Gruden: Quarterbacks Are A-OK

For the second or third time this season, Jon Gruden has publicly praised his quarterback in the face of overwhelming evidence to the shitty, shitty contrary.

“Brian played pretty well and Jeff played pretty well,” Gruden said. “Denver used some strange tactics yesterday. They’ve been a man-to-man team throughout the first month of the season. Yesterday they rushed three 23 times. I thought under the circumstances both quarterbacks did some good things.”

I thought the deal with veteran quarterbacks was that they’d seen everything before and you couldn’t fool them by switching up coverages. I mean, if they can’t adjust to a three-man front on the fly, why not just have a kid back there with a huge arm and an attitude to match to just try to fit the ball into the narrowest gap possible and hope for the best? I don’t think Gruden was watching the same game we were.

The other angle to this story is that if Gruden doesn’t want to put the blame on the quarterbacks, then it has to fall squarely on him. The offensive line isn’t blameless, but they aren’t the ones that decide which plays to run against which fronts. Gruden would probably readily accept blame for the game, but the fact that he seems to have an itchy trigger finger for pulling quarterbacks means that he doesn’t entirely believe it’s his fault. I don’t advocate de-pantsing his quarterback in front of the media, but he doesn’t have to falsely heap praise on them either. It makes me think he doesn’t know what’s going on. Coaches are like politicians in that they are good at talking a lot but not saying anything. He should have done that instead of telling a disappointed fanbase about all the good things his quarterbacks did.