The Ringer NFL Show - Instant Reaction to Jon Gruden's Resignation

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Kevin, Nora, and Kaelen provide their thoughts on Jon Gruden’s resignation and what’s next for the Raiders. Hosts: Kevin Clark, Nora Princiotti and Kaelen Jones Production Assistant: Isaiah Blakely Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is the Renner NFL show. Part of the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Kevin Clark. Emergency Edition. John Gruden has resigned as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. I'm joined by Noel Princiotti and Kalin Jones. A lot to get to. This happened very, very quickly. If you don't know yet, John Gruden in a series of email sent over, I think it was seven years while he was an ESPN employee, made a number of racist, misogynistic, and homophobic remarks. They came out over the past three, four days, starting with the Wall Street Journal report at the end of last week. On Monday night, the New York Times reported the most significant batch of those emails. It included a number of homophobic slurs directed towards Roger Goodell, at one point to Michael Sam, and he resigned, I think, within about 90 minutes of that report dropping. Thank you for joining us to both Nora and Kalin. nor I'll start with you.

When you saw this report, you thought what? I don't know what I thought really so much as it's just even when we've had a number of incidents and particularly information pertaining to all the things that have happened in Washington, which is ultimately the source of how the league got this information, it's not as though this is unprecedented to be in a situation like this where some big figure in the NFL is being shown to have said racist, misogynistic things. I mean, it's, you know, you can go down the line. It doesn't make it any easier to deal with. It's really upsetting, right? Like, this is ultimately an entertainment product. We sort of try to exist in this world to have a nice

time, maybe sort of work out some fun feelings about what can happen if you, you know, work hard, try your best, right? And now we're dealing with a story where it's just really, really crappy to think about. And that's nothing compared to what the people who were the subject of the emails must feel, what people who know them must feel, what someone like Carl Nassib, who's having a great season, must be feeling and what will probably continue to feel is he's going to have to, you know, really, really unfairly probably answer a lot of questions that just shouldn't be his responsibility to deal with, right? So it just stinks. Like, that's, that's a real understatement. But it's what I've got right now. It's, it's bad for a lot of people

involved. Yep. And one of my first 10 thoughts was on Carl Nassad, because if this story had lingered with John Gruden still being in a position of power, Carl Nassad would have had to become a spokesperson for something because the meeting would have gone to him tomorrow in the locker room and Thursday in the locker room and Friday in the locker room. And that's a separate part of that. But it does put him in a, this is an awful position for him. And I feel for him. And I feel, as you said, for everybody, you know, Michael Sam and those folks. Kaelan, you're someone who knows the Raiders organization. Well, you followed them for. years initial thoughts on this.

Yeah, same thing as there are. Like I was shocked at how wide ranging, I guess the comments were because we knew about the racial trope, right? That was what first came out last week. And I was honestly shocked that, you know, with Gruden's personal email account and between another NFL executive at the time, like, you have the homophobic slur, you have the black falling of Eric Reed. There was suggesting that, you know, the league's first.

openly gay player should not be in the league. And they were also like slamming the concussion efforts, which, you know, that's a long, long, longu list of, you know, crew comments. And so my initial thoughts was, again, this is very much a pattern. This has gone over the course of, like Kevin was saying, seven years. And truth be told, like, there was no other option but for the Raiders, you know, to either fire him or for Gruden to move on. And so I'm glad that how swiftly, you know, they decided to act today, but it doesn't make

sense. And I have questions as in the regards, like how readily this information was available, how much the NFL knew, how much the Raiders there, et cetera. But this needed to be done. Yeah. So just so everybody knows, this came to light because the NFL was doing an investigation to the Washington football team's workplace culture. these emails were in part to Bruce Allen, who was the team president there for a while.

That's how they came into possession of these. There is a statement from John Gruden that just came over the wire. I've resigned as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. I love the Raiders and do not want to be a distraction. Thank you to all the players, coaches, staff, and fans of Raider Nation. I'm sorry, I never meant to hurt anyone. My belief is once these emails came out, he could not be taken seriously as a coach as a leader of men.

