Jon Gruden has play-by-play announcer ambitions

Jon Gruden wants to call NFL games instead of analyzing them.

JoeBucsFan.com, which first reported the comments, indicated this isn’t just Gruden musing out loud, writing that he’s “not joking about a new broadcast role” and that a more formal announcement could be coming soon.

“I was a broadcaster for nine years; hell’s bells,” Gruden said on The Ira Kaufman Podcast. “I want to be play-by-play. You know, Frank Gifford, he transitioned into the play-by-play role. I would like to transition. I had nine years of watching these guys —  [Mike] Tirico. And I’d like to give that a shot, man.”

The nine years Gruden is referring to were spent as Monday Night Football’s color analyst, split between his tenure with the Buccaneers and his second run coaching the Raiders. That job, and the coaching job that followed it, both trace back to the same event. Gruden resigned as Raiders coach in October 2021, days after the Wall Street Journal and New York Times published emails he’d sent between 2011-18, while working as an ESPN analyst, containing racist, misogynistic, and homophobic language, including remarks about former NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith and disparaging comments following Michael Sam’s 2014 draft selection as the NFL’s first openly gay drafted player.

Gruden later admitted the emails were wrong but also placed some blame on ESPN, saying the network added to a “misunderstanding” about his character.

The emails surfaced as part of a much larger haul, as the NFL had collected more than 650,000 emails during its investigation into workplace culture within the Washington Commanders organization, and Gruden’s were among the small fraction that reached the public.

Gruden sued the NFL and commissioner Roger Goodell a month after resigning, accusing the league of a “malicious and orchestrated campaign” to destroy his career by selectively leaking his emails to the Journal and Times while keeping the other 650,000 sealed.

The case has ground through Nevada’s court system for four years, including a stretch where the state’s high court initially sided with the NFL on moving the case into arbitration before Gruden’s team sought a rehearing. Gruden scored a real legal win last year when the state’s high court ruled, 5-2, that the NFL couldn’t force his case into private arbitration overseen by Goodell, the very man he’s suing, calling the league’s arbitration clause “unconscionable” as applied to a former employee. According to ESPN’s reporting, Gruden’s team has since moved to depose Goodell directly, along with a list of current and former owners that includes Jerry Jones, Bob Kraft, and Mark Davis, as well as longtime league counsel Jeff Pash and former Washington executive Bruce Allen, the original recipient of the leaked emails.

In a world where Gruden makes sense as a play-by-play option, the networks that would seemingly hire him — CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, Amazon — all pay the NFL for broadcast rights and answer to Goodell’s league office. Gruden has spent the years since his resignation building an audience outside that system instead, most recently through a Barstool Sports deal that grew out of his YouTube channel. He’s also kept angling for a way back into coaching rather than broadcasting, floating himself as a candidate for NFL openings that never materialized and telling audiences he’d “die to coach in the SEC” if a major program came calling.

Gruden has spent the years since his resignation building an audience outside that system instead, most recently through a Barstool Sports deal that grew out of his YouTube channel. He’s also kept angling for a way back into coaching rather than broadcasting, floating himself as a candidate for NFL openings that never materialized and telling audiences he’d “die to coach in the SEC” if a major program came calling.

Gruden has spent the years since his resignation trying to route around that reality rather than resolve it. But in the last year, Gruden has had a cultural renaissance, parlaying a successful YouTube channel into a gig with Barstool Sports. After his name came and went as an outside candidate to potentially return to the NFL sidelines, he has been publicly politicking for a chance at a major college football job, saying he would “die to coach in the SEC.”

Play-by-play is also a different discipline than the one Gruden actually built his reputation on. Nine years as an analyst is nine years spent reacting to a game already being narrated by someone else, not carrying the broadcast himself.

If anyone is going to find out whether Gruden can do it, it probably won’t be a rights holder tied to the NFL. A mid-tier college broadcast, somewhere outside Goodell’s orbit, is a far more realistic proving ground — and, given how much attention Gruden still generates regardless of the outcome, likely a more watchable one, too.