The Jon Gruden News Gets Out
I’m not even sure what to say about all this, there is so much about this entire thing to unpack and there is a very good chance this is just that start. It’s not even the start, the start was Dan fucking Snyder. Man, this whole thing happened so fast.
The WFT is being investigated for all of their horrible toxic culture problems and somehow emails between Jon Gruden and Bruce Allen got leaked. There’s plenty to say regarding the WFT problems, and I’ve said a lot of it already. Dan Snyder is vile. The TEAM’s treatment of cheerleaders and female employees was disgusting, bordering on actual human trafficking at points. The fact remains that all the owners probably have dirt like this on them, and it doesn’t matter because since the owners are all garbage, they’ll circle the wagons around Snyder unless he does something so heinous they have to dump him. The broader picture of this entire investigation is huge and has so many implications, so let’s just kind of leave them to potential future discussion points and bring this back to Gruden.
It almost feels like Gruden got caught in the crossfire of a different fight. These are emails written while he wasn’t even in the league. Why did these emails leak, of all things to leak? Did Gruden piss someone involved off? But make no mistake, Gruden is not a victim, he’s a bigot. He deserves the shame brought upon him right now. I can’t believe I’ve been hearing cries of “well this was 10 years ago! What kind of stuff did anyone say 10 years ago?” Ten years ago was 2011. I knew not to use racist, misogynist, homophobic slurs by 2011. This wasn’t the early internet era when everyone called OP a bundle of sticks. This was 2011. We knew this stuff was bad by then. Gruden is also an old, grown adult man. I might understand kids on Xbox being edgy, but Gruden was a TV personality by then and he still used this kind of language in private. This wasn’t a mistake or a different time, this is who he is. Even if he’s somehow reformed into a new man now (which I highly doubt, maybe Nassib has helped loosen his mind on the gay perspective at least), this is who he was and he deserves to be held accountable. Hopefully this is the last we see of Jon Gruden. It won’t be possible to view him as the goofy football-loving clown anymore.
I bet Urban Meyer is thrilled to have the bad coach spotlight off of him. Urban clearly hasn’t learned the art of the NFL coverup yet. I’m going to be shocked if Urban makes it to the end of the season at the rate he’s going.
Damn, Urban must’ve been on his knees praying for a distraction for days lol Now he has something to deflect to.
“Coach Urban, how do you regain your players trust and respect?”
“Well you know the things Gruden said in thise emails was wrong…”
“It is truly outrageous that after the NFL’s 10-month long investigation involving hundreds of witnesses and 650,000 documents related to the longtime culture of harassment and abuse at the Washington Football Team, the only person to be held accountable and lose their job is the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders,”
The lawyers for the WFT employees said this, and I just can’t think of a better way to put it.
“Ten years ago was 2011. I knew not to use racist, misogynist, homophobic slurs by 2011” – I’m pretty sure you knew not to use those even before that 😛 .
As for Gruden, while I think that him getting canned is warranted, I think what some people find “amusing” is that in a league rife with scandals and literal pile of broken bodies it tried to sweep under the rug, it took a jab at the Ginger Hammer for someone to get the insta-justice’d. The cherry on top of this whole bloody mess is that somehow being an all-round arsehole (I’m assuming in private, otherwise this sort of behaviour would’ve leaked earlier) is worse than the heinous stuff Richie Incognito through the years.
Gruden deserved it, but the NFL are hypocrites. They hire entertainers, who use just as terrible language in their lyrics, to entertain at halftime, Dan Snyder will not be forced to sell his team, like the Clippers owner (can’t remember his name) was, and Deshaun Watson, credibly accused of sexual assault by OVER 20 WOMEN still draws a paycheck. Yeah, Gruden clearly pissed Goodell off.
oh my! terrible language!
dr dre is a woman beater, snoop was at one time a literal pimp
Yeah but even Snoop learned that he had to stop all that and grow up because he had a career and a family to protect.
In an interview, he even stated that he looked at all the stuff he did when he was younger and even he didn’t want his kids listening to his old music. That’s why he vowed to change his image so he could share his career with his kids.
That’s an example of someone who did some messed up stuff when they were younger but learned their lesson and came out the other end a better person.
Snoop Dawg aka Snoop Lion
The problem I have with that view is that if Gruden is held responsible for his past actions, shouldn’t that apply to others. Saying someone has learned the error of their ways can’t apply to one person and not another. If Snoop was a literal pimp, then he was essentially enabling behavior similar to that of the WFT. That’s not saying he’s guilty and should be “canceled” or whatever the cool kids say now. What about Antonio Brown or the Richard Sherman situation?
