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The recent ESPN article regarding the connection between the Jon Gruden emails and Daniel Snyder’s essentially forced sale of the Commanders delved into the animosity between Gruden and the league office. It started during his first stint with the Raiders, and it grew over the years.
The fact that he worked directly for the late Al Davis didn’t help matters. Davis had long been an irritant to the league, suing his partners for antitrust and believing there was a persistent bias against the Silver and Black. The ESPN article mentions, for example, that former Commissioner Pete Rozelle personally kiboshed a trade for John Elway in 1983, when the Colts eventually shipped his rights to Denver.
Gruden’s beliefs regarding an anti-Raiders bias were later justified (in his opinion) by the Tuck Rule game of January 2002, when a little-known rule snatched defeat from the jaws of postseason victory against the Patriots. Then, after Gruden was traded to the Buccaneers, eventually fired by Tampa Bay, and hired by ESPN’s Monday Night Football, the irascible Gruden had a bully pulpit from which to spew any and all venom he chose.
I distinctly recall Gruden being a disappointment as a broadcaster. He kept his “Chucky” demeanor in check as he strategically refrained from speaking his mind about bad play, bad coaching, bad anything, given that he intended to take a coaching job in the future, at some point. A track record of criticizing others could pre-emptively burn one of the bridges back to a sideline.
So Gruden pointed his poisonous tongue at 345 Park Avenue. As explained in the ESPN article, Gruden “was in an especially bad headspace” during the 2011 season, because he was “furious over the owners’ lockout that offseason and that clubs had voted in 2009 to give teams the option to eliminate pension plans for assistant coaches and other employees.”
Per ESPN, Gruden’s frustration “came to a boil” in December 2011. Falcons linebacker Curtis Lofton applied a helmet-to-helmet hit to Saints receiver Marques Colston, drawing a foul for unnecessary roughness.
“I just don’t understand how games are being officiated,” Gruden said during that game.
Gruden’s remarks sparked a call from Commissioner Roger Goodell to meet with John Madden and Jeff Fisher at Park Avenue, in order to give Gruden a “lesson on player safety.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Gruden reportedly said to Goodell. Gruden, per ESPN, later told associates he thought it might be a joke. He thought Madden and Fisher had coached players who “had delivered some of the ugliest hits in NFL history.”
Gruden fumed that Goodell was treating him like a “stooge” who “never coached in the league, like I don’t study football day in and day out . . . like I didn’t know a damn thing about player safety.”
Gruden never went to the league office for the meeting.
That’s a bit surprising, given that the effort surely (this is my opinion, not ESPN’s reporting) included Goodell or someone else contacting Gruden’s bosses at ESPN and strongly suggesting that the broadcast partner make the meeting happen. Was ESPN unwilling to squeeze Gruden to go, or did Gruden tell ESPN he wasn’t doing it — and that if they didn’t like it they could buy out his contract and send him on his way?
That’s a big part of the prologue to Goodell (as Gruden believes it) seizing on the chance to force Gruden out of football during his second stint with the Raiders.
But now Gruden has his chance at the ultimate bit of revenge. If he can show through his lawsuit that Goodell or someone at his direct or indirect direction hatched and implemented the plan to pressure Al Davis’s son, Mark, to push Gruden out by selectively leaking emails culled from the Commanders investigation, the end result for Goodell could potentially be as bad — or worse — than the end result was for Gruden in October 2021.