Jon Gruden Alleges That He Cried For Three Days After Trading Khalil Mack, Which Is A Lot Too Much To Be Even A Little True

Gruden said he “cried for 3 days after trading Mack. But we’re not able to get Antonio Brown, Trent Brown and Lamarcus Joyner without making that trade.” #Raiders

— Vic Tafur (@VicTafur) March 26, 2019

While I have very little doubt that Jon Gruden is a passionate guy who wears his emotions on his sleeves and whose eyes have welled up, with either sorrow or joy, more from football than literally anything else in his life, I think doth protest just a few thousand too many tears here. As I recall, we're talking about a recent hire that didn't so much as reach out and initiate contact with Khalil Mack throughout his holdout, so implying that he spent upwards of 72 hours swimming in pool of his own sadness after an extended split that he snarled silently through seems a bit extreme. 

You might be able to convince me that he cried himself through many "don't know what ya got 'til it's gone" type moments after the season started and he was getting beaten six ways to Sunday in the breakup. I'm sure his office got mildly dusty when #52 was wrecking havoc on the entire NFC North while he was stuck sounding nothing short of senile in answering to Oakland's inability to pressure any quarterback other than their own, but in the immediate aftermath of the trade? Nah.

That heartbreak was reserved for the Raiders' faithful that was left believing their team was too cheap to retain talent despite arranging a move to a city where money is no object and having just committed $100 million to a head coach that hadn't manned a sideline in a decade. Let's not retroactively manufacture the crocodile tears of some immediate mourning period as if Jon Gruden wasn't gung-ho in giving away a defensive destroyer the likes of which all other organizations were desperately searching for. That's a convenient rewriting of history after said quarterback killer predictably proceeded to have an unquantifiable impact on a playoff team, but it's not one that comes anywhere close to being considered non-fiction.