Facts doomed Gruden (rightly so). I do not defend or condone his actions. I do however wish to see consistency in action from the league and it’s fanbase on who gets rightfully punished and who gets to squeak by.
If Gruden deserves his punishment without an opportunity to atone in any way, that same mentality should apply to players currently in the league who have been in trouble more recently than 10 years ago. Gruden’s feelings likely influenced actions that adversely affected people. I’m sure the same could be said for Watson. The same was said about Incognito. Holding one person to a higher standard while ignoring others isn’t the way to fix anything in the long run.
I dunno, I feel like a coach should be held to higher standards, like a judge, or a gameshow host
Dave, the WFT isn’t under investigation anymore. That investigation ended and the NFL quietly announced it just before the Fourth of July weekend and didn’t release the results, obviously hoping to sweep everything under a rug. Also I remember there being political cartoons depicting Obama as a literal monkey ten years ago so it kinda was different. People didn’t know to hide their racism quite so well then, let alone the other stuff. I’m sure Gruden isn’t the only one and we can only hope more people will be outed, but as their job mightn’t be leading African-American and gay players, there mightn’t be the ramifications there was for Gruden
It may not be under investigation anymore, but the PA is not letting it go and is trying to pressure them into releasing all the emails pertaining to it, so it’s not exactly over yet.
Oh, I hope it isn’t over, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is. I think the NFL doesn’t want this out there, especially not during the season. Taking this comic as a microcosm of the whole thing, if the Gruden thing hadn’t blown up, the comic would be about the Ravens crazy comeback. Lamar’s heroics, the two misses by the Colts kicker, SOMETHING to do with the play on the field. Instead it’s about off the field stuff that involves management and more importantly ownership. They will continue to try to sweep it all under the rug and hopefully fail, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for it
Well that explains how Richie Incognito is still in the league.
Not all of the Gruden stuff was from 10 years ago, too. Like the homophobic comments were from 2014 about Michael Sam and his misogynistic comments were from 2015 about female referees.
My issue from the Gruden thing essentially boils down to this:
1) Gruden gets fired while men who beat women, have punched their pregnant girlfriends, and who have committed other actual real crimes keep their jobs. It’s very clear the NFL had no actual standard; That makes this whole thing look like a farce, and trying to pander to an audience by effectively sacrificing Gruden to distract from all the other shite that goes on in the NFL.
2) Why were Gruden’s, and ONLY Gruden emails leaked? You can’t tell me that out of like 600,000 emails the only bad ones were sent by Jon Gruden. There’s probably an insane amount of dirt in there.
3) This isn’t necessarily an excuse, but more of just the reality, that the language used inside locker rooms is awful. Literally anyone that grew up playing sports at any level knows this. That’s not an excuse for it, but it is however, the reality of it. It always makes me chuckle just a little bit inside when people freak out over this with Gruden (As is merited) when what he said is shockingly mild compared to the stuff that gets said and talked about on a daily basis inside of sports locker rooms.
There are plenty of ex-players and locker room reporters saying that this is not actually how NFL locker rooms sound. Maybe you were in locker rooms that were poorly run, or run by people that thought this was ok. That doesn’t mean it’s the norm and it certainly doesn’t say anything about locker rooms at the professional level.
FWIW Gruden didn’t actually get fired, he stepped down. Richie Incognito, Rays Rice and Lewis and countless others had the opportunity, but chose not to.
the standard is, was, and will remain: will this cost us money
that’s it.
I think other emails were leaked, but with all the shit going around about Gruden already, they mostly focused on that. And they aren’t “sacrificing” Gruden. This stuff seems to be pretty messed up.
Yeah man, I spent time in a locker room in high school and an entire career in another ‘Locker room style culture” (The military) and even we didn’t talk like that back in 2005.
“It’s just locker room talk.” is a complete load of BS!
I don’t think that’s the complete point there. We’ve seen stories of how NFL locker rooms have spoken and acted disrespectful to women reporters. It’s not in every locker room, but to say that it’s not in some is incredibly short sided. Just because you weren’t in “locker rooms” that weren’t like that, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Should people know better? Absolutely. But it will never cease to amaze me how many people do things that they know they shouldn’t
Couple of thoughts:
-This is EXACTLY the joke I thought you were going to make! Urban Meyer is the luckiest SOB ever in the wake of this news.
