“The bottom line is I have to talk to coach more,” the Redskins quarterback told ESPN’s Hannah Storm. “Coach has a lot of stuff going on on game days, whether it’s offense, defense, substitutions, talking to the refs. Anytime you have a situation like mine you have to talk to the coach directly.”
“Every good leader has to know how to listen,” said Griffin, who initially laughed when asked the question. “It’s hard to say that. … Coaches coach. I’m a player. He doesn’t have to listen to me. I have to listen to coach. That’s just the way it goes. Everybody has a boss in this world. Our boss is Mike Shanahan. … I trust him.”
“I’m real close to 100 percent,” Griffin told Storm. “That’s the great thing. Even though there’s a process of getting back and getting back into practice, it’s all been worth it. Coach’s plan has been great as far as me feeling good because every day I don’t get those team reps I feel that much better.”
“Teams are going to give that to us,” he said. “Some teams won’t. Teams that do, we’ll take it. It’s my job to make sure I stay safe in those situations. That’s something I learned from last year. It doesn’t matter what play’s called, what happens at the end of the day I’m the quarterback and the ball’s in my hands and what I decide to do is entirely on me.”
“The voice in my head will be the image of Haloti Ngata bending my knee in half and then what happened in the Seattle game,” Griffin said. “It’s not a sense of fear but it’s something I learned from and, yeah, I had to learn the hard way and I want to be in the NFL for a long time.”
“It was a sign to me from God saying, ‘Hey, it’s time to get off the field.’ And I got off the field,” Griffin said. “It was devastating for me because I knew I let my team down, I let my parents down, I let my fans down. That was tough for me.
“I promised my parents I’d never get hurt again after I got hurt at Baylor. That was part of the reason it was tough for me to wake up from that surgery and see my parents in that room. That’s the little things you have to deal with as a man. It was tough for me to deal with but I have.”
“Technically I was never gone,” he said. “Adrian [Peterson] had a great year last year but I don’t consider his a comeback story either. He recovered from a knee injury over the offseason and quite well. Now, you want to talk about Peyton [Manning]? Peyton’s a comeback story because he missed the whole season. But for me it’s not a comeback story. You always have to play like you were never gone.”
