Jon Gruden Taken To Task After Taking Derek Anderson To Task

On Monday night, ESPN's cameras "caught" Cardinals quarterback Derek Anderson yukking it up on the bench with his team on the wrong side of a rout, and Jon Gruden took the opportunity to deliver a short sermon on the matter. On Wednesday, Deadspin has given the floor to Nate Jackson, a former teammate of Anderson's, who starts things off well enough:

[W]here do people get off trying to gauge his competitive spirit from an image on a TV screen? Every single NFL quarterback I have ever met is fiercely competitive, almost annoyingly so.

True. There are certainly exceptions, but generally speaking, one must be a hyper-competitive jerk to reach the highest echelon of a hyper-competitive sports league. Later, Jackson drags his ire over to Kent Somers, the journalist who asked Anderson about the yukking in question after the game:

What's funny is the way many sports journalists have convinced themselves that they know what it takes to be a successful athlete. Hunkered down over computers, poring through statistics, biting their fingernails, and in this case, buoyed by the words of a former coach (another non-athlete), the journalist truly believes that Anderson's smiling on the sideline during a loss actually matters, that it says something profound about his will to win.

Anderson's laughter would have been a non-issue to most viewers, and Gruden's words serve as testament to the ability of the man on television to shape peoples' interests. He fixed on it, people cared, and Somers followed up on something people cared about. I wouldn't have asked Anderson that question -- given the chance to talk to an athlete, I'd rather discuss living room furniture -- but it certainly isn't deplorable, or even worthy of a scolding. He asked a question that much of the public would ask were it in his place.

Also: sports journalists do not bite fingernails. You see, we never go outside, and the resultant vitamin D deficiency renders them so brittle that they crumble long before we can gather the strength to drag our spaghetti arms up to our mouths. In fact, I am so sickly that it has taken me six days to type this many words, necessitating the ability to accurately predict what will happen in the future and write it far in advance. Also, Cortland Finnigan was suspended by the NFL because his name is strange.