If there is something certain in the NFL, it’s that they do not care about people’s concerns. They do not care if their purge of Black head coaches is proof that their vow to end racism is a sham.
Six head coaches were fired after the regular season. Two of those six were Black.
The NFL entered the 2021 season with three Black head coaches. With the firings of the Miami Dolphins’ Brian Flores and the Houston Texans’ David Culley, only one Black head coach remains: Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who has never had a losing season in his 15-year tenure with the team.
NFL franchise owners had to be pushed to seriously consider Black coaching candidates to be their head coach. They were willing to sign Black players to make them money while risking health, but were reluctant to let them lead their teams after they were done playing.
When those Black coaches got opportunities, they proved they should have had them all along.
The league is basically chucking that out the window.
Remember the 2018 season? After the conclusion of that season, four Black coaches were fired (Hue Jackson, Steve Wilks, Todd Bowles, and Vance Joseph) and were replaced by four white coaches (Freddie Kitchens, Kliff Kingsbury, Adam Gase, and Vic Fangio) [NOTE: Marvin Lewis was not fired; he and the Bengals mutually parted ways].
Not to mention that before the 2018 season, Jim Caldwell, who is Black, was fired after his Lions made the playoffs twice and he had just one losing season (2015) and was replaced by Matt Patricia, who is white.
That was not the first time he was fired, as he was relieved of his duties after the 2011 Colts season where the team finished 2-14 when Peyton Manning sat out of the season following his neck surgery. That time, Caldwell was replaced by Chuck Pagano, who is also white.
This is becoming a throwback to the pre-Rooney Rule days, when the Bucs fired Tony Dungy after he led his team to the playoffs and one bad season ended Dennis Green’s successful run with the Vikings.
Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, told the Washington Post that teams have a “double standard” when judging the performance of Black coaches:
I don’t think that that is something that we should shy away from. But that is all part of some of the things that we need to fix in the system. We want to hold everyone to why does one, let’s say, get the benefit of the doubt to be able to build or take bumps and bruises in this process of getting a franchise turned around when others are not afforded that latitude?
The whole double standard is what led to the NFL adopting the Rooney Rule in the first place. Dungy and Green were fired the year before as the league was under the threat of legal action of racial bias in hiring decisions by its teams. Attorneys Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran were pressuring the league to improve its record.
Those lawyers commissioned a study by Penn professor Janice Fanning Manning. The study, published in 2004, found that Black coaches performed better than white coaches.
“Overall, the results are consistent with African American coaches being held to higher standards to get their jobs in the NFL,” she concluded.
Flores and Culley were the two most recent victims, but both of them won as many games as could reasonably be expected given the circumstances of the teams they were coaching.
The Dolphins were 23-25 under Gase from 2015 to 2018, including 7-9 in his final season. Flores took over in the 2019 season and beat expectations in his three-year stint. His first Dolphins team had an over/under win total of 4.5 and finished 5-11. The Fins finished 10-6 in 2020 with an over/under of 6 and 9-8 this season with an over/under of 9.
There were reports that he was fired because of a power struggle between him and general manager Chris Grier. Other reports said that he was “difficult to work with.”
The latter is commonly used as an excuse for firing successful Black coaches. On the other hand, white coaches are celebrated for their abrasive personalities as long as they win.
Culley got the job in Houston after Bill O’Brien ran the team to the ground. Taking over a team in a disastrous situation is another reality faced more often by Black coaches than their white counterparts.
Luke Knox of ESPN was examining data on head coaching performances from 2003 to 2018. He found that Black coaches had to “take over a higher rate of bad teams in Year 1,” but went on to beat expectations.
They still got shorter tenures than white coaches anyway.
The Texans were an absolute mess when Culley took over as head coach. He had a roster lacking talent and depth thanks to O’Brien’s constant bungling as general manager. Deshaun Watson demanded a trade after the 2020 season. He ended up sitting out of the 2021 season as he faces 22 civil lawsuits alleging sexual assault and misconduct.
Culley led the Texans to a 4-13 record this season without Watson. His bosses could not have expected any better.
It was all a setup for him to be fired at the end of the season. After the final game, they sent him out to talk to the media and he pretended that he was keeping the job.
Notice a theme here? The NFL is tarnishing the Rooney Rule’s legacy after they created more opportunities for Black coaches.
There were six Black coaches in the NFL in the league’s first 80 years, including one (Art Shell) in the modern era. There were four Black coaches in the 16 years before the Rooney Rule. NFL teams hired 22 minority coaches from 2003 to 2019.