He could not look his players in the eye and try to give them anything because he would have lost the locker room for a number of reasons. And it's funny because there are people online tonight who are saying, oh, this is just how coaches talk. No, it's not. It's not. And it's the worst sort of football culture guy, just like a talking football. Like this is, this is the worst side of that. Okay. It's caveman logic. And the idea, somebody said to me, they were like, well, 80% of NFL go to say this. No, they don't. I've been in NFL locker rooms. And if a guy talked like this, it would be out there pretty quickly. And I think that that's just sort of how things are now.

Nora, when you think about what this says about football culture and kind of John Gruden's outdated place in this, you go where? The NFL can be an unpreted place sometimes. I doubt that, look, I don't want to speculate on who else might say things that are as awful as this, right? But it's not a completely unprecedented act, right? It's something that is coming to light based on the need to investigate the culture of an entire organization. If somebody thinks that this is just how coaches talk, my first question would be, why are you interested in this league, first of all?

Right, right. If this is supposedly a given among most people in positions of power here, I just don't understand why that wouldn't be sort of automatically disqualifying. I guess the good news is that I don't think that it is. I do think that, you know, I think it's sort of goes without saying that we know that there were some particular issues with Washington, obviously sort of Bruce Allen's responses to John Gruden, something that we have not seen. He's not in the league right now. So that's probably something that we won't necessarily find out about. Obviously, we know that, you know, the NFL is the one with, with access to this information. As of July, they felt comfortable making a decision on finding Dan Snyder, $10 million, taking him out of day-to-day ops there. That was after receiving an oral report from Beth Wilkinson's team who ran the investigation. That was July. This is now based on what the NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told the Washington Post.

And based on the reporting that was in the New York Times piece, it's still a little bit unclear. I think McCarthy told the Washington Post that league executives had been looking over something like 650,000 emails in the last several months. The language was really vague. Obviously, it poses the question, did they have this information before? And it's just coming out now. Or was there such a breadth of documents that they had to go through and, And now it's just coming up. I think it makes you a little bit uncomfortable with who is handling this information, right? I mean, it was a little bit surprising at the time. And look, I was interviewed as part of the process of conducting that report. It was a little bit surprising at the time that there wasn't paperwork.

There wasn't anything that people could look at and see, okay, this is what you found and this is what you deemed to be the appropriate response to it. So, yeah, I think there's some discomfort with the idea that there are just people in league offices going, okay, this is what we're going to act on this isn't or this is how we're going to sort of try to, you know, we don't know if we can suspend him because he didn't work for the league at the time. We don't know if we can intervene or if we want to intervene, but we want to get the Raiders to do it. That sort of judge jury execution or role that the NFL has a lot of the time when people within the league misbehave in various ways. I think it becomes increasingly uncomfortable when you're dealing with things this serious and this ugly.

Hopefully we learn more about that. I don't mean to be out of loss for words here. I think this is just sort of a gross day, like a gross evening. I think even some of the sort of initial laundering of the first wave of this story after the first email was uncomfortable because it did seem like initially

there's this idea of, oh, this won't be a big thing. This will just be this one thing that happened. And then Gruden can go get interviewed by ESPN and it's all going to be okay. And maybe we'll end up with a clearer picture of who decided that it shouldn't be okay. If that's the league, they're not exactly making that clear. And it would be nice if that is the case, if they would. But ultimately, to your point, of course he had to resign. of course he needed to.

It was beyond disqualifying, and that's where we are. So Chris, Chris Mornson over the weekend reported that there was a damning batch of emails that was in the league office. And John Gruden spent... We should also, Kevin, sorry. He and Bruce Allen also exchanged topless photos of Washington's cheerleaders as part of this. Like, it's worth having the conversation.

Obviously, we're here on a podcast doing it. But it's just, there's not a lot of... lot of nuance here. Like this was just, it sort of boggles the mind, even though it shouldn't in some ways. So I want to keep this on John Gruden, but I do want to point out there's a pattern

of people acting like assholes and Bruce Allen being involved. Okay? That's, it's a longstanding thing. A bunch of people acting like idiots and Bruce Allen happens to be there. At some point, I don't know. It's more than a coincidence

that Bruce Allen's involved in being an asshole. Okay. So Chris Mornson reports, the weekend that there were damning emails in the league office. And John Gruden had spent three days acting like a moron and saying it was just one email. It was 10 years ago. Don't have a racist bone on my body. This was about the D. Smith email. The racist trope was unintentional. By the way. Yeah. Which doesn't even make sense. And you had to know. You had to know this was coming. So organizationally, this was a failure for the Raiders. Now, I want to address one small thing,

which is that somehow, somehow this has become a cancel culture story online, which is just outrageous. This is not about cancel culture. There are certain instances, I'm sure, where you can say and make a good point, oh, you shouldn't be going through old emails of people. Yeah, okay, fine. But this is not one of those cases as far as just stuff coming out. And once it's out, he can't lead a team anymore.

