NFL investigates itself, finds nothing else wrong whatsoever

Jon Gruden lost his job over his racist, sexist, homophobic emails.

The NFL’s general counsel, Jeff Pash, was revealed to have joked in emails with Washington team president Bruce Allen about Donald Trump’s wall quashing the need for Latino outreach by the league, and maybe accepting the gift of a Hooters VIP card from the exec.

Vacuous turd Adam Schefter of ESPN was in Allen’s inbox, too, calling him “Mr. Editor” as he sent an unpublished draft to his source for review, revealing what we’d suspected all along, that he’s more PR man than journalist.

That’s what we’ve learned in the past week from leaks and reviews of court exhibits surrounding the 650,000 emails investigated by the NFL. But that’s it! All the bad actors have been revealed! There’s nothing more to see here — please disperse!

So said “a person familiar with the documents” to The Associated Press on Friday.

Glad that’s all wrapped up, then!

Or, going beyond the headline, “AP Source: No one else in NFL cited with email violations,” there’s the third paragraph of the actual story:

“The NFL did not identify any problems anywhere near what you saw with Jon Gruden,” the person said. The person did not address any other areas of potential issues found in the emails beyond similarities with Gruden’s comments.

“Near what you saw?” Okay, so… if there were email conversations that involved ensuring Colin Kaepernick would never play another down in the NFL, say, those emails wouldn’t describe Kaepernick using old-time racist tropes about his facial features? Is everyone supposed to be satisfied that only Gruden was dumb enough to make his bigotry explicit?

Exposing individuals like Gruden is the sexy part of a story like this, but what makes it really important is exposing the institutional rot — in this case of both the Washington Football Team and the NFL. A qualified word that there aren’t reams of slurs in the emails isn’t going to change that, and this story isn’t going away based on a single-source story dropped on a Friday night. The emails need to be released.