-Gruden’s comments, particularly those about Michael Sam, show why Carl Nassib coming out was such a huge deal. It’s easy for many people to say “I don’t care as long as they’re good at football” but many who say that actually still harbor some serious prejudices. Which is what many supporters were trying to get across to the “just play football” crowd.
-I feel like so many leads are getting buried. The racist stuff is bad. The homophobic stuff is bad. The misogynistic stuff is bad. One of the worst parts of all this is his connection with the skeezy WFT topless cheerleader stuff. We’ve moved on and forgotten how bad that whole situation really is and Gruden is directly connected to it. But it seems so few people are talking about his place in a crypto-trafficking scheme put on by the executives of the team.
-Finally, thanks for pointing out the hypocrisy. Gruden should be shamed and ousted, but we need to keep that same energy for that creep Watson, wife-beaters like Tyreek Hill and Jeff Gladney, and racist homophobes like Ritchie Incognito. I’m not saying people don’t deserve second chances, but they need to be taken more seriously like this whole Gruden situation. You don’t get extra credit for throwing a grounder for the out at first base. That’s your job.
it’s “ledes”, not “leads”.
lede
/lēd/
noun US
the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article, summarizing the most important aspects of the story.
“the lede has been rewritten and the headline changed”
https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-roy-peter-clark-has-the-definitive-answer-at-last/
2011 was ten years ago but 2018 was three years ago. As I understand, the most recent emails were sent in 2018, the year he came back to coach the Raiders.
Everyone has skeletons in their closet but the only times I ever said anything remotely like this was when I was a literal child whose brain wasn’t developed enough to think critically about the hateful adults around me.
yeah, the number of people on /r/nfl and facebook that are telling on themselves is nuts.
No, if you look through my personal emails from 2011 on you *won’t* see that sort of crap because I’m not a bigot and I’m not dumb enough to put damaging shit in writing either.
I’m hearing from a lot of those r/NFL types “I mean, we’ve all said that kind of stuff right? If you haven’t, then you’re a liar”. I can honestly say that I have never used those kinds of slurs EVER. I’ve never even used the term “gay” as a derogatory adjective either. Even when I was a shithead teenager, I had gay friends and knew better.
i did*, “back then” (pre2001ish – when i took acid with gay friends for the first time) and i don’t feel too bad about it, honestly, because i didn’t know any better. but i don’t say such things now, and my nephews who are basically-me-but-now don’t either, because they DO know better. they know better, in part, because there are now consequences, consequences that are discussed publicly.
that said, yeah, burn the NFL to the fucking ground.
*the homophobic stuff, not the racist stuff, for the record.
Yeah man. I grew up in the 90-00s and the only time I ever used the word “gay” was to say something was ‘stupid.’ I then stopped using that when I found out my cousin was gay…..and my ex-g/f.
But I can say with 100% confidence that I’ve never, EVER directly called someone a ‘maggot’ that doesn’t begin with the letter m. Even as a kid, I knew that was completely unacceptable.
There were emails from as recently as a week before he got hired by the Raiders, so this isn’t just limited to 2011. When the first email got leaked I said “Committing one dumb, racist act doesn’t necessarily mean someone is a racist. There’s smoke, but no fire.” A day later that smoke turned to fire real quick.
I also saw people defending Gruden by saying it clearly didn’t affect his roster construction, since he signed and started Carl Nassib. First, all that means is that he disregards personal judgments when it comes to football, but only when it comes to football. Second, it still doesn’t make him not a bigot; at best it makes him casually bigoted, which is possibly even more pernicious than overt bigotry.
The bit where he says the NFL “forced” Jeff Fisher to draft “a queer” in Michael Sam makes me wonder if Carl had come out before he got his nice new contract, that might have legitimately played against his tenure/contract/playing time with Jon at the helm.
I wasn’t really following the NFL at the time, did Goodell “force” the Rams into drafting Michael Sam? Because that seems like something Goodell would do for good PR.
Nassib signed with the Raiders before he came out, if Gruden knew he might have skipped him. Gruden also signed Richie Incognito (who was a known quantity by then), which should have told us everything we had to know
Richie Incognito was also signed by others before Gruden and after he called Martin a half racial slur bundle of sticks. That’s not evidence of Gruden being a homophobe, that’s the NFL as usual prioritising talent over character
While true, Incognito had been out of the league for a bit when the Raiders signed him, after essentially forcing his way out of Buffalo and then he had a couple off-field incidents after that.At the time even Incognito felt too toxic to touch because not only was he awful, he was old and claimed to retire from Buffalo with health issues. Gruden still gave him a pass. I even made a comic about that at the time.
