Videos featuring Washington football coach Jay Gruden out on the town smoking a cigarette of some kind, as well as spitting game at what appears to be a much younger woman, have been making the rounds online over the past day or so.
At first glance it would be appear as though these clips capture someone who has accepted the inevitability of losing his job and is throwing caution to the wind despite the fact that his team will play the New England Patriots on Sunday. But, as Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk reports, that’s not what’s happening here.
Those videos including images of Washington coach Jay Gruden that emerged on Friday are not new videos.
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, the videos are more than a year old, if not older than that.
But now the question is why exactly the videos have started to recirculate now? It’d be easy to dismiss this as just someone online deciding to make jokes at the expense of the sorriest non-Dolphins team in the NFL right now, but there’s a chance that there’s something more in play here, especially considering how the team declined to comment on the videos.
It’s worth noting that this is coming on the heels of Gruden announcing that Colt McCoy would be starting Sunday’s matchup instead of rookie Dwayne Haskins. As others have pointed out, the former Ohio State quarterback was a selection that owner Dan Snyder made, which overruled Gruden’s desire to pick new Giants hero Daniel Jones. It would be reckless to suggest that the Skins are in the process of doing to Gruden what they did to former GM Scot McCloughan in the form of finding some reason to fire him with cause and not pay him anymore—in McCloughan’s case, team-adjacent media members accused him of having a drinking problem—or, hell, that the team had anything to do with these videos coming out again at all, but the timing, and the team’s history, does raise some questions.
Regardless, Gruden was not out celebrating his all-but-confirmed departure with intoxicated apathy, though that ultimately might work to his disadvantage since it makes him seem a lot less cool.
Know anything? You can contact us at tips@deadspin.com. For added security, use our SecureDrop system.