(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
Even though he’s still months away from his NFL debut Robert Griffin III just keeps on impressing us. Over the weekend, at an NFL Players Association event for the upcoming season’s rookie class, Griffin told Outsports.com that he would not mind if one of his teammates was openly gay.
Griffin was one of a dozen first-year and former players interviewed by Outsports who said they’d be fine playing alongside a gay teammate. Joining Griffin and his fellow rookies were former Tennessee Titans defensive end Jevon Kearse, former Titans running back Eddie George and former New York Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce, who each echoed the sentiment that what matters is not a player’s sexuality, but how they perform on the field and contribute to the team dynamic.
And it seems like much like the United States at large, where support for same-sex marriage increases among younger demographics, there’s a generational shift at work in the NFL. Trent Richardson, a running back who played for the University of Alabama drafted by the Cleveland Browns, said that his teammates’ personal lives do not enter his thinking. “As long as they’re playing good football and contributing to the team, I don’t have nothing to do with that,” he told Outsports. “It is what it is. I don’t have any problem with any sexuality or whatever they’ve got going on.”
But it was Griffin who said he’s had direct experience with the matter. He recalled a high-school teammate in Copperas Cove, Texas who came out to his fellow players but then quit the team. It was a formative experience for the young quarterback:
“When he came out, he stopped playing,” Griffin said. “He might have stopped playing because of the negative feedback he might have gotten from being that on the football team. So, I think that’s probably why he ended up quitting.”
It was from that out player that Griffin learned a gay teammate poses no threat.
“Just because they’re gay doesn’t mean they’re hitting on you,” he said.
Griffin’s acceptance of a gay teammate is certainly a welcome change from previous instances of Redskins players talking about sexuality. In 2009, running back Clinton Portis colored his hair and beard blond and followed up the dye job with a public announcement that he is not gay, even though there were no allegations that he is. (Though he did possibly insinuate that he’s slept with every woman in the United States.) And in 2007, wide reciever Brandon Lloyd injected into in a radio interview his suspicion that former Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman is gay.
