What Mike Shanahan did to Griffin was just shy of criminal. It's a playoff game, yeah, but your guy can barely walk around on the sidelines- and you put him out there against that legendary (well, in hindsight) Seattle defense, on that WWI front line trench system that Snyder dares to call his football field? There's a lot of blame to point at people in that situation, but at the end of the day Shanahan made the decision to play Griffin in a situation where no sane coach would put his guy on the field, no matter how much pressure he was getting from the owner's box or the player himself. I was very disappointed in that decision, and the results are still hard to see in photos.
I'm no big fan of Griffin, and wasn't before his injury, but he deserved better than the way he got treated by Washington. His wasn't going to be a long career, with that playing style, but one can't help but wonder what it might have looked like if he'd ended up in Indianapolis rather than Andrew Luck in that draft. (Luck, of course, would have been killed in Week 12 of that season due to the last of his bones being hopelessly shattered, and buried in a touching ceremony under the 50 yard line in Landover just prior to that playoff game starting.)
