The NFL figured Jon Gruden was finished the day he walked out of the Raiders’ building in 2021.
The league moved on, and the sports press wrote him off as a coach without a team or a cause.
Then Gruden turned up next to President Trump in Ohio, grabbed a microphone, and said something no league executive ever expected to hear from him.
Jon Gruden grabs the microphone in Vandalia
President Trump recently brought his midterm rally tour to Vandalia, Ohio, a town just up the road from Dayton.
US Senator Jon Husted (R-OH) and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy stood alongside him. And so did a face almost nobody saw coming, the coach who won a Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
OutKick’s Armando Salguero put the question a lot of football fans had right at the top of his report. “First of all, who knew Gruden was a conservative?”
Husted handled the introduction himself. The two men go back to the 1985 University of Dayton football team, and OutKick reported they’ve stayed close through the years.
Gruden promised to keep it short. “I love you guys,” he told the crowd. “I just came back for one reason and I’m from Ohio. My mom and dad are from Cleveland. I was born in Sandusky and I went to the University of Dayton.”
Then he let loose with seven words.
“And I’m d*** proud of it, man!”
The place came unglued. Anybody who ever watched Gruden work a sideline knows the voice, that gravelly bark that sounds like a man chewing on a playbook, and the Ohio crowd got the full dose.
The teammate who picked off 17 passes
Gruden didn’t fly home to talk about himself. He came to vouch for the guy who lined up with him at Dayton four decades ago.
“Jon Husted is a lot more than my friend,” Gruden said. He went on to tell the crowd, “He intercepted 17 passes on the gridiron. He was a great player. And I know why he’s a great player. It was because of his work ethic and his commitment and his day-to-day mental toughness.”
The résumé backs up the old coach. Husted earned All-American honors as a cornerback and kick returner at Dayton, and he started on the Flyers’ 1989 Division III national championship team that finished 13-0-1. He even grabbed an interception in the title game against Union.
After football, Husted served as an Ohio state representative, Ohio House speaker, state senator, secretary of state, and lieutenant governor before he joined the US Senate in January 2025.
Gruden boiled all of that down to one line. “He will never quit, ever on you or anybody,” he bellowed.
But the coach saved a little locker room fire for the finish. “Get your friends, and get their friends and their friends, and let’s get Husted back in action,” he told the crowd. “Let’s go!”
President Trump clearly enjoyed the show. A protester piped up during the President’s remarks and left under escort while the crowd sang “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye,” and Trump turned the moment into a joke at his guest’s expense.
“You know, Jon Gruden is standing here, saying, ‘I don’t believe this. This is rougher than a football game,'” Trump said. “There’s more spirit.”
Why the sports world never figured on Gruden walking back out
Here’s where the story gets bigger than one rally.
Gruden resigned from the Raiders in 2021 after emails he’d written years earlier surfaced in the national press. He has spent the years since in court, and his lawsuit alleges the NFL selectively leaked his private correspondence to wreck his career. The league denies that and has called his claims baseless.
ESPN reported that the Nevada Supreme Court sided with Gruden in a 5-2 ruling in 2025 and found the league couldn’t shove his case into private arbitration run by the NFL itself. The justices called that arrangement “unconscionable.” They didn’t decide whether the league leaked anything, and that question still hangs out there.
So a coach the league pushed to the curb is still swinging at the league in open court. And now he’s standing on a stage with the President of the United States. Whatever anybody thinks of Gruden, he didn’t crawl under a rock like the sports press expected.
There’s a lopsided scoreboard in the background here too. CBS Sports reported that more than 75 current and former athletes formally lined up behind the Democrat presidential ticket in 2024. Pro leagues spent years letting players kneel through the national anthem, an insult to every serviceman who died under that flag, and then acted surprised when fans in places like Vandalia started changing the channel.
But the fans never changed. They still love football. They just got tired of the lecture that came with it.
That’s why a guy like Gruden lands so hard with a crowd like that one. He didn’t read a statement some publicist typed up. He talked about Sandusky and Cleveland and Dayton like a man who never forgot where he’s from, and working people in Ohio can smell the difference between that and a Hollywood fundraiser.
And maybe the read on this runs a little ahead of the evidence. One coach at one rally doesn’t flip the culture of professional sports, and Gruden himself said almost nothing about policy. He talked about a friend.
Still, the trend line points one direction. CBS News counted a whole roster of former athletes and coaches running for Congress this cycle, most of them as Republicans. Sports figures who once kept their mouths shut to protect an endorsement deal seem a lot less afraid of the league office and the sports networks than they used to be.
The NFL spent five years treating Gruden like a ghost. But ghosts don’t usually get a standing ovation in their home state.
And if the league thought he’d stay quiet forever, a few thousand Ohioans just heard otherwise.
Sources: OutKick, “Jon Gruden fires up Trump rally crowd in Ohio as if delivering a locker room speech then delivers endorsement”; ESPN, “Nevada high court sides with Jon Gruden in lawsuit over NFL emails”; CBS Sports, “Kamala Harris campaign announces ‘Athletes for Harris'”; CBS News, “The athletes and coaches running for Congress in 2026”; Washington Examiner, “Jon Gruden stumps for Ohio Republicans at Trump rally near Dayton”