The only reasonable explanation for this is the NFL thought the emails would never be released.
It appears it was their goal to make sure, at least initially, that the emails weren’t made available to the public.
If you are curious, what changed about that? I believe that Roger Goodell didn’t know the extent of how bad Gruden had talked about him, and once he did, he made the decision to leak enough information out there to get him fired. Goodell thought that Gruden being racist towards NFLPA director DeMaurice Smith would be enough, but when it wasn’t, he put the knife in Gruden’s chest by having homophobic emails leaked. That is something you can’t overcome in 2021.
Pro Football Talk explains how the NFL had the emails for a very long time.
The league has said that it became “informed of the existence of emails that raised issues beyond the scope of the investigation” during the investigation itself. Then, “over the past few months,” a group of senior NFL executives reviewed more than 650,000 emails, including the Gruden emails.
Why did the Raiders get emails about which the league had known for months during the regular season? If this had come to a head in January, owner Mark Davis could have hired a new coach who would have spent the offseason preparing to move forward. If the league had waited until after the current season ended, Davis could have replaced Gruden then. Instead, the delivery of the emails to the Raiders — coupled with the making of just enough of them public — forced the team’s hand.
Again, why wait until October to act on the emails? Even if this had all blown up in June, Davis and the Raiders would have had time to make a hire and to get someone up to speed. The unanswered question, and it’s a critical one, is when the league first knew about the Gruden emails and why the league waited until the week of October 3 to start this process.
There is obviously a lot more going on here than meets the eye.
The NFL is like MI6, so don’t expect to learn anything they don’t want you to know about.
Remember when they destroyed the Spygate tapes?
Flip the pages for the emails.