The latest episode of Back on the Record with Bob Costas, premiering tonight at 11:00 p.m. ET on HBO, includes an interview with Jerry Jones. Costas, among other things, asks Jones whether the emails sent by former Raiders coach Jon Gruden reflect attitudes that are prevalent in the NFL.
“At the risk — at the risk — of pointing toward Jon, and I don’t want to do that, he’s a friend of mine,” Jones said. “But what I will tell you is that there is not that type of issue prevalent in the NFL, and I can speak to that directly.”
But can he really do that? What does he actually know about how people in the NFL communicate when no one else is looking?
If asked whether Gruden would have sent horribly racist, homophobic, transphobic, and/or misogynistic emails to former Washington Football Team president Bruce Allen or anyone else before those emails came to light, Jones surely would have said that Gruden would never do that.
But he did. So it’s difficult if not impossible for Jones to sweep with a broad brush in suggesting that Gruden was the aberration — especially as the NFL continues to refuse to produce the balance of the 650,000 documents from which the Gruden emails came.
That continues to be the best way to prove that Gruden was an outlier. Produce all of the emails and let us see for ourselves that no other poison lurked within those pages.
Jerry Jones on the Jon Gruden emails: That is not prevalent in the NFL originally appeared on Pro Football Talk