Osi Umenyiora is no stranger to antagonizing his NFC East foes. But yesterday on WFAN, he shifted his aim further down I-95, to a certain can't-miss superstar quarterback:

"Who is this RG3 guy you guys keep talking about?'' Umenyiora said. "You talking about Bob Griffin? You guys are giving him a cool nickname already and everything. When he does anything in the NFL we're gonna call him RG3. Right now he's Bob Griffin.''


Meh. Just trash talk; there's nothing wrong with giving an athlete a nickname, even using it more frequently than his actual name. (Except "Black Mamba." Kobe gave himself that nickname. You don't get to give yourself a nickname. None of us should give him the satisfaction of using it.)

It's not as if it's a cool, performance-dependent nickname either, like the Braided Assassin or Code: Burgandy. RG3 is RG3 because his actual name is so cumbersome. Not the Robert Griffin part—that's boring, and makes him sound like a white dude from Hingham. It's the "III," that for whatever reason has to be appended every time you use his full name. Maybe this isn't a problem for broadcasters, to slip a "the third" in there, but it's so awkward to break out the Roman numerals in print. And as a grown man, I can only type "RG3" so many times. How about we agree to call him just Robert Griffin? No one's going to get confused. There are no other Robert Griffins in football. (Except the Jets' Robert Griffin, also from Baylor, but whatever.) He can still have his oh-so-marketable nickname, and we get to avoid cluttered up headlines and copy.


For his part, Griffin says Umenyiora, and all of us, can call him whatever we want. Code: Burgandy it is!