He can't look as players in the eye anymore. This is not about cancel culture. saying to meeting that they were saying what would happen if all your emails are made public over the past 10 years what are you people using email for i fine it's just a bunch of pearl jam tickets and emails to you norah like i just i just i just can't imagine work emails you know if you're saying this in work emails what else you're saying um all right kaelin from a football standpoint where do the raiders go from here i mean i'm not sure i mean they're definitely going to have to have to get i mean they're going to have to reset the culture right i think yeah the hiring of John Gruden was intended to be a culture resetter for them,

especially as a transition going from Oakland to Vegas. Like he was supposed to be the guy that kind of carried the mantle for them and was the face of the franchising, though he had a franchise quarterback already there. And so it was weird because even when Gruden first took over, though, he tore everything that last gas, you know, that previous regime before he got there had built up. and he tried to build the Raiders in his image.

And over the course of the past, what, three plus years now, that hasn't been successful. So from a football standpoint, you know, I don't even know if the Raiders would have been able to get out of this season with him as their head coach or at least, you know, justified outside of his contract. But that being said, if you're hired to be a culture setting type guy and you have emails like this,

like you're mentioning Kevin, like, there is it's a complete disqualifier as a head coach for you as a leader you guys know that i'm really green to covering the NFL and so i'm learning more about how important culture is like i've been around sean mcbay brandon staley on a weekly basis and i see the difference in respect and command and genuineness that these men have for people who are from all different aspects of life like i remember the first time i ever heard brand silly talking to press conference it was about how you know we knew more black coaches in the NFL. Like, okay, cool.

Like someone who gets it, you know? And it doesn't seem like the show. It's always seen from the outside like a charade for John Groot. And so when you have a paper, machet, horse, whatever you want to call it, and stuff comes a light that's really inside of it, I'm not shocked at it all falling apart for him at all. Nora, what questions are you now thinking about asking the league, asking the Raiders, spinning this forward? Where does the story go from here?

of Gruden is out. Well, I think the question for the league is what did they know when? Will there be any sort of push for them to reveal a little bit more in terms of what the contents were of that report? And even just what they have of it, right? Because even that is not clear. Goodell was presented with spoken findings. it strains credulity that there's no paper trail when they're talking about league executives reviewing hundreds of thousands of documents and in certain areas.

650,000 emails. And the only ones that came out were John Gruden's. Right. So I guess one hopes that there will be a little bit more light shed on what exactly is where and what of it, if any, we will get to see. Um, Susie Culver said on, on the Monday night football halftime show that, um, she's expecting the special teams coach, Rich Basaccia to take over as the likely interim in Las Vegas. I think that makes, you know, I'm sure that makes sense.

Special teams coaches obviously tend to be, um, good candidates to be elevated when there's an interim needed just because they're used to having a, they work with a lot of different players across the roster. that really seems like a secondary thing to me. It sucks for those players. They were having a pretty interesting season. I think it's hard to see something like this, not being something that rocks them to an extent.

You know, Gruden was four years into a 10-year, $100 million contract. I think that's not really the important thing here, whether it's a slightly annoying or very annoying amount of money that the Davis family has to deal with as a result of this depending on, you know, for cause, whatever. I just don't think that that's really all that relevant. And then the rest of it is just, you know, can the league find a way to prove to people who rightfully don't necessarily have all that much trust in them?

