Olde Hornet
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2022/nfl-black-head-coaches/?
Despite the league’s end-zone pledge to “END RACISM,” Black coaches continue to be denied top jobs in a league in which nearly 60 percent of the players are Black.
It is a glaring shortcoming for the NFL, one highlighted by the findings of an investigation by The Washington Post. Black coaches tend to perform about as well as White coaches, The Post found. But while White candidates are offered a vast and diverse set of routes to the league’s top coaching jobs, Black coaches face a much narrower set of paths. They have had to serve significantly longer as mid-level assistants, are more likely to be given interim jobs than full-time ones and are held to a higher standard when it comes to keeping their jobs.
Since 1990, Black coaches have been twice as likely as others to be fired after leading a team to a regular season record of .500 or better.
Amid growing scrutiny of the issue, The Post compiled and analyzed three decades’ worth of data and conducted interviews with 16 of the 24 living current and former NFL head coaches who identify as Black, as well as dozens of other coaches, former players, team executives, agents and others.
The data quantifies the frustration felt by many of those coaches, which erupted into the public eye this year with a lawsuit by Brian Flores, fired by the Miami Dolphins in January, that accuses the league and its teams of racism in their hiring and firing practices. The lawsuit and its potential implications hover over the NFL as its new season unfolds with just three Black head coaches: Todd Bowles of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Lovie Smith of the Houston Texans and Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
That’s the same number as in 2003 — the year the NFL, under intense external pressure, introduced the Rooney Rule, which required teams to interview at least one candidate of color for open head coach and front-office jobs.
Taken together, The Post’s analysis mirrors the sentiment among Black coaches that they are playing by a different set of rules than their White counterparts. The result, Black coaches said, is a league in which many Black assistants have resigned themselves to the notion that they will never get an opportunity to be a head coach — a position that, in addition to the immeasurable prestige, also could pay, on average, 10 times what a mid-level assistant makes — while others have left the profession entirely.
“It seems like the criteria moves,” Leslie Frazier, defensive coordinator for the Buffalo Bills, said in an interview. “One week, or one year, it’s ‘We want an offensive-minded guy.’ Another year: ‘We want a guy with a Super Bowl-winning background.’ What’s the criteria? Sometimes it’s because he’s ‘a great leader.’ Sometimes it’s because he ‘came up the same way I came up.’ But the common theme … is [an owner is going] to hire someone that looks like that owner.”
The NFL is both a financial behemoth, with record revenue of $11 billion in 2021, and a cultural institution with unmatched reach into the national psyche: 75 of the country’s 100 most-watched television programs in 2021 were NFL games. Its sheer might and media reach give it unprecedented sway over American culture and have allowed it to survive controversies that could have smothered lesser enterprises, most recently the rift over players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence against Black people.
Despite the league’s end-zone pledge to “END RACISM,” Black coaches continue to be denied top jobs in a league in which nearly 60 percent of the players are Black.
It is a glaring shortcoming for the NFL, one highlighted by the findings of an investigation by The Washington Post. Black coaches tend to perform about as well as White coaches, The Post found. But while White candidates are offered a vast and diverse set of routes to the league’s top coaching jobs, Black coaches face a much narrower set of paths. They have had to serve significantly longer as mid-level assistants, are more likely to be given interim jobs than full-time ones and are held to a higher standard when it comes to keeping their jobs.
Since 1990, Black coaches have been twice as likely as others to be fired after leading a team to a regular season record of .500 or better.
Amid growing scrutiny of the issue, The Post compiled and analyzed three decades’ worth of data and conducted interviews with 16 of the 24 living current and former NFL head coaches who identify as Black, as well as dozens of other coaches, former players, team executives, agents and others.
The data quantifies the frustration felt by many of those coaches, which erupted into the public eye this year with a lawsuit by Brian Flores, fired by the Miami Dolphins in January, that accuses the league and its teams of racism in their hiring and firing practices. The lawsuit and its potential implications hover over the NFL as its new season unfolds with just three Black head coaches: Todd Bowles of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Lovie Smith of the Houston Texans and Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
That’s the same number as in 2003 — the year the NFL, under intense external pressure, introduced the Rooney Rule, which required teams to interview at least one candidate of color for open head coach and front-office jobs.
Taken together, The Post’s analysis mirrors the sentiment among Black coaches that they are playing by a different set of rules than their White counterparts. The result, Black coaches said, is a league in which many Black assistants have resigned themselves to the notion that they will never get an opportunity to be a head coach — a position that, in addition to the immeasurable prestige, also could pay, on average, 10 times what a mid-level assistant makes — while others have left the profession entirely.
“It seems like the criteria moves,” Leslie Frazier, defensive coordinator for the Buffalo Bills, said in an interview. “One week, or one year, it’s ‘We want an offensive-minded guy.’ Another year: ‘We want a guy with a Super Bowl-winning background.’ What’s the criteria? Sometimes it’s because he’s ‘a great leader.’ Sometimes it’s because he ‘came up the same way I came up.’ But the common theme … is [an owner is going] to hire someone that looks like that owner.”
The NFL is both a financial behemoth, with record revenue of $11 billion in 2021, and a cultural institution with unmatched reach into the national psyche: 75 of the country’s 100 most-watched television programs in 2021 were NFL games. Its sheer might and media reach give it unprecedented sway over American culture and have allowed it to survive controversies that could have smothered lesser enterprises, most recently the rift over players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence against Black people.
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