Gruden Helped Create the C-Suite Bro Template and Then He Got Caught
Connections and privilege led to a middling career as a platitude-spitting bad guy—and worse
Jon Gruden’s career arc should be familiar to anyone who’s worked in corporate America at any time over the last couple of decades.
What started as promising turned to a middle-aged bro producing fewer and fewer results as age and comforts of maintaining mediocrity combined with the relative ease of getting more and more opportunities (not fewer) because of the institutional memory of talent and connections that had taken root.
His is the corporate model of continuing to reward average white dudes who know how to suppress, oppress, and obfuscate.
Then, mercifully, comes scandal.
This time it’s in the form of predictably racist, homophobic, misogynist, anti-women, bullying emails that were a decade old, but as anyone knows anything by now, it’s not just about the emails or the texts, or the group chats, or the Facebook entries, or the calls.
Gruden has an earned reputation for being a bad man doing bad things in and out of the spotlight. But also in the blandest way possible, he is the archetypal c-suite bro, taking enough space and enough credit, riding into retirement in the white water of a reputation for being tough or witty or charming or innovative that had long since crashed, and surrounding himself with literal networks full of apologists and protectors to keep the charade up, to the sustain the toxic culture he spun up around him to keep the image alive.
The NFL, after all, is a dysfunctional corporation that rewards those who can wall themselves off while running through the actual talent—mostly minorities—like used tissue. It is the model for the rest of corporate America.
Gruden wasn’t self-made. His father, Jim, was an assistant to head coach Dan Devine at Notre Dame. He grew up in the shadow of America's Football Team in South Bend and was a backup quarterback in college for Dayton.
By 1990, Gruden found himself a part of the NFL’s biggest bro-cabal coaching tree as a special assistant with the San Francisco 49ers under quarterbacks coach Mike Holmgren.
From there, it was a quick ascent. He followed Holmgren to Green Bay in 1992, then on to the Philadelphia Eagles, where he became offensive coordinator in 1995. And finally, Al Davis chose Gruden to be the Raiders head coach in 1998 at the age of 34.
After coaching the Raiders to a pair of 8-8 seasons, Gruden had breakout years in 2000 and 2001, making the playoffs both seasons and in 2000, after finishing 12–4, the team reached the AFC Championship, where they lost to the eventual Super Bowl champions Baltimore Ravens.
Gruden by then was a hot ticket, a young gun who could turn around a franchise. Moribund Tampa Bay came calling and made football’s biggest head coach trade ever in 2002, giving the Raiders 2002 and 2003 first-round draft picks, 2002 and 2004 second-round draft picks, and $8 million in cash, bringing him from the West Coast to the West Coast of Florida to replace Tony Dungy.
Gruden took the Buccaneers to the postseason that season and beat his old team, the Raiders, in Super Bowl XXXVII to become the youngest head coach to win football’s ultimate prize at age 39. Despite this, many football experts attributed Tampa Bay’s success to the offense built by Dungy and especially the work of defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin. Gruden thanked Dungy for his contributions upon accepting the Lombardi Trophy.
From there, it was a long, slow descent in Tampa and professionally in general. The Buccaneers finished 7-9 and out of the hunt in 2003 and 5-11 in 2004 to become the first team to have consecutive losing seasons after a Super Bowl victory.
While the Buccaneers returned to the playoffs in 2005, in 2006, Gruden led the team to a 4-12 record, and by 2007 Buccaneers executive vice president Joel Glazer said of Gruden, “we have to move on.” And in January 2009, he was fired after seven seasons.
After time spinning up an independent football think tank in Tampa and joining ESPN for a failed stint as a color commentator for Monday Night Football and with series of segments breaking down game film with quarterbacks which also didn’t take, Gruden returned to the Raiders in 2018 as a mostly nostalgia play, signing a 10-year $100 million contract that would purportedly return the team (and Gruden himself) back to its turn-of-the-century glory days as the ownership readied to carpetbag the franchise once more, this time to a new $2 billion stadium built on the hinterlands of the Las Vegas Strip.
After going 4-12 (2018), 7-9 (2019), and 8-8 (2020) with the Raiders, Gruden at 3-2 this season after limping off the field Sunday post an anemic home loss to Chicago, addressed the emails that had surfaced last week where he called commissioner Roger Goodell a “faggot”, saying Goodell was a “clueless anti-football pussy”. He also wrote Goodell shouldn’t have pressured the Rams to draft “queers,” referring to Michael Sam, the first openly gay player drafted in NFL history.
He rhapsodized about how players who protested the National Anthem should be “fired,” specifically referring to former 49ers safety Eric Reid. He called then Vice President Joe Biden a “nervous clueless pussy.” Gruden also made misogynist remarks against female referees and commented upon receiving emails that contained photos of Washington’s cheerleaders who were forced to pose topless by the team during a photoshoot in Costa Rica.
Of course, this is who the man is, not a measure of him, but the ACTUAL him.
