Redskins coach Jay Gruden not happy with players joking after loss
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.”
Redskins safety Ryan Clark wasn’t pleased with the stories about the atmosphere in the locker room after the loss, saying that how players handle a loss wasn’t the media’s business in part because every player handles it differently.
“You’d rather write about whether somebody is laughing or somebody is joking. It doesn’t matter,” Clark said, according to CSN Washington. “Whether they laugh or joke or are (ticked) off or throw a helmet, it’s not going to change what happened [during] those 60 minutes on the grass. It’s about how you prepare on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday for next Sunday’s game that’s the mark of a man, the mark of an athlete, the mark of a player. That’s what I’m looking for.”
There are two ways to look at it, as shown by the reactions of Gruden and Clark.
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It would strike a lot of super-competitive people as odd that NFL players could be in a good mood after a loss. And that’s probably not the culture Gruden wants.
But Clark has a very good point. The Redskins played hard against Seattle. There’s no reason to believe they didn’t perform to their best, despite losing to the defending champs. They just got beat by a better team. Even though football players have high-profile jobs, they’re still jobs. There aren’t many businesses in which you would face criticism for not being sad enough after a tough day at work. Clark pointed out that he thought the players put everything they had into the game, and he was satisfied with that. That’s a reasonable expectation.
Should players be expected to act a certain way after a loss? Probably not. That won’t stop it from being a topic of conversation.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
