Jay Gruden Is Not Happy About Players Joking Around in the Locker Room After A Loss, And He Might Have Said The Offense is Close To Shit
Redskins HC Jay Gruden On Kirk Cousins saying the offense is close: "Close to being good? I don't know. Close to what? Shi*." #WASvsAZ
— Mike Jurecki (@mikejurecki) October 8, 2014
Yahoo - After losing on “Monday Night Football,” the Washington Redskins didn’t show a proper level of grieving for coach Jay Gruden’s tastes.
Reports said there was joking in the Redskins locker room after the loss to the Seattle Seahawks, one that dropped Washington’s record to 1-4. Receiver Pierre Garcon and offensive tackle Trent Williams were identified by ESPN.com as sharing a laugh after the game. Gruden wasn’t happy to hear about it.
According to CSN Washington, Gruden said he wasn’t aware if the locker room was jovial after the game, because he was doing his own news conference. But if the reports were true, he called it “concerning.”
“This is the first time I’ve ever heard of something like this happening,” Gruden said. “I’m going to think long and hard of how to approach this. For me, I haven’t smiled [in] two days, I don’t think. I thought when you lose a game that you prepared your butt off to try to win, in an important game at home in front of your home crowd, on ‘Monday Night Football,’ you should be dejected and sick. If anybody was jovial and joking around, I don’t understand why that would be the case. But I’d like to find out.”
And your standard Redskins locker room nonsense begins. Ever year there’s unnecessary drama. I see it both ways. On one hand, you don’t want to hear about players joking around after another loss. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean they are okay with losing. They put their bodies on the line every week to win games. They want to win. But it’s not a funeral. They are still human beings. If someone said something funny, it’s not the end of the world. I don’t really like people making it out to be something that it’s not. Not everything is black and white. You are allowed to be pissed the fuck off about losing a game and falling to 1-4 and still have a positive attitude about life in general.
Now for Gruden calling the offense shit, here’s the full quote:
HC Jay Gruden On Kirk Cousins saying the offense is close: “Close to being good? I don’t know. Close to what? Shit. I think we can be close to a lot of different things the way you look at it. The positive person says were close to being pretty darn good. We’re already ranked in the top 10 right now. I think if we clean up our third downs, we’re right 30-something percent, we have to get that up to at least mid-40’s, 40, 42 percent, to keep drives alive, and I think we can take the next step. Until we do a better job of protecting the ball and doing better on third downs, we’re not close anywhere. Defense can help out too by giving us better field position.”
It’s hard to tell if he said the offense is close to shit, or if the shit was a filler word there. The Redskins are 6th in total offense in the league. That’s pretty good. And this is with a stud RB in Alfred Morris not getting the carries he needs to get going. It’s possible he was trying to make a joke by saying it’s close to shit, or maybe some reverse psychology to pump his guys up? I’m not sure. Seems like a Zorny thing to say. I don’t love my head coach saying it, regardless of how he meant it. And he finished by evening it out and taking a shot at the defense. I definitely prefer the Bellichick method of “on to Cincinnati” over him being public about his issues with the team he is paid to manage.
Hopefully we aren’t going down this divided locker room bullshit road again. It’s every single year. Gruden was supposed to change the culture. And now it looks like same ol’ same ol’. The one constant variable? Daniel Snyder. It starts at the top. Always will.