NFL Notes: Cam Newton, NFL International, Jon Gruden/Bruce Allen

October 19, 2021

Cam Newton

Free Agent QB Cam Newton said he is still looking to play in the NFL.

“Hell yeah I still want to play football,” Newton said, via Pro Football Talk. “I still get that urge to go out and perform and do something that I’ve been doing since I was 7 years old.”

NFL Media’s Tom Pelissero says the Seahawks will keep tabs on Newton but for now they plan to stick with QB Geno Smith with QB Russell Wilson just a few weeks from returning.
Pelissero adds that financials were another obstacle to a deal. Newton’s $1.5 million guaranteed from New England is subject to offsets, so he was seeking more than that from a new team.

International Games

Per CBS Sports’ Jason La Canfora, NFL officials are meeting with officials from three German cities in the running to host an NFL game annually starting in either 2022 or 2023. They’re observing this week’s game in London and what goes into hosting an NFL game.
La Canfora says the NFL hopes to push its total of international games to four minimum starting next year, with two games in London, one in Mexico City and one in Germany.
He adds the Jaguars could also make an arrangement to play an additional regular season game in London annually, which would bump the total to five international games a year.

Jon Gruden/Bruce Allen

Former Raiders CEO Amy Trask was one of the highest-ranking female executives in the league who wasn’t related to ownership during her tenure with the team from 1997 to 2013. That overlapped with both former HC Jon Gruden‘s first stint with the Raiders and former NFL executive Bruce Allen‘s eight years with the team. Trask never heard Gruden say anything as bad as what was in the emails between him and Allen that have become public recently — though that doesn’t mean there weren’t some red flags about Gruden.

“I didn’t interact with Jon a lot, but that was by Jon’s choice,” Trask said in a segment on CBS Sports. “Jon made very clear throughout the organization he did not want to interact with me. Had I heard him say anything of that nature, I would have spoken up. Because silence is complicity.”

Trask was not surprised in the least to see Allen’s comments in those emails, though, saying she heard as much while she worked with the team and made it a point to tell Raiders owner Al Davis.

“I did hear comments of that nature from the individual to whom Jon sent those emails,” Trask added. “And I did speak up. I spoke up repeatedly, I spoke up forcefully. I talked to the owner about it. Because to be silent would have been to be complicit.”