LANDOVER, Md. — The Franchise returned in street clothes, not in a knee brace.
And if ever you wanted to crystallize the difference since the adults took over the Washington Commanders, with a clear chain of command that everyone respects, look at how Washington’s new brain trust handled Jayden Daniels’ rib injury in the first quarter of what became a 40-7 Washington rout of the hapless Carolina Panthers. And compare it to how a previous regime let its injured franchise quarterback, Robert Griffin III, waltz back out on the football field, seemingly having decided on his own, against the Seattle Seahawks in a 2012 season playoff game — a decision that led to catastrophic results.
Daniels, the rookie phenom, was injured during Washington’s first offensive drive Sunday. It may have come on his first play, a read option he took right and down the field for 46 yards. But he tried to stiff-arm Panthers safety Lonnie Johnson Jr., who was a little behind him, and fell awkwardly as Johnson tackled him. Or it may have happened on another keeper later in the drive. But after a swing pass to running back Austin Ekeler set up an Austin Seibert field goal, Daniels’ day was done. It was not left up to him to decide this.
Before Washington’s next offensive possession, Daniels went into the blue medical tent. Then, after Emmanuel Forbes’ interception late in the first quarter, Daniels was ready to go back into the game. He’d come out of the tent and got his helmet. He started to run back onto the field. And then … he was stopped. He returned to the bench. He slammed his helmet. He was escorted off the field and into Washington’s locker room.
He did not return. Well, not in uniform; he came back to the sideline after halftime, dressed in street clothes, and waiving to the crowd.
“It was the more difficult right, over the easier wrong,” Commanders coach Dan Quinn said about removing an injured Jayden Daniels. (Amber Searls / Imagn Images)
“That’s from the medical side,” Dan Quinn said afterward.
“Al (Bellamy, Washington’s head athletic trainer), the team doctors,” Quinn said. “They were very clear in their communication. Warmed him up — he threw some. We took him to the tent. The next step is we’re going to take him inside and get images there, and he’ll do some more images (Monday). That’s the process that it goes through. The good news, it was really clear, this is where it’s at. We had a couple of guys. He went down, (tackle) Brandon Coleman went down (with a concussion). Dyami (Brown) was able to come back (from an ankle injury). That process, just like calling a play, is really important.”
That meant Bellamy, the longtime athletic trainer in his second tour with the team, and team physician Christopher Annunziata and Tim McGrath, the team’s senior director of player health and performance, all watched Daniels throw. Then they got the imaging — it’s not known at the moment how detailed that was — with Daniels in the locker room. Then, they made their recommendation to General Manager Adam Peters and Quinn: Daniels should sit the rest of this one out. They were not overruled by Josh Harris or his ownership group, or Quinn and his coaches.
It also happened a week ago, when Brian Robinson was held out of the Baltimore game — a game in which he desperately wanted to play — with a knee injury. It was a big moment for him and for his team, to try and prove that things really are different this season. But Robinson didn’t dress.
“It was the more difficult right,” Quinn said, “over the easier wrong.”
In sports, and certainly in football, a player will go back on the field, every time, if it is his or her call, and they don’t have bones sticking out of their skin. That is their ethos. But someone has to say no. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable and if the stakes are at their highest.
To be sure, we celebrate people like Ronnie Lott, for the seemingly insane decision to have a piece of his finger cut off so he could return to action. We lionize Willis Reed limping back onto the floor at Madison Square Garden before Game 7 of the 1970 NBA finals. We recall the bloody sock of Curt Schilling and Michael Jordan’s flu/food poisoning game, and Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali beating the humanity out of one another in their three epic fights.
But someone, sometimes, has to step in and say no.
“There’s a lot of people, obviously, who want Jayden to be out there,” tight end Zach Ertz said.
