The Return of Grumors
By Mark Nagi
So Tennessee football is in a really good place right now. Yes, this article is being written before the Vols play at Georgia, but whether they won or lost by 50, UT is in better shape in terms of their football program than it has been in decades.
Sometimes it is hard to remember what things were like before Josh Heupel and Danny White showed up in Knoxville, but it wasn’t pleasant. Between Phillip Fulmer’s “retirement” and Lane Kiffin’s resignation and Derek Dooley’s incompetence and Butch Jones’s ego and Jeremy Pruitt’s rule breaking, Tennessee football was mostly a mess.
And through most of it, there were Grumors.
Unless you’ve been living under a Knoxville rock the last 10-15 years, you know what I’m talking about. Every time there was a coaching change (and there were many) at Tennessee, the name Jon Gruden would be heard the loudest.
Gruden, the former NFL coach with the Oakland Raiders and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had been a Tennessee grad assistant in 1986-1987 under Johnny Majors, and married a Tennessee cheerleader from Morristown. He won a Super Bowl at Tampa Bay, and following his firing was the color commentator on Monday Night Football from 2009-2017.
That meant that Gruden wasn’t on a football field during the Vols 2012 and 2017 coaching searches, prompting the “Grumors” we spoke of earlier.
Jon Gruden owns land in East Tennessee! Jon Gruden was seen at Calhoun’s! Jon Gruden was seen driving down I-40 in Dandridge in an orange colored Corvette!
And on Monday Night Football, Gruden would often put in a not so subtle plug for the University of Tennessee.
Gruden lost his NFL gig in 2021 when emails surfaced in which he used racist and homophobic language. Recently, he was hired by Barstool Sports because… well because that’s what people do now.
They go work for websites.
Gruden made news late last week on that app when he talked about… you guessed it… Tennessee.
He said, “My wife cheered at Tennessee. I love Tennessee. I was a graduate coach there, and I did talk to the Athletic Director, and I don’t look up to anybody more than I’m looking up to Peyton Manning and Kenny Chesney. Those are two of my favorite Tennessee guys. And I was very interested in doing it. At that time I was having so much fun on Monday Night Football with Mike Tirico I couldn’t take any other job… I almost did consider pulling the trigger there.”
The truth of the matter is that Jon Gruden was never taking the Tennessee job, no matter what he says today. Gruden successfully used Tennessee as leverage with ESPN when negotiating contracts. Gruden was not a college coach. He was an NFL guy, and went back to the pros to coach the Las Vegas Raiders in 2018.
Fame is a heck of a drug, and Gruden has never been able to let that go.
There’s another truth at play.
The Grumors never really die.
