In just a few weeks we'll get an opportunity to at least begin to correctly diagnose just how much Jon Gruden has been overpaid by a desperate Raiders squad who got their beloved (and mythologized?) former coach back after nearly a decade of providing commentary on Monday Night Football. As you may remember, especially if you're in the Bay Area, the Raiders will part with what was reported as $100 million over the course of ten years to get Gruden back on their sideline.
Giving away that much dough (allegedly) seems like a bold as hell move, but the Raiders march to the beat of their own drum. Also it's their money.
Anyway, as you can see from that tweet date, that $100 million price tag was reported in January, and nobody had denied it up until the past few days. In fact the denial of that nine-figure tag came from Gruden's own mouth, via Peter King's most recent column, where the Super Bowl 37 winner denied he was making that type of bread while simultaneously throwing a shot in Tom Cruise's direction to explain how he put his head down and grinded, and eventually got paid.
“I’m not making $100 million, just so you know," Gruden said to King. "Well, I never thought Tom Cruise, never thought his movies were any good but he’s making plenty of money. There’s a lot of things that I don’t understand. No disrespect to Tom Cruise. I’m sure he’s a great actor. But you know what? You just go about your life as hard as you can. You try to find something you love and you do the best you can at it. I never got into coaching for the money. I got into coaching because I wanted to be a quarterback coach. What the salary cap has become, what free agency has become—it’s amazing.”
This feels like a good time to mention that, unlike player contracts, coaching deals are fully guaranteed, meaning that if Gruden sucks upon his return this is going to be a pricey decade.
Anyway, it also seems worth mentioning that Gruden's quote was poorly timed, as the recently released Mission: Impossible – Fallouthas the highest aggregated rating of any Cruise movie ever (sitting at 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes).