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Jon Gruden Wants To Coach Again ... If He Has A Manning

Dec 22, 2009, 4:30 PM UTC

â†µLate in the fourth quarter of a blowout between the Giants and Redskins Monday Night, Jon Gruden dropped a small nugget of information about his coaching future. Well, sort of ...â†µ

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â†µâ†µâ‡¥“You guys ask me when I was ever going to coach again? I’m gonna come back when Eli or Peyton Manning have twins sons and they get to be about 19 years old. And I’m gonna coach for 30 years. I wanna coach a Manning before I cash it in. Those guys are just better than everybody else. They just know how to play the position. You know this, as an Iron Man yourself, Ron (Jaworski), the greatest attribute those guys have – those Manning brothers – is that they never miss a game.”â†µâ†µIt’s interesting that Gruden put Eli into the same category as Peyton. To be fair, Gruden may have only made the comment as a teaser for the graphic ESPN showed, depicting the Iron Man-nature of the Manning brothers (and Brett Favre). But Gruden did say that ‘those guys’ are better than everybody else, which would include Tom Brady, I suppose. Now, Brady did the Patriots no good last season, so to Gruden’s point of being healthy, Eli Manning has Brady beat there. But Drew Brees is a pretty good quarterback as well, and while injured at times in his career, has missed just one game since the end of the 2003 season. I’d love to have Gruden in my fantasy league next year. â†µ

â†µOr chalk it up to overselling the product that's in front of you. It's a tactic most car salesmen use – whatever is on the lot is the best on the market – until next week when the Favre model enters the showroom. Then he'll be the best. Gruden was overselling a few other times last night, like when he ended the third quarter with, "Who are these running backs? You gotta really give the Redskin guys credit. This is four or five different running backs that I've seen play for these guys this year." â†µ

â†µâ†µFour or five different backs, who, by all statistical measures, are mediocre to poor at their position. Washington doesn’t have one back over 500 yards rushing and as a team ranks 25th in the league in yards per game. Add to that the fact that the MNF booth spent half the game lauding the hiring of Bruce Allen as new GM of the Redskins, but Gruden wants to give credit to the ‘Redskin guys’ – aka Vinny Cerrato and Dan Snyder – for bringing in this crop of backs ... who are terrible and/or always hurt. â†µ

â†µâ†µWell, at least Gruden didn’t think any of the Washington running backs were Jewish. What’s that you say? He didn’t think Giants DE Osi Umenyiora was Jewish, he just thought his last name was pronounced “you-menorah.” Ah ... well, it was just Hanukkah, so I can see how he’d be confused. â†µ
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