RG will be gone after this year. Regardless of why he is where he is, he's too far behind the curve and it isn't reasonable that he'll have a remarkable turn around. He'd have to have an excellent year, not just show improvement to justify keeping him. He will have to cement himself as the long term solution to stay. Does anyone really, deep down in side, think that is remotely possible. We'd all love him to do that. It's the best possible outcome, but realistically, the odds are stacked heavily against it. The best possible outcome never seems to be our outcome.
steve...you limit the set of factors that influence the outcome to one: RGIII. the reality is that multiple factors are in play.....
- RGIII's native physical skills
- RGIII's commitment/preparation
- RGIII's mental habits (reading, anticipating)
- the play of the offensive line, running backs (blocking) and receivers
- the ability/skill/commitment of coaches to work/improve above
- the quality of playcalls by the coaching staff
- the quality of strategy generated by the coaching staff for a game
- the quality of adjustments made by the coaching staff during a game
- focus for any given game (the Skins, in particular, have demonstrated a remarkably consistent lack of focus game after game, year after after year)
- many other factors
we know all of the above were suspect in previous seasons.
to name just a few. in short....the results of RGIII's play (or any other QB) are not under the sole control of the QB. that's why the sometimes mindless pursuit of simple stats misses rising to the stature of root cause analysis. too often...the analysis over-simplifies what is a complex set of interacting factors - this is inherent in the math of the situation. outcome = fnc(number of players, possible decisions by each player for each play (e.g., receiver breaks and timing, blocker positioning in space relative to time and rusher, blocker shoulder position relative to rusher, blocker separation (arm length) from rusher, etc., etc.). if we're going to get down to brass tacks...there's a huge number of variables per individual, per play, per game. it's inherent in the number of players involved, the variety of plays that can be called, the variety of defenses that can be run on any given snap, etc.). we all know intuitively better and worse....kinda like what many of us have been observing for o-line play the last several seasons. but that doesn't really capture the full set of interactions that is occurring on the field.
if RGIII fails.....it will certainly be his responsibility to bear....but that outcome will be the product of the factors described above. separating out the major from minor factors is the challenge. that has been exceedingly difficult in the past with this team because so much was going wrong across the board - all the way to coaching decisions that led to damaging a player physically when he should have been seated rather than risk serious injury.
one way of overcoming the complexity is to contrast performance for different QBs - HOLDING EVERYTHING ELSE CONSTANT. that's what many are implicitly doing when they compare, say, Griffin with McCoy. whether everything else is truly constant, of course, is open to question.
RGIII has to create his own fortune in large measure - I agree with that. but the players and coaches have to want to succeed as well and make the 1000% commitment to do so. not so sure that is the case with this HC.
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