Doug Saffir

Robert Griffin III is not a hero. He is a (very talented) man who plays a game for a living.

But you’d have a hard time telling that to Redskins fans. Many of them watched their franchise player enter Sunday’s game against the Seahawks and saw him as some sort of savior. They placed squarely on his shoulders their collective hopes of winning a playoff game for the first time since 2005.

And the icing on the cake was that the man would be playing with an already injured knee, making his perceived heroism all the more impressive.

Unfortunately, he was very seriously injured while playing that game. As of now, it looks bad, but he may have avoided the worst.

So, Redskins fans (and football fans who enjoy RGIII’s on-field brilliance), was it worth it?

One has to wonder how it felt, going from admiration and elation while watching RGIII play despite physical limitation to immediate regret and despair while watching Griffin crumpled on the ground at FedEx Field.

I know how I felt. The effort I initially saw as heroism (Griffin puts the team on his back, do!), I immediately saw for what it truly was: stupidity and gross negligence.

Head Coach Mike Shannahan and Griffin conspired, explicitly or otherwise, to gamble the future of the Redskins franchise by letting the star quarterback play injured.

There’s nothing heroic about that. It’s inhumane and shortsighted.

The smart play would have been giving Kirk Cousins the start. He’d proven he could manage a game while Alfred Morris carried the ball – why couldn’t that work on Sunday?

It’s unclear why Shannahan and Griffin chose to gamble (and lost), but one thing is clear: in the Concussion Era, it’s becoming increasingly tough to maintain the heroic image of NFL players.

We’ve all seen the footage of retirees who can’t walk or can’t remember their names. It’s not hard to imagine the man Griffin could one day become simply because he gambled his future for a game. A man who limps because his knee never fully recovered, or a man who has to be kept alive by machines because too many hits to the head rendered his brain incapable of doing the job.

What’s so heroic about that?

(Photo Courtesy: The Iconocast News)