“We say we take the good the bad and the ugly on these e-mails every day on the show,” Larry Michael said during Griffin’s recent appearance on Redskins Nation. “I told our producer, ‘I don’t want any stupid [questions],’ and we got a couple stupid ones. But here’s one from Jason in Laurel: Is it true you went to Coach Shanahan after your first year and requested the offense be changed?”

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Griffin chuckled.

“The urban legend, right?” he said with a smile. “Actually, just like any coach-quarterback combination, we had healthy conversations about everything, evolving as a player. There’s a lot of dark things that are talked about with Mike and Kyle and those things, but it was never a wholesale ‘This is what we’re gonna run, this is what we’re not gonna run’ [demand].

“You know, I’m a player,” Griffin said. “I’m here to play. As we like to say, I just work here. Open discussion. Coaches get to call the plays, and players have to run them.”

It might be healthier for everyone to move on from the 2013 offseason. But since we’re on the topic, here’s Shanahan’s recounting of what happened, delivered on ESPN 980 — another Redskins media property — last February. The coach said Griffin requested a meeting two days after the 2013 Super Bowl, and said he wanted changes in Washington’s approach.

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“He mentioned the Baltimore game and the Atlanta game, you know, his injuries,” Shanahan recalled. “He talked about protection shortening his career. What I tried to share with him is I thought he had probably as good a protection as most rookies do have in their first year because of what he was able to do with the running game. If you compare [Griffin’s protection] to Andrew Luck, it’s not even close.

“He actually [mentioned] what plays were acceptable and unacceptable. And when he started talking about what plays were acceptable and unacceptable — and that he wasn’t a rookie anymore and wanted to voice his opinion — the term ‘unacceptable’ is used by Dan [Snyder], the owner, quite often. So [I had] a little bit of a smile when I heard some of these complaints.”

Again, there’s nothing to be gained from re-litigating this issue now, other than page views, I guess. But the quarterback says there was never a wholesale demand about which plays he would run, and the coach says there was a discussion of what plays were acceptable and unacceptable. Those accounts do not square. One of them is an urban legend, I suppose.

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Another e-mailer to the program asked Griffin if his successful rookie campaign might have hampered his growth as a quarterback, in things like getting rid of the ball and learning to read defenses.

“I don’t think it’s hampered me in any kind of way,” Griffin said. “If anything, it gives you confidence, confidence that you know that you can go out there and get it done at the highest level. So for me, that’s exactly what my rookie year did for me as a player. It gives me the confidence to know that when I’m healthy and ready to go, and we’re all working together as a well-oiled machine on offense and defense and special teams, we can do great things.

“So we’ve got to get away from this reading defenses stuff, man,” Griffin concluded. “If you can’t read defenses, you can’t play in the NFL. So obviously 2012 proved that we can do that, and I can do that.”

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Yet another fan wanted to know Griffin’s goals for the upcoming season, arguing that “When we speak great things into existence, they tend to happen.”

“Is that one of your sayings?” Michael asked Griffin.

“It is not one of my sayings,” the quarterback said.

“Okay,” Michael said. “Does it bother you when people say you have too many sayings?”