TAMPA, Fla. — Let’s face it, NFL owners are an unimaginative group when it comes to hiring head coaches.
It’s as if they are stuck at a high school dance of perpetual infatuation. It’s the same teams chasing the same profile with the same desperate hopes and fantasies.
They hire retreads, they promote proteges and occasionally spend gobs of money on college coaches. More than anything, however, they love to hire coordinators they see on Super Bowl sidelines.
Kyle Shanahan was a Falcons offensive coordinator in the Super Bowl one night in 2017, and was the 49ers head coach the next morning. One week after working for the Eagles as an offensive coordinator in the Super Bowl, Frank Reich was hired to be a head coach in Indianapolis in 2018.
Six assistant coaches from the New England-Los Angeles Super Bowl the following year have since been hired as head coaches and, in the Super Bowl after that, both coordinators from the 49ers ended up wearing the boss man’s headset.
You want to know who hasn’t yet been hired to be a head coach?
All four coordinators from last year’s Super Bowl between the Bucs and Chiefs. Coincidentally or not, three of those coordinators are Black men. So 16 job openings in the past two seasons — half the freaking league — and not one went to Tampa Bay’s Byron Leftwich and Todd Bowles or Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy.
I bring this up only because, well, the NFL is facing a reckoning when it comes to hiring practices. From 2018 until just a few days ago, 33 men had been hired as head coaches and only three were Black.
Then former Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a class action lawsuit accusing the NFL of systemic racism last week and — Voila! — two of the next three hires were of African American descent.
Don’t you just love happy endings?
Except, of course, this isn’t the end. The Flores lawsuit isn’t going away and neither is the scrutiny.
If you go case by case, owner by owner, you can justify almost any hiring in the league. Collectively, however, it’s hard to understand how a Leftwich or a Bieniemy hasn’t gotten a shot when Dan Campbell, Brian Daboll, Matt Eberflus, Kevin O’Connell, Nick Sirianni, Arthur Smith and Brandon Staley have been hired with similar, or inferior, resumes in the past 13 months.
So is it fair to suggest individual owners are racist? Not without better evidence. But is it logical to assume the NFL still has a big problem when it comes to recognizing the talents, and providing opportunities, for Black coaches? Without a doubt.
That’s why it was so ridiculous when the NFL’s immediate reaction to the Flores lawsuit last week was to claim it was without merit.
Never mind that the league could not possibly have known whether specific accusations made against owners and officials in Miami, Denver and New York were accurate without investigating.
The larger picture is the league could easily see a half-dozen seasons of declining diversity in the coaching ranks and acknowledge that disappointment and injustice.
Commissioner Roger Goodell belatedly acknowledged that point of view a few days later, but the league’s initial posturing and, if you’ll excuse the term, whitewashing was indicative of the problem.
It’s not as if owners can point to their hiring records and claim to have unearthed the NFL’s brightest minds. Of the 26 coaches hired between 2016-19, only nine are still on the job. When almost two-thirds of your hires are sent packing within their first few years, you might want to rethink your process.
None of this means Leftwich or Bowles or Bieniemy are guaranteed to be successful head coaches. Far from it. The NFL’s turnover rate for head coaches is about 20% every year. That’s an awful lot of failed experiments. But the point is that Black assistants are not even getting the chance to fall flat.
The Flores lawsuit suggests the Rooney Rule, which the NFL implemented to encourage teams to interview minority candidates, has become a farce that is routinely manipulated or ignored.
The rule clearly has its flaws and loopholes, but it’s unfair to suggest it hasn’t had an effect.
There were 67 head coaches hired in the 1990s and only 5.9% were Black. With the Rooney Rule put in place in 2003, the number of Black coaches hired in the 2000s jumped to 17.3% . It held steady at 17.1% in the 2010s before dipping to 15.7% in the first few years of this decade.
The NFL should rightfully point to the gains made in the league since the Rooney Rule was enacted, but it should also acknowledge and work to improve the shortcomings. In a league where 70% of the players are African American, it defies credibility to see so few Black coaches wearing headsets.
So did Bowles get cheated? Did Leftwich get hosed? Were they both victims of systemic racism?
That’s an explosive accusation and it’s difficult to prove but the NFL’s history suggests it does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
