The Jon Gruden Story is the Latest in a Long Line of NFL Redirects

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: A powerful NFL figure is revealed to have acted in some immoral fashion, creating a scandal that could rock the foundation of the NFL. The NFL focuses on that one person, offering them a harsh punishment and promising that this type of behavior is not tolerated. The focus is shifted away from the culture of the league, and we pretend like all is good again. Soon enough, that person has gone through their punishment without paying any real restitution, and they come back without any real consequences. This situation has applied to many people. I could be talking about Greg Hardy right now. Or Riley Cooper. Or Kareem Hunt. Or Jameis Winston. Or Tyreke Hill. Or Antonio Brown. It’s an endless list- and yet what we are now faced with is something more sinister. Rather than letting something slide, the NFL is selectively revealing toxic figures, while actively hiding details that could reveal a toxic culture inside the league. This is more than non-attention. This is a coverup.

Quite frankly I don’t have much of an interest in rehashing what Jon Gruden said. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume that if you are reading this you know what he said- and quite frankly I’m not interested in giving any of those comments the light of day. Gruden revealed who he is, and that should be that. And yet these emails were revealed as part of a greater investigation into the Washington Football team following a story in the Washington Post last year that revealed a toxic workplace culture under Owner Dan Snyder and former General Manager Bruce Allen that was particularly hostile towards women. One major question that’s lingered is who leaked these emails. If this was an internal investigation, who sent these documents to the Wall Street Journal and then New York Times? To me, the answer seems pretty simple- it was the league itself. You see, this Gruden story is actually in the league's benefit. They were investigating one of the league’s most powerful owners, not over a specific incident, but about a systemic issue. Any findings in this investigation can not be written off as a one-time thing, because the investigation is acting under the assumption that scandalous things occurred, and is asking a question over whether there is a greater issue at stake having to do with the integrity of the team and the league. These Gruden leaks change that. The story now becomes about Jon Gruden and the downfall of a Super Bowl-winning coach who has also become a significant celebrity. Jon Gruden is not an owner, meaning Roger Goodell does not have to respond to him, so he is expendable. All while this Gruden story has been going on, the larger question of the WFT investigation has taken a backseat. In fact, the investigation actually concluded in July with barely anyone noticing- that’s because there was never a written report. That’s right, a year-long investigation was verbally reported and then vanished into thin air. The NFL has said that they are not planning on releasing any of the other 650,000 emails involved in the investigation claiming that every other email absolved everyone else. And yet that was brought into question by a leak to the New York Times this week, which I am sure was not by the NFL, that showed that the NFL’s general counsel, Jeff Pash was often in cahoots with Allen, using racist and sexist language, while conspiring with Allen to give him league favors. How are we to believe that everything else is all rosy? And yet by redirecting the issue to focus on Gruden, the NFL diverted the discussion away from a greater discussion about the cultural fabric of the league, and towards a singular issue that has to do with the football field itself.

The redirect is not a new strategy for the NFL. In fact, much of Roger Goodell's time as commissioner has involved him taking a scandal that could have greater implications league-wide, and narrowing its scope, continuously turning a story about a systematic problem in the league into a story about a bad apple. It all started with Spygate, which is something that obviously is not on the scale of systemic racism, but which brought into question the competitive integrity of the league. Over the course of his investigation, Roger Goodell mysteriously destroyed the tapes containing the signals captured by the Patriots, while never once asking Bill Belichick how long he had been taping opponents, instead choosing to not have to hear what he didn’t want to know. He wanted the scandal to just focus on a couple of games, and destroying that no one would know what they contained or how far back they scanned. It was only years later that a report showed that Belichick had been taping games since his first season in New England, and likely even taped a Rams walkthrough before they played in Super Bowl 36. However, other teams league were taping signals, but the reason the Patriots benefited the most was that like everything else he does, Belichick was the best in the league at coming up with a taping system. This narrative would not have pleased Goodell at the time, because the degree of the Patriots taping would have brought into question multiple Super Bowls, something which the league values more than anything else, while also revealing a league-wide scandal that would have matched that of steroids in baseball. But by the time this was revealed, everyone had forgotten.

The next big scandal was the long-term brain damage involved with playing football, and the fact that the league had lied for years about the impacts of the game, and covered up evidence linking football to CTE. But Goodell didn’t want the focus to be on the fact that the NFL was involved in litigation which wound up with them paying nearly $1 billion to retired players, so instead, he went all-in on bounty-gate, the Saints system where Defensive Coordinator Gregg Williams paid players to injure stars on other teams. Goodell laid the hammer down on the Saints, claiming this was specifically a problem in New Orleans, suspending Sean Payton for a year. It didn’t matter that Williams had instituted similar systems before at stops in Washington and Buffalo. It didn’t matter that a federal judge had ruled that Goodell overstepped his boundaries in overseeing the investigation. All that mattered was that this was a direct story that centered around a specific instance implicating a certain head coach, redirecting the conversation away from the role the NFL played in promoting a culture of headhunting for decades. After the firestorm of the story was over, Gregg Williams was welcomes back into the good graces of the league, and made multiple future stops as a Defensive Coordinator before getting fired last year by the last-place Jets. When former Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison came out years later and said that coach Mike Tomlin once handed him a wad of cash following a helmet-to-helmet hit in 2010, people had moved on from concussions and the story barely made a blip. Now? The NFL is a league where spiking the ball after a first down is deemed an equal offense to trying to decapitate someone.

