Jon Gruden Is OUT As Head Coach Of The Raiders
Obviously, a few days ago it came out that Gruden used some racist terms to describe a black player in an email back in 2011. He had a big public apology,
"All I can say is I'm not a racist," Gruden said. "I can't tell you how sick I am. I apologize again to De Smith. But I feel good about who I am, what I've done my entire life. And I apologize for the insensitive remarks I had. I had no racial intentions with those remarks at all. ... I'm not like that at all. But I apologize."
He met with the players and staff as well last Friday, and a lot of the key guys seemed to be at peace with it. That's not to say I think that any of the Raiders were ok with what Gruden said at all, just that they seemed ready to move past it. And that was good enough for me and presumably most non-journos.
"I've been around this guy for three years now; I've never felt a certain type of way about him," Raiders running back Josh Jacobs said of Gruden, who drafted him in the first round out of Alabama in 2019.
"He's never rubbed me a certain way, that type of way. I mean, what he said is what he said at the end of the day too. But I mean, I definitely trust him. I mean, it was 10 years ago. People grow."
Raiders linebacker Denzel Perryman, who joined the Raiders in a Sept. 1 trade with the Carolina Panthers, said Sunday, "I let it go as soon as we walked out of the meeting room. I wasn't focused on that. Still not focused on it. So, I mean, I don't know what he said. I could care less, honestly. I don't know how many years ago it was, but my main focus this week was on the Bears, not whatever he had going on."
"Us as a team, we're like, 'Yeah, Coach, it was 10 years ago. We love you, man. We got your back,'" Carr said. "We're just trying to be there to support Coach. I know it's a hard time for him. … He told us, 'Men, learn from my mistake.' When we left that meeting, we didn't take it as how it came out."
But now with the rest of these emails out, this relationship was clearly over and that is for the best. I saw some people acting as if what he had said was "ok" by the times standard, and personally, I think that's nuts. Some of these are 10 years old and some of these were as late as 2018! It's on his work email! It's not like someone secretly recorded him at a bar or something. This dude was firing off the big guns in his work email! And the fact that he not only felt comfortable speaking like that to his coworkers, but open and secure and stupid enough to say it over email says more than anything else IMO. And I think most NFL brains would agree, any time a player, coach, or anyone in an organization becomes that much of a distraction to the team, they gotta go.
He ends his Oakland tenure 22-31. A loser off the field and on it.
