The lack of black coaches is deplorable, but is going to remain this way for one reason: The owners don't give a shit if they are all a bunch of racists. They don't want the best coach, they want the one they are most comfortable with. And that's a fellow white guy.The NFL so often punishes its followers for their devotion. Its owners have plundered cities for new stadiums and effectively blackballed a Super Bowl quarterback for protesting police violence. The sport brutalizes its players. The league is withholding the details of an investigation into a culture of sexual harassment within the Washington franchise. It owns a shameful history of equitable hiring for Black coaches. It dares you to love it.
It's so damned bad that NFL Commissioner Pete Rozell had to implement the Rozell Rule, where the teams had to at least pretend they would look at black coaching candidates, by telling them they HAD to interview at least ONE black candidate. Not hire them, heaven forbid, but they had to pretend they had at least considered one.
And that's pretty much all they've done. Via USA Today:
Here's white privilege at work in the NFL:That’s not to say that any coach at any level should be hired because he or she is Black; it’s more to say that while the NFL keeps pace with white mediocrity and has always done so, it’s inarguable that on the whole, Black head coaches are held to a higher standard, and given far less oxygen with which to navigate any kind of roster and cultural architecture.
Need proof from this season? Let’s start with Giants head coach Joe Judge, who has been a disaster from start to finish in his two-year tenure. He has a 10-23 record, his playcalling and talent deployment tend to be a joke at the best of times (Exhibit Z right here), and there are reports that Judge’s own players want him out even as ownership holds fast to the idea that Judge is the guy to turn the franchise around. Judge’s Giants lost their last six games, and seven of their final eight
Need more proof? The Panthers hired Matt Rhule two years ago. Rhule has the same 10-23 record Judge has, Carolina lost their last seven games in 2021, and eight of their final nine. Rhule has overseen similarly horrible roster and talent deployment decisions, and if you want to know how clear he is on his own quarterback situation after two full seasons… well, this ain’t good.
This is indefensible.On Thursday the Houston Texans, an N.F.L. franchise worth $3.7 billion in 2021, announced that it had interviewed Josh McCown for the role of head coach. The Texans fired their previous head coach, David Culley, on Jan. 13, after just one season. (The Texans finished 4-13.)
It’s odd to me that the Texans interviewed Josh McCown, because he doesn’t have any experience as an N.F.L. head coach. Or as an N.F.L. assistant coach. Or as a coach of any kind at the professional or college level. (He has, however, coached high school football.) Josh McCown is currently an N.F.L. quarterback. In fact, both the New York Jets and the Jacksonville Jaguars were interested in adding him to their rosters as recently as October to serve as a backup QB.
It’s not uncommon for former players to become N.F.L. head coaches. As of right now, there are seven such coaches, including Mike Vrabel of the Tennessee Titans and Kliff Kingsbury of the Arizona Cardinals.
But no one goes straight from the field to the top job. “I don’t believe there’s anyone in recent memory who would have transitioned from being a player into becoming an N.F.L. head coach without any coaching experience before,” Bill Barnwell, a staff writer at ESPN.com, told me.
But McCown has had not just one interview for the head coaching job with the Texans, but two — the Texans talked to him about the position last year, according to the Houston Chronicle reporter John McClain. And the sportswriter and television host Mike Florio reported that the Texans are so enthusiastic about hiring McCown that they are hoping another team interviews him for an open head coaching position to legitimize their choice. (Florio also called the potential hiring “crazy.”)
David Culley, on the other hand, was an N.F.L. assistant coach for 27 years before he finally got the chance to serve as a head coach in the league. He coached in Tampa Bay, Philadelphia and Baltimore. As the Texans head coach, he was given a very, very bad team that had lost almost all of its stars in trades, and he did a manful job of winning four games. (Successful N.F.L. coaches have often had bad first seasons, and, I must repeat, the Houston Texans were hot garbage.) But he has now joined a depressing club — the 18th N.F.L. head coach since 1994 to get fired after one year on the job.
David Culley is also Black. He was one of three Black head coaches in the N.F.L. in 2021. With his firing and with the sacking of the Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores, there is now one Black head coach left in the N.F.L., the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin. Meanwhile, nearly 60 percent of N.F.L. players are Black.
Owners seem to have less patience with nonwhite N.F.L. coaches. In 2019, the sports website The Undefeated published results from a study that found that from 2009 to 2018 nonwhite head coaches averaged much shorter tenures than their white counterparts and were less likely to land a second head coaching position after getting fired. As Sports Illustrated’s Conor Orr put it, they get “half the runway of their white counterparts, requiring gargantuan expectations to succeed in impossible scenarios.”