taking things like this seriously beyond just the PR hit that they're actually doing some thinking and trying to address some of the root issues and not just the symptomatic stuff. You know, I don't want to be totally cynical here. Like not holding my breath, but you like to hope that if people are sort of disturbed and surprised by something that they see something that they read and something that ultimately um action needed to be taken to deal with you you hope it i don't know spurs some change obviously we got to wait on that because it'll really depend on a bunch of stuff i mean the 650 000 email thing is so interesting to me because i think that there's probably

going to be some pushback as far as just going through it all and and sorting it out and saying who said what but But if someone in those, if anybody else in those emails is telling you loud and clear who they are in the same way John Gruden did in those emails, those people should be exposed. Like I don't, I don't think we should go through there and say these people said the following bad things. But if someone is so clearly letting everybody know that they were emailing to an NFL email address, letting everybody know that they don't deserve a job they have now, then yes, that should come out. That's where I draw the line. It's also like sometimes it's just baffling the way that, I mean, I guess it's purposeful ignorance, but it's not as hard as it's sometimes made out to be to tell what's over the line

and what isn't necessarily. Like these weren't like the bad art friend emails, right? Like this isn't snark. This isn't rude comments about someone you don't like very much. And presumably those same lines might. be able to be drawn. And, you know, got, like, cancel culture has lost any semblance of meaning.

Some people, some entities probably should be canceled. Another word for that is consequences. That's the thing that NFL coaches talk about with their players as it pertains to stuff that happens on the football field all the time. You, actions have consequences.

I don't want to get into the cancel culture debate. On my end, I want to get into the John Gruden as an asshole debate, and it's confirmed. it's confirmed that John Green is an asshole. Kaelan, take us out with some final thoughts, anywhere you want to go with it? I mean, I would hope, like you guys are saying,

like 600, it was 650,000 emails. That's the number. What you guys are saying, like I would hope that whoever, you know, also is speaking like this, like it's not perpetuating this kind of culture in the NFL. It's weird because, you know, during halftime right now, they were just running, you know, football is everything promo. Yeah.

Like, it's supposed to be an inclusive environment. And everything about this completely undermines that type of promotion from the NFL. You can't get out here and say that Colin Kaepernick was getting blackfalled when you have literally John Gruden smoothing with higher-ups of companies that are, you know, millions of dollars. Like saying they don't deserve to be in the league. Like, you know, you can't do this when the dude is just dishing out homophobic slurs. Yeah, fun. Like, yeah. sorry it's baffling no no no I completely agree with you it's a great point I was on jane cozen's

podcast a couple weeks ago at the new york times and she was talking about the ray rice thing and this is is i was obviously very separate but she was saying you know one of the overtones of the ray rice thing was that the NFL will sell you a pink hat and you know they'll they'll run these commercials but they won't do anything about domestic violence in any meaningful way and that is what the nfl uh kind of faces with these sort of crises where they'll have the commercials and they'll say football is for everybody. It's all inclusive. And then football, the worst elements, the absolute worst elements of football culture rear their head and that's what they're faced with. I do want to read the statement that the Raiders provided from Mark Davis and it is

short. I quote, I have accepted John Gruden's resignation as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, end quote. So that's all we're getting from Mark Davis tonight. So more will come out here. Kaelin, is there anything specifically that you're looking for in the next couple of days anybody you want to hear from that you think would shed more light on this, whether it's grid, Mark Davis, a player, damn Bruce Allen, any of those, you know, Jim McVeigh, any of these guys C-Ced. There's going to be more that comes out. What are you looking at in the next couple of days? Yeah, definitely the people who are C-Ced. Like, that's absolutely, I'd like to see what they have to say, even if it's nothing. Like, at least show your ass if you're going to show, like, show your

full ass if you're going to be an ass. Like, that being said, also, like, I, I'm just curious, like, what Roger Goodell is going to say? like what the league ends up doing as a result of this as well because they were the ones getting directly called out by John Gruden in those emails. So we'll see. Yeah. I mean, listen, if you're CCed on a bunch of emails where everyone's acting like a jackass at some point, you're also a jackass.

Okay? You're not just jackass adjacent. Get yourself off. Just remove me from the thread. Remove me from this jackassery. I don't need. Like truly. Yeah.

All right. Guys, thanks for joining us. This been the NFL show. on the Ringer Podcast Network. Next up on this feed is the player show, James Jones, Ryan Chazier, and Jason Gough. They will have, what I imagine, will be extremely good insight

into how our locker room would process this, and I'm looking forward to hearing it. Thank you to Isaiah Blakely for additional production help.