The Black coaches among the group proved they can do the job. That was the case with Flores and Culley. It’s at the point that the NFL is making the MLB look progressive.
The Cleveland Guardians (previously known as the Indians) hired the MLB’s first Black manager, Frank Robinson, in 1975. There have been 16 Black managers since that year, but now there are only two: Dave Roberts of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dusty Baker of the Houston Astros.
Baker began his MLB manager career during a time when 20% of their players were Black. The number of Black players in the MLB has steadily declined, and now about 10% of its players are Black. Only a small number of MLB managers never played in the big leagues, including Atlanta Braves skipper Brian Snitker.
To put this in comparison, about 70% of NFL players and more than half of NCAA football players are Black. The NFL has a much larger pool of Black coaching candidates than the MLB. Yet the MLB has more Black people leading their teams on the field.
In the NFL, Black coaches are smeared with dismissive labels such as “doesn’t interview well” to the point that many coaches feel that the hiring practice is deeply flawed.
It’s a fact that most Black coaches have more experience on average as an assistant, offensive and defensive or special teams coaches and couldn’t be more qualified for head coaching positions.
All 32 teams stamped helmets and painted end zones with slogans like “End Racism” and “It Takes All of Us,” which is a sham because their individual owners do not practice what is preached.
Just like politicians who use Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for their individual purpose, the NFL is about aesthetics while responding very late to historically evidenced internal racial hiring disparities.
The NFL is doing better with giving Black professionals opportunities at front office positions.
Atlanta Falcons general manager Terry Fontenot is one of three Black executives who were hired to run football operations last season, along with Brad Holmes of the Detroit Lions and Martin Mayhew of the Washington Football Team. This increased the number of Black GMs to five.
Fontenot, however, didn’t get to pick his coach because the Falcons already hired Arthur Smith.
Black head coaches were rare in the NFL before the Rooney Rule, which led to an unprecedented number of opportunities for Black coaches. In recent years, it has been expanded to have teams be required to interview multiple minority candidates for head coach. GM and coordinator openings are not covered by this rule.
The fact that the NFL has only one Black head coach after two of them only got raw deals shows that franchise owners decide who coaches their teams. For all the times they can co-opt anti-racist movements and put progressive slogans on the fields, they cannot escape the reality on the racial bias in the hiring and firing of coaches, which is on them, as pointed out by Rod Graves, the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, in a statement:
The recent dismissals of Brian Flores and David Culley is a disappointment given efforts to increase the representation of Black coaches as Head Coaches in the NFL. The fact that we stand today with only one Black Head Coach makes clear that the current system does not provide a sustainable pathway for the growth in numbers of minorities as Head Coaches.
For many, the time for progress is now. With eleven openings, the NFL has an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to diversity of leadership. We hope that our increased involvement as partners with the NFL will have an immediate and long-term impact on the system of hiring and evaluating leadership performance.
Said eleven openings are eight coaches and three general managers. It appears that as of now, teams are going through searches that comply with the Rooney Rule, but that often doesn’t matter.
And that’s because the NFL does not care about their own problems.
The only thing they care about is money, and that was evidenced when they added a 17th game to the regular season—never mind exposing players to more concussive hits—and put in the sham slogans at the end zone with “End Racism” and “It Takes All of Us.”
In fact, that they put “End Racism” in the end zones when they have an obvious systemic racism problem is very, very ironic.
The NFL signed an 11-year deal with its media partners at $110 billion in March 2021. Viewership on television and digital streaming services took a sharp jump upward, leaping 10% and reaching its highest regular season average in six years.
Is this a good sign for their dominance? NFL games accounted for 48 of the top 50 most-watched broadcasts of the 2021 regular season, and 91 of the top 100.
So why should the league worry about what we think, what we worry about, or even protest, when cash and ratings continue to crash down?
Never mind any of their problems. Never mind Jon Gruden’s emails. Never mind the sexual harassment within the Washington Football Team and Dan Snyder’s involvement. Never mind the unethical way the NFL treats their former players.
The owners of all the league’s 32 teams, who are almost all white, conservative, and male, are content with the status quo, as long as we keep watching. How is it that we can’t turn our backs on the NFL?
One reason for that is the game’s unrivaled ability to bring people together. It’s the most popular sport in the United States, and it remains powerful on how it unifies, even during the COVID pandemic, and when the divisions in American life seemed to grow wider every day.
The fact that Flores and Culley became scapegoats for their organization’s ineptitude is just sickening. It gets worse when Brandon Staley, another young white head coach who was hailed as a genius despite his minimal NFL experience, have his team miss the playoffs because he called a timeout at the worst possible time.
