I'LL TAKE SYSTEMIC RACISM FOR $55, ALEX:

The emails exposed the NFL as a multibillion-dollar leviathan with a red, brightly flashing Achilles' heel. The league's weak spot is precisely how the powers that be speak about players behind closed doors. There is a racial contradiction in the NFL that we pretend isn't staring us in the face. Gruden picked at that contradiction with his sophomoric bigotry -- and to say this is a problem with one man's conduct is to miss the larger point.

Gruden's missives were part of the NFL's investigation into the culture of sexual harassment in the Washington Football Team organization. Gruden's portion of these emails -- the only ones the public has seen, perhaps just the first drop in the bucket -- also included his beliefs that the NFL shouldn't be compelled to draft "queers" and that it should fire safety Eric Reid for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality.

Even if Gruden was not working directly for the NFL at the time he sent these emails, he was the prime-time voice of ESPN's "Monday Night Football" and a former Super Bowl-winning coach: a powerful figure even among the power brokers of the NFL's elite.

Unlike over the weekend, when Gruden -- in retrospect quite brazenly -- said an email in which he used a racist trope to describe NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith was just a one-time offense, this document dump of emails sent over a seven-year period displays a pattern. All the NFL heads who rallied around Gruden over the weekend, supporting his statement that he did not have "a blade of racism" in him, are looking remarkably foolish.

The only person in the NFL world who seemed to get the significance from jump was Smith, who told The Wall Street Journal when only the email targeting him was being discussed, "This is a thick skin job for someone with dark skin, just like it always has been for many people who look like me and work in corporate America."

"You know people are sometimes saying things behind your back that are racist just like you see people talk and write about you using thinly coded and racist language," Smith said.

"Racism like this comes from the fact that I'm at the same table as they are and they don't think someone who looks like me belongs," he said. "I'm sorry my family has to see something like this but I would rather they know. I will not let it define me."

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