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Tipsheet: Redskins moving on from RG III
• By Jeff Gordon
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/colu...cle_9bbdda95-6a4c-5915-80a3-9247927bb671.html
It's official: The Rams won the Robert Griffin III trade.
That's because the Washington You Know Whos have benched RGIII, probably for good. Colt McCoy takes over at quarterback this week and Washington seems ready to move Griffin in the offseason.
Washington Post columnist Jason Reid fills us in:
Jay Gruden’s benching of Robert Griffin III should end any doubts about whether the Washington Redskins are united behind their rookie head coach. And after displaying the type of persuasive leadership the long-struggling franchise needs, Gruden should floor the accelerator.
It’s time for Gruden to push for changes — the hiring of a top-notch player-personnel official, a significant increase in Washington’s scouting budget and granting more authority to the head coach in the player-selection process chief among them. These changes could help Gruden guide the Redskins out of their deep hole. By consensus-building to make the tough call on Griffin, he’s demonstrated he’s ready to do more.
It’s highly unlikely the struggling quarterback will return next season, people within the organization say. Gruden convinced owner Daniel Snyder and team President and General Manager Bruce Allen, Griffin’s biggest supporters at Redskins Park, that change was necessary. Although Griffin was coming off consecutive inept performances and had not led Washington to a victory in more than a year, don’t underestimate what Gruden accomplished in getting Snyder and Allen on his side.
Snyder and Allen were united in the belief that Griffin could turn back the clock to 2012. They hired Gruden to help make it happen, figuring it wasn’t lack of ability that derailed Griffin last season; it was Mike and Kyle Shanahan. In the past couple of weeks, though, Snyder and Allen began to see the same glaring shortcomings Gruden had noticed since the preseason, team officials say. The tape doesn’t have an agenda.
What a fall by RG III. Washington traded a mother lode of draft picks over a three-year period for the rights to draft him.
Briefly he looked like the franchise savior. But then injuries struck, robbing him of his mobility, and the strain of trying to carry a brutally incompetent operation became too much too much for him.
REJUVENATED RAIDERS PREPARE FOR RAMS
The Oakland Raiders will carry a much lighter load into the Edward Jones Dome Sunday.
They are still the worst team in the NFL, but at least they have ACTUALLY WON A GAME -- against the rival Kansas City Chiefs, no less.
“I needed this win like I need to breathe,” defensive back Charles Woodson told the NFL Network.
“I feel like I just took a bath in the fountain of youth,” defensive lineman Antonio Smith told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I found the key to life.”
“We needed it, man,” Woodson told reporters. “I don’t think there’s any other way to put it. We needed this win. It just lets you know that you can do it, even though we haven’t done it to this point. We got it done tonight. Now there’s no excuse not to get the next one.”
That next one is against the Rams, a team capably of playing terribly on any given Sunday.
“All I can think about now is St. Louis,” defensive end Justin Tuck told reporters. “We need to make this thing contagious. We have to bring that same emotion to all our games.”
Interim coach Tony Sparano feels much better about his group than he did a week ago.
“They got a taste of something good and they want more of it and that’s natural,” Sparano told reporters at the start of the practice week. "That’s a good problem to have. You can get into a funk of feeling that other feeling and we don’t want to feel that other feeling. As I said to them today, one of the things you’ve got to do, it’s okay to close your eyes and think back to the locker room a couple days ago and think about what that feeling is all about because you want more of it.
“It becomes something that possesses you a little bit when you win a football game like that. You want to be able to go out and try to get as many of those as you can right now, and teams that are making progress start to play well at this time of year and we’re a team that’s making progress.”
Young quarterback Derek Carr credited Sparano for helping the Raiders persist.
“Patient endurance. That’s hard," Carr told reporter. "It’s hard to continue to go to work and work your tail off when you’re 0-and-whatever, but we kept fighting. We believed in what Coach Sparano was preaching to us. Our teammates believed in each other and … man, we finally got a win.”