Preseason power rankings are simply a fact of life in all sports, and the NFL is no exception. Most reasonable people don’t put too much stock into these initial rankings. After all, they’re little more than educated guesses based on past performance and some offseason moves where nobody has really seen how they’ll translate on the field. They can be, and often prove to be, wildly inaccurate, because sports are tough to predict.
Well, Jay Gruden is not one of the people who discards these things. When Gruden saw Washington ranked in the bottom two or three of virtually every preseason ranking, he decided that this was a good motivational tool.
“[Y]ou’re always looking for ways to motivate your team,” Gruden told reporters on Wednesday, via Mike Florio at ProFootballTalk. “Football is hard enough as it is. It’s a grind, obviously. But if you can find unique ways — and there’s a lot of doubters and a lot of haters that really had a lot of negative things to say about this franchise before the season about this team, and you should take it personally. This is their jobs. This is what they are paid to do. We have a lot of pride in this locker room, and for people to give us no respect whatsoever is insulting and it is a motivational tool. I’d be stupid not to use that, in my opinion – to an extent, obviously. But to challenge these guys and let them know that, ‘Hey, this is where we are. This is where we need to get. That’s a long way.’ I think they’ve accepted the challenge and have come a long way. But I try not to buy into what people say, but to an extent, I think it was important to let them know what the views are. It wasn’t just one publication — it was ESPN, it was PFT, it was CBS. It was all of them that had us in the 30, 31 or 32. It is what it is. We still have a long way to go obviously but we’re proud of what we’ve done so far but we have a long way to go.”
Note how Gruden emphasized that he tries not to pay attention to the pundits right in the middle of a lengthy monologue about how he felt disrespected and insulted by the pundits.
Nobody was really wrong to think Washington wouldn’t be much. They were 4-12 in 2014, Kirk Cousins wasn’t supposed to be good, and they were stuck in what originally looked to be a pretty solid division. A lot of that has proven untrue. The NFC East turned out to be poor, Cousins turned out to be competent, and Washington is taking full advantage of the fact that they’re in a division where 8-8 could legitimately get into the postseason. For that, they deserve credit, and coaches have to find ways to motivate their team. If it worked, more power to Gruden.