“But people care about Jayden the person first. I think it’s a testament to the people they have running this place that they view us not only as Employee Number 5, or Employee 86, but they care about us as people, as individuals. Jayden’s long-term health is of the utmost importance to everyone in this building. And so, they understand that Jayden’s going to do everything he can to be out there. I think everyone sees his competitive spirit, how much he loves being out there with his guys. And I can’t speak on whether he could have gone or could not have gone. But it was a no-brainer, I think, from the top down, that he was done. And I think it’s a testament to the people they have running this thing.”
This is a decision that can’t be freelanced. And, especially, when it involves the player more responsible than anyone, with all due respect to the other guys in the locker room, not only for Washington’s 5-2 start, but for the feeling that this franchise, finally, is aligned, from ownership to management to coaching to players, and moving in the right direction.
Washington head coach Mike Shanahan talks with quarterback Robert Griffin III during 2013 the wild-card round NFC playoff game against the Seahawks. (Toni L. Sandys / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
This did not happen on Jan. 6, 2013.
Griffin, who’d already torn his right ACL while in college at Baylor, had suffered a sprained lateral collateral ligament in his right knee a month earlier, late in the regular season, against the Ravens, when Baltimore’s massive nose tackle Haloti Ngata fell on his leg after a Griffin run. Kirk Cousins came in for a play, after which Griffin returned for a few plays before taking himself out of the game for good.
Cousins led Washington to an overtime win over the Ravens, then started the following week in Cleveland. But Griffin returned to play the last two regular season games, including the then-Redskins’ 28-18 win over Dallas in the regular season finale, clinching a playoff berth. So Griffin was behind center against Seattle the following weekend in the wild-card round.
Griffin, clearly limited, appeared to aggravate the sprained LCL in the first quarter against Seattle. But after a brief stop on the sidelines, he went back into the game. No one stopped him. Coach Mike Shanahan, who had more authority in this town at the time than any man short of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, let Griffin go back on the field. So did Dr. James Andrews, the celebrated surgeon, who had told USA Today the week of the game that he wasn’t sure Griffin was healthy enough to go back on the field and play.
More importantly, Andrews said he’d never cleared Griffin to return to the Baltimore game, which Shanahan insisted the doctor had done.
But against Seattle, both the coach making $7 million a year, and who had complete control over the franchise, and the renowned doctor, stood and watched while the franchise QB went back on the field, and played, until his knee gave out for good late in the game, with Griffin suffering a complete tear of the ACL.
“You respect authority and I respect Coach Shanahan,” Griffin said after the game. “But at the same time, you have to step up and be a man sometimes. There was no way I was coming out of that game.”
Shanahan said he would probably second-guess himself. But, he also said, “I promise you, if we thought it had something to do with Robert’s career and his injury and he shouldn’t be in there, we would have took him out.”
I don’t know as much about football as Shanahan. But, I know knee injuries have a great deal of something to do with a quarterback’s career. Especially one whose career had gotten off to the electric start of RGIII’s. Of course, his knee injury led to “All In For Week 1” the following season, all the nonsense that entailed, and everything going sideways between Griffin and Shanahan — and the franchise and its star QB going into the woodchipper.
To be sure, a rib injury is not as severe as a knee. And, also, this time around, Washington had the benefit Sunday of playing … well, the uniformly awful Panthers. How they’ve won a game this season is beyond me. It is not at all beyond me that this is what the Commanders looked like to the rest of the league during most of the previous two-plus decades. There are a lot of reasons that that is now not so, but Daniels is among the most important.
Marcus Mariota replaced Daniels at quarterback and did just fine, leading Washington on six scoring drives that took the pulp out of the Panthers, leading to another early exit from this suddenly-spoiled fan base, on the day that the franchise retired Hall of Fame cornerback Darrell Green’s number 28 jersey. It was a very good day on the field for this very intriguing and interesting team.
But the most important work was done on the sidelines when an organization saved the star quarterback from himself.
(Top photo of Jayden Daniels walking off the field after suffering an injury against the Panthers: Daniel Kucin Jr. / Associated Press)
