Nevada Supreme Court Denies Jon Gruden’s Petition for Review

The Nevada Supreme Court has spoken. Again.

Monday, the court rejected former Raiders coach Jon Gruden’s request Gruden has asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the decision that ordered arbitration of his complaints against the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell. Now he has no choice but to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case.

Good luck. Even if they agree (and they probably won’t), count on a 6-3 decision that will force Gruden to submit the case to arbitration chaired by one of the people he sued.

The case follows Gruden’s forced resignation in October 2021, days after someone began leaking emails he had sent to former Washington executive Bruce Allen. Those emails created a groundswell of support for Gruden’s ouster. The Gruden case focused on the selective use of supposedly confidential emails from the Washington franchise investigation by one person in the relatively small universe of people with access to the documents.

If Gruden takes the case to the Supreme Court, the effort to reach a decision on the merits of the dispute will continue to be delayed. At some point, he will have to try his luck in the secret, rigged, sham tribunal the league has set up both to control the adjudication of all complaints brought against it by non-player employees — and, more importantly, to keep it all secret.

Secrecy is essential to the league. For example, even if it succeeds in overturning last week’s massive verdict in the Sunday Ticket class-action lawsuit, things have come to light that the NFL would have preferred to keep in the dark.

Despite the fact that coverage of the case by many media outlets has been scant to say the least, the truth remains that the mere fact that the litigation took place in open court allowed anyone who cared to notice to learn that, yes, the NFL has been deliberately rigging the price of the Sunday Ticket for years, overcharging those who were willing to pay the price and depriving those who were not of the opportunity to watch games other than those offered by their local CBS or Fox affiliates.

While the league has benefited from the media’s discomfort when it comes to connecting the dots for consumers, few if any details would have been publicly known if the league had had the silver bullet of mandatory arbitration at its disposal.

In Gruden’s case, someone connected to the league office or one of his teams decided to eliminate Jon Gruden by forwarding these emails to the wall street journal and the New York TimesUnless Gruden can convince an already hostile Supreme Court to overturn the Nevada decision, the public will never know the answer to that question.

Some will say that we have no right to know the inner workings of a private company. Others will say that as long as that private company relies on the general public to consume its products and fund its stadiums, we absolutely have a right to know.

Our right to know is reinforced by the fact that this happened during football season, necessarily undermining the integrity of the 2021 campaign by suddenly leaving one of the NFL’s 32 teams without its head coach.