Kirk Cousins had proven himself. Why risk RGIII and his career. Remains to be seen how serious that injury here in the 4th qtr is. But Washington's playoff season is done so RGIII won't get hurt any further.

Shanahan kept him in there because he said he wanted to keep playing. Who's running that damn team? And you're right, Cousins is a capable reliever. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The guy has too much heart.  He wont give up or quit, and its going to be his downfall.  He's going to have to learn to shut it down when he's injured or he wont last three seasons in the league.  He has all the skill in the world, but unfortunately not the body to take the kind punishment he's taking(what QB does?).  The coaching staff can't keep letting him make the decisions.

I cannot think of a harder situation for a coach in any sport.  It is just so easy for a fan or media member to declare (especially after the fact) that they would have taken him out.  But this kid is the heart of the team.  He's a captain.  He's the personification of hope in that lockerroom.  You think I'm being dramatic when I say that, but I assure you I am not.  Everything that could go wrong for that franchise for a dozen years has gone wrong.  This kid shows up, declares things will change, and they do.  Even the veteran players look at him like he's Neo from the Matrix.  Just listen to the way they talk about him. 

When your'e the coach, and THAT guy is staring you in the face and saying "I can go, coach.  I deserve the chance to try," how can you lift him?  How can you look him in the eye and say "Sorry kid, I'm going with someone else."? 

I know, I know.  Coaches paid to make hard decisions, blah blah blah.  I think this is a situation where a coach is thinking about things beyond the simple quantitative probabilities of whether the Skins have a 25% chance of winning with RG3 and a 29% chance of winning with Cousins.  There are really complex long term implications here on both sides.  Risking injury.  Risking a relationship by not trusting your star player.  Risking losing the lockerrom if the team goes into the offseason thinking that RG3 would have found a way to win when Cousins didn't, etc.

Here's all I know.  I follow a lot of football people on twitter.  Prior to the injury, exactly 1 of them was saying that RG3 should have been out of the game.  After the injury, about 95% of them were ripping on Shanahan for not yanking him long before the injury.  

(One last thing to consider is circumstance.  The Redskins barely had the ball in the 3rd quarter.  They only had 2 drives, and both started inside their 5.  They went 3-and-out on one, and got a 1 or 2 first downs on the other before stalling out.  There just wasn't much opportunity to see RG3 working in the open field to see how he had reacted to the treatment he got at halftime.  By the time it became pretty clear that he was severely limited (when he had that ugly run left where it looked like was running on ice), it was already a few minutes into the 4th quarter.  Now you're talking about putting a rookie backup into the game in the middle of the 4th quarter, cold, with no time to settle in, against arguably the best defense in the NFL, when the entire game plan was designed around RG3.  That's not a promising scenario.  Had circumstances allowed RG3 to have more of an opportunity to show his limits a few minutes into the THIRD quarter (instead of the fourth), the calculus would have been different and the ultimate decision may have been as well.  In that scenario, Cousins would actually have had a couple drives to get comfortable before the do or die drives of the 4th quarter.  But that wasn't an option as things played out.)

This post was edited on 1/8 11:46 AM by DC Nole