I got no problem with him getting canned, but taking him out of the Buc’s ring of honor while they have fucking Antonio Brown on the field and Warren Sap still in the ring of honor is, uh, more than a little hypocritical. And I’m going to be *really* pissed off if it’s only him and Bruce Allen taking the fall for this shit, because we all know damn good and well the rot runs deeper than that.
I saw a lot of people speculating it’s because Gruden insulted the Glazers in his emails specifically, and I agree they took personal offense because they do indeed suck. Sapp and Brown show they don’t care about that.
It all boils down to team PR, an owner/GM/Head Coach’s personal feelings and money.
If you mess with either of those three, you can kiss your career goodbye.
Love the Tipper Sticker – much like the NFL, the PMRC would flag lyrics by Jon Gruden but not by Dan Snyder
Whoever in the music industry that was responsible for designing that logo knew what they were doing. It’s well designed and does a good job of drawing the eye and adding cachet to something they were forced into for the opposite effect.
Fun fact: The fourth “Fuck You” in the top panel is also being said by a Mets fan.
I’m glad Gruden got what he deserved, but I agree with the other posters that it all rings kind of hollow when we have Collinsworth talking about how “brilliant” Antonio Brown is and Tyreek Hill has essentially gone unpunished.
I can visualize Andy Reid saying “That was in college”
There has to be a high standard for leadership positions like head coach. As decision makers they need to be trusted with the careers of a great many people, particularly coaching staff and players.
You really live up to your soyboy New York stereotype eh? Out of touch with real hard working Americans who use the f-slur to fuck around with their friends and crack jokes not be homophobic. I mean watch Louis CK’s standup on the word. People like you are so narrow minded. Then again you’re a cartoonist for a living so I’m not surprised by your politics.
1. Dave isn’t from New York; he is from Baltimore.
2. He was actively calling other people fags and other horrible derogatory stuff, not just “Fucking around with friends”, which still wouldn’t make it OK at all. Not as bad, but still not OK.
3. Louis C.K. is a filthy piece of shit, so I wouldn’t trust anything he says.
4. Dude, there are so many conservative cartoonists. Fuck off and read those instead, if that’s what you agree with.
Also 5. Dave isn’t a cartoonist for a living he has some boring marketing job as I recall.
What exactly do you gain from this mentality? I totally understand being nervous about the change going on in the world, and trust me there’s things I don’t like too, but that does not mean that you have to defend ignorant actions like those of Gruden.
There’s nothing saying you can’t start to become more tolerant, and understanding of how actions like these impact people. There’s no reason to be using the f-slur, even joking around with friends. Old habits die hard, I get that. But still.
Using Louis CK as example after he got accused of sexual misconduct is not a really good idea.
Comedy acts tend to be good measures of where society is. Louis CK was far from the only one doing such a bit. Chris Rock and South Park come to mind off the top of my head. I think these bits wouldn’t fly today, well, Chris Rock’s literally doesn’t fly today. It says more about where society is right now versus where we were even five years ago
I can tell you’re a troll because if you actually believed any of this drivel you’d have just posted the word instead of typing “f-slur”. So even if you really believe this, you still fundamentally understand the word is offensive and refused to use it, proving us right. Looks like the soyboy was you all along
I’ve always disliked people who try to defend their offensive use of certain terms with defenses like, “We’ll I don’t find that offensive.” or “Quit your whining. That’s not an offensive word.”
Well guess what buddy, you don’t get to decide what other people find offensive. (As a leader of young people, God knows I wish I could but I don’t. So instead I adjust)
To try to keep myself honest, because I know I have a potty mouth and I get quick to get right up in people’s faces and curse them out, and without outside assistance from people who identify as certain groups, I ask myself if how would my child feel if someone used that word to describe them (that is if they actually fell into one of those groups: dark complexion, LGBTQ, disabled, etc)
also, great comic. got a good laugh with this one. i read all of the noo yawk bubbles in michael rappaport’s voice.
I wish we could get Draw Play portraits for players instead of the weird over-muscled drawings they throw up lately.
that depiction of nyc is incredible lmao