Jon Gruden, “Raiders” Coach, Resigns

A racist email from 2011 in which Gruden said NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith, who he called, “Dumboriss Smith,” “has lips the size of michellin tires,” was reported by the Wall Street Journal. Smith is Black. 70% of NFL rosters are Black men. 

Today, more emails were released. Gruden called the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, a “faggot” and a “clueless anti football pussy” and said that Goodell should not have pressured Jeff Fisher, then the coach of the Rams, to draft “queers,” a reference to Michael Sam, a gay player chosen by the team in 2014.

The NFL is the worst, a group of pro-Trump latter-day slave owners who care not a whit for the safety of the players.

In a numerous emails during a seven-year period ending in early 2018, Gruden criticized Goodell and the league for trying to reduce concussions and said that Eric Reid, a player who had demonstrated during the playing of the national anthem, should be fired. In several instances, Gruden used a homophobic slur to refer to Goodell and offensive language to describe some N.F.L. owners, coaches and journalists who cover the league.

Gruden also criticized President Obama during his re-election campaign in 2012, as well as then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden, whom Gruden called a “nervous clueless pussy.” He used similar words to describe Goodell and DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the N.F.L. Players Association.

Taken together, the emails provide an unvarnished look into the clubby [The "club" is recognizable by their white-hooded uniforms] culture [and its culture by the moving "cross burning ritual] of one N.F.L. circle of peers, where white male decision makers felt comfortable sharing pornographic images, deriding the league policies, and jocularly sharing homophobic language.

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Privately, [Bruce Allen, the former president of the Washington Football Team] and Gruden appeared to have few boundaries in expressing homophobic and transphobic language. In one email from 2015 that includes Droste, McVay and others, Gruden crudely asked Allen to tell Bryan Glazer, whose family owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers where Gruden coached until 2008, to perform oral sex on him. Allen said Glazer would “take you up on that offer.”

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In an email from 2015, Allen and Gruden criticized a congressional bill that aimed to force the Washington franchise to change its name, which some Native Americans and others have denounced as a slur. Again using a vulgar term, Gruden took aim at Goodell and his staff even though the commissioner had initially defended the team’s right to keep the name.

In 2017, [Ed Droste, the co-founder of Hooters] shared with the group a sexist meme of a female referee to which Gruden replied, “Nice job roger.”

That same year, Gruden was sent a link to an article about N.F.L. players calling on Goodell to support their efforts promoting racial equality and criminal justice reform. Gruden had advice for Goodell:

“He needs to hide in his concussion protocol tent,” he wrote.