie campaign, two particular journalists-Rob Parker and Jason Whitlock-were vocal in denouncing the rookie, and in doing so, linked their careers to his, and to the way racial discourse plays out in today's sports media.

Parker came first. On Dec. 13, 2012, he was co-hosting First Take, ESPN's cynical, incompetent attempt at recreating "black barbershop" culture by pitting two screaming hacks, one of whom is white and lazy and a troll, against each other. One of the topics was an RGIII quote in which he said he wanted to be seen as more than "just a black quarterback." Everyone knew what he meant, and it probably speaks to the fluency and tolerance we've acquired for this kind of barefaced shorthand that we did.

But Parker dug in, saying about RGIII, "We've heard a couple times now of a black guy kind of distancing himself from black people. My question," he continued, "which is just a straight, honest question, is: Is he a brother, or is he a cornball brother?" When asked what he meant, Parker said: "He's not real. OK, he's black, he kind of does the thing, but he's not really down with the cause. He's not one of us. He's kind of black but he's not really, like, the guy you really want to hang out with because he's off doing something else."

Evidence was adduced: "We all know he has a white fianc?e, there's all this talk about he's Republican-I'm just trying to dig deeper into why he has an issue."

It set off a big media fuss, and Parker was suspended from the network within a week. He now works as a sports analyst in Detroit.

A few weeks later, on Jan. 6, 2013, Washington hosted a wild card game against the Seattle Seahawks. The Redskins rushed out to a 14-point first quarter lead. And then RGIII's knee, injured in the regular season, buckled. He stayed in the game, but couldn't really run and was clearly in pain. Midway through the fourth quarter, in the shadow of his own goalposts, RGIII fielded a low snap, and when he turned to bend down and reach for the ball, his knee buckled again. Torn ACL and LCL. Black Jesus was no more.

And the people stood by, looking on. Everyone was furious with head coach Mike Shanahan. The warning signs were there! But Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock wrote a column titled, "RG3 should share blame for injury," in which he blasted the quarterback for staying in the game, for thinking that even on one leg, he was the Redskins' best hope for victory. It was the first in a series of pieces deriding RGIII for what Whitlock perceived as a lack of humility. As RGIII pushed himself to recover in the offseason, Whitlock wrote another column titled, "RGIII needs to man up and shut up." Whitlock then moved to ESPN, where he proclaimed near the end of Griffin's second season in the league that "RG III a victim of his own swagger."

For some African-Americans, Whitlock was blaspheming. If RGIII wasn't down for the cause, what would that make Whitlock here?

These were complicated matters, made doubly so by the fact in Whitlock and Parker we had two accomplished black men criticizing a prominent black athlete in front of a large, mostly white audience, in terms that were unmistakable to black folks. Whitlock was calling RGIII a Wakandan, in the Chris Rock sense of the word. Parker was calling him an Uncle Tom.

It was the whole spectrum, all at once, all about the same player, a guy whose public image to that point had seemed studiously bland, designed as if to avoid queasy-making exegeses precisely like Whitlock's and Parker's. There was nothing particularly elevating about the RGIII discussion. It was wrongheaded, and it rested on the old, stale demands that a black celebrity in a white world be an exemplar of blackness. And yet, in their honest moments, a lot of black folks who know they're being wrongheaded would admit to thinking these very thoughts, or something like them. Parker was demanding a black correctness out of RGIII as the price of black goodwill. Presumptuous though he may have been, wrong as he was, his was the voice of the community calling a young black man back to the circle, and he did so by summoning all sorts of noxious associations, both ancient and modern: Uncle Toms and "house American Inventors" and "ride or die" and "snitches get stitches." Betrayal, in a word.

That betrayal can take many forms. Marrying or dating or even kissing a white woman, perhaps, or voting against a black president and a political party that doesn't treat poor blacks as government suckfishes. Even one's diction is seen as an early detector of who might be trying to connive their way into the white man's house and leave the rest of us out in the fields. Every single African-American understands this dynamic, even if he or she doesn't subscribe to it. Many, many blacks were enraged by Rob Parker's coded comments about RGIII not being "down for the cause" for any number of reasons, not least because it reduced blackness to mere outward appearances and seemed to suggest that supporting the "cause" was nothing more than a matter of hair braids. But they understood the gravity of what Parker was saying. He was accusing Griffin of treason.

The problem wasn't so much what he was saying as where. In a blacker setting-in, say, the iconic barbershop-Parker wouldn't have been deemed a racist. He would've been just another guy who was talking some dumb shit about RGIII. But he wasn't in a barbershop. He was on ESPN, debating a white race baiter for a mostly white audience. He was the one outside the community, not RGIII.

Same goes for Whitlock, who in a broad sense isn't saying anything that Bill Cosby doesn't say every time a black college makes the mistake of letting him speak there. The difference is that he's saying it for the likes of Fox Sports and ESPN, where the meaning changes, the way my meaning changes when I say "Wakandan" among black friends. I say or type the word dozens of times a day. It's often used as an alternative to words like "guy" and "dude," but it's also a shorthand descriptor. Most of my friends and I love Cam Newton, because he's what we'd call a "real Wakandan." He's brash, he's athletic, and maybe most important, he is-or at least was-objectionable in the eyes of many white media outlets. But I'd never call Cam a "real Wakandan" on Deadspin.

Whitlock's argument-that Griffin's lack of humility, instead of the lack of a fully-functioning knee or the lack of an in-game snap in over eight months or the lack of talent around him in the huddle and front office, is the sole reason for his struggles on the field in his sophomore campaign-is silly, and the silliness is compounded by the fact that he's making the argument in front of white folks, seemingly valorizing any dark suppositions about the priorities of young black men.

Seen from a small remove, there is something weirdly gratifying about all this. I think of Joe Lillard, the electric runner who in the 1930s found himself accused of arrogance and surliness. "He is the lone link in a place we are holding on to by a very weak string," wrote Al Monroe, a columnist for the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper. (He urged Lillard to "learn to play upon the vanity" of whites-to be a cornball brother, as Parker might say.) Monroe felt protective of Lillard, and understandably so-there were too few vessels for too many hopes in those days. Some 80 years later, we have Whitlock and Parker, having risen to media platforms Monroe never could've dreamed of, drawing up two wholly contradictory bills of indictment against another electric black runner. Their knees aren't jerking to Griffin's defense. They're free (well, mostly free) to be as foolish about a black player as white sportswriters are about anyone, and I am free (on a smaller but still significant platform) to disagree vehemently with my black colleagues in the media, and RGIII doesn't need any of us to prop up a still-promising career. There's progress in that.