This is also the predominant (though also dying) culture in the NFL.
Looking at the branches that extend from Gruden’s coaching tree, which includes Chip Kelly, Urban Meyer, Jim Haslett, Rick Venturi, Sean McVay, Greg Schiano, and Lane Kiffin—they’re all the same of puffy (or soon to be puffy) white guy asshole c-suite bro who’s just basically hanging around, doing enough to be mediocre one more season, and surrounding themselves with nervous protectors or apologists until controversy breaks.
Then they go away (at least for a while.)
Those who complain Gruden’s resignation is cancel or woke culture are the exact same guys who love to fire underlings for the most ambiguous reasons like “not being a good cultural fit” or not “adhering to core values.”
HR-as-cops-friendly corporate tropes for we don’t even have to have a reason (we’re in an at-will state) but here, we made some unattainable goals for you to hit, and/or some made-up ridiculous benchmarks for you to reach, and your inability to do that will result in your immediate termination. Here’s your envelope with your last check and COBRA paperwork. Please sign this and the security guard will see you out now.
I’ve been through it; I’ve watched it happen.
The jackals surround themselves with a moat of staggering incompetence. They play by the numbers as long as they can—not producing work as much as creating a copy of a copy of a copy of what either made them have perceived success early in their career or what made someone else successful as they watched on and learned how to bully.
Then they grind it out, helping usher in a collective new Dark Ages, blaming those on the lower rungs for failed work while keeping their post on the high ground.
What usually takes them down isn’t losing, or even driving a company to bankruptcy or blowing through tens or even hundreds of millions of investor dollars (there’s always another round of funding or private equity bailout in the offing, worst case, they get their “exit” and get to go be speakers or spin up a failson podcast or whatever.)
Nope, the Grudens of the professional world, as in football very rarely don’t get to leave on their own terms, and the overall product (ever notice how every football team now runs the same offensive schemes, how you can’t tell the 49ers from the Bears form the Browns anymore when even through the '90s you could very specifically tell a team by its style of play; hell a whole offensive movement was named after the West Coast... that, the homogeny, is by design) continues to suffer.
Gruden’s story and the tale of every Gruden copycat out there is one greed, of mediocrity, of mendacity, of a slightly charismatic Svengali with opportunity who seizes upon that to slander, abuse and act out.
He’s just one of many.
But at least, for now, there’s one fewer.
Dodgers vs. Giants Game 5
With apologies to the ’55 Dodgers and the Giants’ trio of World Series winners at the beginning of the ‘10s, the 2021 versions of both ball clubs is a high point in either franchise’s history and the best example of division rivals playing peak baseball at the same time (not only in a season but in the history of the game.)
So, of course, it was going to go the distance.
Unfortunately, for Dodgers and Giants fans, West Coast apologists, and even the casual parachute journalist from the NYT, the two best baseball teams in recent memory are squaring off against one another in a five-game division round instead of the World Series.
The only folks on the planet who may be feeling an ounce of relief at the prospect of not extending this thing any further are the members of the respective clubhouses themselves; think very big Rocky v. Apollo energy on this one.
Tuesday night’s Dodger victory was a must-win for the franchise in every sense of the word, and for their part, the Dodgers rolled out their home-grown ace Walker Buehler for the second time in three days and he responded in kind with 4 1/3 innings of one-run ball.
It was the Dodgers’ bats that woke up. The team that couldn’t get a run across the plate on Monday scored seven and left 11 runners on base, and the previously quiet former AL MVP Mookie Betts hit a home run along with one for role player Will Smith who turned the do-or-die affair into a 7-2 laugher.
But that’s OK. The Giants will do what they’ve done all season, go back home and reload with their ace Logan Webb whose game one seven-inning shutout performance throwing sliders Dodgers hitters had no business trying to track launched him into the national consciousness.
Webb will face the Dodgers’ homegrown ace 1(a) in Julio Urias, the Culiacán, Mexico-born 25-year-old is 10-0 in his last 15 starts with a 1.98 ERA. He’s been MLB’s most unhittable pitcher with the notable exceptions of Sept. 4’s tilt with the Giants where he only lasted 5 2/3 and gave up a run. He also gave up one run over five during the Dodgers’ game 9-2 Game 2 victory on Oct. 9.
So what’s it going to be? The best team money and analytics can buy vs. the best team analytics and less money can buy?
Once more, it’s important to note that Giants president of baseball operations Fahran Zaidi is the architect of both these teams (he came over to SF from LA in 2018 and is fingerprints, including both presumptive starters on Thursday, are all over both teams—it’s like he’s playing himself in franchise mode) did he build one dynasty to last or a bunch of overachieving rascals to pull an upset.
And while Vegas is sticking with the Dodgers (the Giants have yet to be the favorite this series, and the Dodgers are still the World Series favorite even though they haven’t made it out of the divisional round), the whole baseball world holds its breath to find out who’s best.
Take the Giants +170 vs. the Dodgers -135 6:07 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 14 at China Basin