The next big scandal the NFL faced was that surrounding domestic violence and the Ray Rice case. This was one the NFL couldn’t really get around, because the truly implicating evidence came after Goodell had once again swept an investigation under the rug. After Ray Rice was accused of striking his fiancee the NFL conducted a quick and narrow investigation, resulting in a suspiciously short two-game suspension. But then TMZ released a video showing Rice striking his fiancee, and all hell broke loose. Once we realized this video existed, the NFL and the Ravens had no excuse for how they handled the incident. The Ravens likely had the video but were never asked about it by the NFL, once again engaging in a situation where the league was not going to ask what it didn't want to know, and the Ravens were more than happy to not show it to them. There was no real way for the Ravens or Goodell to get out of this one, so the Ravens cut Rice while Goodell later raised his suspension to six games. This revealed to the public the lack of care the NFL took with issues revolving around violence towards women and forced the NFL’s hand in changing the system. Of course, the NFL commissioned their own report which suspiciously cleared them of any wrongdoing in the Rice case, but by that point, it was too late. They instituted more rigorous investigative policies while raising the minimum suspension. At the same time, Goodell was losing authority and needed something to divert the conversation away from Domestic Violence- and in came a bunch of deflated footballs. It didn’t matter that Quarterbacks across the league deflated footballs. It didn’t matter that Aaron Rodgers had openly admitted to inflating footballs over the legal limit because that was his preference. It didn’t matter that the game in question was played in a torrential downpour, a setting that could affect the PSI of a football. All that mattered was the league had its most famous player, coach, and team in the middle of a major scandal. Goodell used this as a platform to reclaim authority lost during the Rice situation and decided that language in the official report stating that it was “more probable than not” that Brady was at least “generally aware” of a scheme to deflate footballs was somehow damming enough to give Brady a suspension twice as long as that initially given to Rice. And just as Goodell hoped, in all of the discussion about deflated footballs, the biggest story in the league suddenly stopped being about how the league allowed its players to treat women. And while Ray Rice was never signed again by a team despite his actual attempt to repent for what he did, the NFL has since had numerous players kept by teams in the midst of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault investigations, with the Buccaneers even signing Antonio Brown despite the fact that he was in the middle of an active rape case. And while there was certainly criticism of Tampa’s signing, as long as people aren’t blaming the league Goodell doesn’t care.

Roger Goodell hopes that pinning it all on Gruden will just be the latest in his line of redirects, but it may be harder this time. For starters, this might not be the end of it. Assuming the league did not leak the Pash stories, there may very well be more emails coming. What’s more, the fact that this happened within the context of people dealing with the NFL makes the issue a little harder to divert. Beyond even the content of the emails themselves, the fact that Gruden felt comfortable freely sending them is indicative of a league where this stuff is part of the fabric. The fact that Allen felt comfortable sending Gruden pictures of nude cheerleaders from a team account shows that this stuff is considered normal in the league. And yet the truth is as fans we don’t have a lot of ability to change the league itself. We do, however, have the ability to pressure the owners and sponsors, because that is where the power comes from, and until there is an attitude shift in that area nothing will happen. Dan Snyder only changed his team’s name once Nike and FedEx threatened to pull their sponsorships from the team. The Football Team is now dead last in attendance and shamefully attempted to appease their fans this week by hastily calling together a jersey retirement for Sean Taylor that they hoped would distract from the investigation, taking a page from Goodell’s playbook. What’s more, people in the media need to be more willing to directly call out the NFL. Broadcasts need to stop simply talking about Antonio Brown’s “off-the-field issues” and instead confront the issue directly. It’s time for all of us to acknowledge that something is broken in this league and to truly push for change in a sport that we love.

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Week 6 picks

Last weeks record: 6-9-1 (0-0-1 locks)

Season record: 40-45-1

Buccaneers (-7) @ Eagles

Dolphins (-3) @ Jaguars (London)

Ravens (-2.5) vs Chargers

Packers (-4.5) @ Bears

Lions (+3.5) vs Bengals

Texans (+10) @ Colts

Rams (-8) @ Giants

Chiefs (-6.5, lock) @ Washington Football Team

Vikings (-2.5) @ Panthers

Browns (-3) vs Cardinals

Raiders (+4) @ Broncos

Cowboys (-3.5, lock) @ Patriots

Seahawks (+5) @ Steelers

Bills (-5.5) @ Titans