The NFL does not care about diversity. They don’t care about what people think of their hiring practices either.
It has been an embarrassment for them, and that embarrassment has evolved into a crisis. The firings of Flores and Culley should serve as a reminder that not only do Black head coaching candidates rarely get jobs.
When they do, they are tasked to rebuild disastrous organizations, only to be fired when the ship gets turned into at least a favorable direction.
The most popular sports league in the United States, which is 70% Black, that same league that puts anti-racism slogans in the end zone, is reluctant to hiring Black people. This is a league whose public relations could crack under the contradiction of relying desperately on Black talent and the injuring of Black bodies, while standing emptily in front of Black minds. This is a league with no Black franchise owners, and that, along with just one Black head coach as of now, shows a display of apartheid.
Longtime NFL.com reporter Michael Silver, who has been a journalist with the NFL for decades, tweeted out, “There is systemic racism in the NFL, and there are actual racists in some positions of power. I’m done dancing around the latter.”
The question that has to be answered is how this will be changed. If, as Silver wrote, there is “systemic racism in the NFL, and there are actual racists in some positions of power,” then the Rooney Rule will not cut it. For two decades, the NFL had to compel their almost all white franchise owners to just sit down with coaching candidates of color, which is embarrassing in and of itself, producing little results.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifices, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertion and passionate concerns of dedicated individuals.”
Along with the systemic racism in the coaching hiring practices, this is not to mention that the NFL should be called out with their plan to “honor” Dr. King during the Monday Night Wild Card match between the Arizona Cardinals and the Los Angeles Rams. It showed yet another one of their fraudulent shams from a league that is showing their true colors again and again.
The small, round “MLK” decals and the words “BE LOVE” painted at the back of the end zones are, by itself, just words. Words without action are meaningless, along with decals and field paint, particularly when there have been years of inaction and deliberate actions AGAINST what Dr. King stood for.
Such examples included blackballing players from the NFL who dared to protest on behalf of those who look like them before team owners begrudgingly conceded that they could speak up, though in ways that they approve.
And here’s yet another reminder that Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid had their careers taken away from them while Richie Incognito continues to get second chance after second chance to bring his cruel “humor” and “leadership” to locker rooms after multiple violent events.
One of the NFL’s press releases announcing their “remembrance” of Dr. King includes a quote from Roger Goodell: “Dr. King envisioned a world where justice and equality existed for all,” which carried the greatest MLK Day tradition ever: White moderates showing THEIR vision of who Dr. King was, cherry-picking a few words or misappropriating a sentence from his March on Washington speech to use as a bludgeon, not someone despised in life by those who thought true equality for Black Americans was unacceptable.
“Justice and equality for all” are words that are totally unrecognizable for a league that is doing its hardest work to protect Dan Snyder over the women who endured the vile acts he did while they were employed for his team that is not cooperating with a Congressional inquiry into what happened into Washington’s front offices.
The NFL’s “Inspire Change” initiative is meant to be a public service announcement during games and for people to throw money at groups fighting for the progress that franchise owners are not interested in being part of.
The league even had a golden opportunity last year to use their influence to further one of Dr. King’s major causes: Voting rights.
When the Arizona legislature proposed a series of laws that would disproportionately affect Black, Brown, and Native voters in the state and to basically make things harder for them to cast their ballots, the league could have gone to the state leaders and tell them that Super Bowl LVII, set to be played in State Farm Stadium next year, would be moved elsewhere if those laws were passed.
Predictably, the NFL did nothing.
There was a time when the NFL did the right thing, when the state refused to recognize MLK Day, and pulled a Super Bowl from the Phoenix area. Yes, the state now recognizes the holiday, but voting is something more important. Pulling Super Bowl LVII from Glendale, Arizona, would be a proper way of honoring Dr. King.
The NFL could have also followed the words of Cardinals right tackle Kelvin Beachum, who also quoted in that release:
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr., may we continue to fight for justice for all who are marginalized economically or due to the color of their skin. We quote the words he spoke with conviction. It’s much more vital to embrace the ideals and actions of his message. We honor the life of a man who stood for justice, for liberty, for integrity.
It’s better that the NFL embraces the ideals and actions. Instead, they chose to stand pat and put decals on helmets while watching the Dolphins and Texans fire Flores and Culley when they have done well for the teams they coached.
It seems that they are content with hollow gestures and not doing anything to reflect what Dr. King believed in.
And knowing this league, they’re not going to change meaningfully, so long as it is still popular.
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