Former Raiders coach Jon Gruden isn’t directly suing the Raiders. As a result, the arbitration clause in his Raiders contract doesn’t apply.
So how is the NFL trying to force Gruden to submit his lawsuit against the league and Commissioner Roger Goodell into arbitration? The league, based on publicly-available court filings, is trying to claim that Gruden’s situation falls under the NFL’s Constitution and Bylaws.
The Constitution and Bylaws, as written, allow the Commissioner to compel arbitration of any dispute arising from situation deemed to be conduct detrimental to the NFL or the sport of professional football. That’s a confusing standard, one that gives the Commissioner broad, vague powers to pull disputes out of the court system and into a private, secret process over which he or his representative preside if/when the Commissioner identifies some form of detrimental conduct in the underlying dispute.
As it relates to Gruden’s claim that the league and/or Goodell interfered with Gruden’s employment relationship with the Raiders by selectively leaking emails he sent to former Washington executive Bruce Allen, what is the detrimental conduct? Gruden’s emails sent at a time when he wasn’t employed by the NFL; is that detrimental conduct when it comes to light well after the fact? Does the NFL’s alleged mishandling of email that supposedly were secret amount to detrimental conduct?
In theory, any allegation of misconduct that any league or club employee ever makes against another league or club employee could end up being regarded as “conduct detrimental” and whisked away to a secret arbitration process.
Gruden also contends that he never received a copy of the Constitution and Bylaws, and that the arbitration provision by its terms doesn’t apply to former team employees, such as Gruden. Taken together (and with other technical legal arguments included), Gruden argues that the terms of the arbitration clause contained in the Constitution and Bylaws don’t apply to him, that he’s not bound by the requirement to remove his case from the court system and to submit it to the authority of Goodell, one of the very persons Gruden has sued.