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Saturday, April 28, 2012

New York Jets draft Baylor's Robert Griffin in the sixth round - Yahoo! Sports (blog)

This is not what we expected. (Getty Images)

Wait, what?

Yes, every word of the headline is true. In the sixth round of the 2012 NFL draft, the New York Jets selected a player from Baylor named Robert Griffin. Of course, the Griffin the Jets got with the 203rd overall pick is a right guard  -- he's Robert T. Griffin, a 6-foot-6, 333-pound offensive lineman who was originally recruited as a 370-pound cheeseburger of a man. He's not RGIII, but he does go by three different nicknames -- "RGII,'' "Deuce,'' or "Big Griff,''

"I get it all the time when I tell people my name,'' Griffin told SI.com a couple weeks ago between pre-draft training sessions. "In Waco, people know me by now and they don't have any trouble keeping it straight. But when I'm out and about in the Dallas area, I tell people I'm Robert Griffin and play for Baylor, and they say, 'No you don't. You're too big to be RG3. You don't play quarterback.' I've had a lot of people try to tell me I'm not him."

George Bass, RGII's agent, recently said that he had to be careful when he's talking to NFL teams about his client -- kinda like the recent commercial in which a guy named Michael Jordan shows up at different events and disappoints everybody who's expecting the "real" MJ.

"I always had to make it clear I was talking about Robert T. Griffin,'' Bass said. "The offensive lineman. And then I'd put in parentheses, not RG3. Not that it always helped. It still got to be pretty interesting at times.''

"Oh, wait -- you're not the right guard? Sorry, but thanks for coming!" (Getty Images)

That the bigger Griffin plays on the same team as the smaller, faster, and far more highly-rated RGIII? We'll that's just one of those quirks of fate. The big man on his former quarterback:

"RGIII, he's one of a kind. There's no one else like him out there. Michael Jordan can't be like Kobe. And nobody can be like RG3. We have the same name, and we're like brothers. We even have our own handshake. I came to Baylor (as a JUCO transfer in 2010) knowing there was another Robert Griffin there. We actually knew about each other back in high school. He looked on Rivals.com and saw there was a Robert Griffin who weighed 330 pounds and he knew that wasn't him. I looked on there and saw a Robert Griffin who was 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, and I knew that wasn't me.

"I play this game, and he plays this game. Two things are different about us. I use my hands to protect and he uses his hand to throw. He's one of the top quarterbacks in the nation, so he's going to get noticed and rated high in the draft. I'm probably one of about 300 offensive linemen in the draft, so I've got try even harder to get noticed. But I think it's pretty unique and cool that we've known about each other all along.''

Now that the Jets have their RGIII, and the Washington Redskins selected quarterback Kirk Cousins in the fourth round to replace Rex Grossman as the backup for ... well, RGIII ... perhaps the Jets should sign Grossman, who could rightfully be called "RGI." Rex Ryan would probably remind us to do the math, and reminds us all that in the end, the Jets got their own RGIII after all.

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