New Coaching Cycle Continues Broken Pattern of Few Head Coach Minority Hires in the NFL
As the nation faced a so-called “racial reckoning” after the largest protest movement in U.S history in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, and businesses pledge to do better, the NFL continues to lag. There is still little visible progress in hiring minority coaches as head coaches, despite a predominance of minority players in the league.
The hope that a new year would add change began in disappointment. 2021 has shown little progress in adding more minority head coaches in the NFL. David Culley and Robert Saleh were the only minority hirings in the latest coaching cycle. From year 2020 to 2021, the amount of minority coaches slightly increased from four to five. Out of 32 head coach positions in the NFL, the percentage of minorities that are head coaches remains puzzling.
For the third consecutive season, the most qualified minority hire available remained without a head coaching position. Eric Bieniemy, the offensive coordinator for the Kansas City Chiefs, was forced to wait another year for an opportunity. His head coach Andy Reid expressed his disappointment in not getting a head coaching position. “I was really hoping he would have an opportunity to take one of those jobs.”
The success of Eric Bieniemy and the Kansas City Chiefs has hurt his ability to get more interviews for open positions. With three deep consecutive postseason appearances, there is less chance to capture a head coach position when teams are teams eager to quickly fill their void. Like Bieniemy, the defensive coordinators for the Buffalo Bills and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Leslie Frazier and Todd Bowles, have been victims of their playoff success and the early head coach hiring windows. According to Sports Illustrated’s reporter Albert Breer, The Bills are trying to change the beginning of the hiring process until after the Super Bowl. The proposal would create a fairer hiring process. With the change, assistant coaches that are in winning teams will have the same interval afforded to interview for open positions.
Even with the proposed change in the hiring window, there are deeper issues that are handcuffing minority coaches. The NFL hiring process comes down to the owners. They decide who they hire to run their team. As former football executive Michael Lombardi said on his podcast, the GM Shuffle, the hiring process in the NFL is selected not elected. Merits do not always equal guarantees. Jemele Hill a journalist for the Atlantic alluded to this when saying when black coaches follow established blueprints to a head coaching position, they’re not held in the same regard as their white contemporaries.
It’s difficult to ignore that over 93 percent of owners in the NFL are white. Skepticism remains whether some owners are comfortable with a minority leading their billion-dollar investment. Staff writer for the Houston Chronicle Jerome Solomon explains how the owners should not be pardoned saying, “NFL owners have had a century to work it out and have chose not to.”
The barriers get more frustrating when the tools used to encourage minority hirings are flawed. The Rooney rule created in 2003 to encourage minority hirings has been manipulated. Minorities have expressed they feel they were only interviewed to meet the Rooney rule’s quota of interviewing a few minority candidates per open position. Former African American general manager of the Arizona Cardinals, Rod Graves expressed the unfairness of the hiring process saying, “Nothing stops an owner from locking onto a white candidate and hiring him after checking the boxes of the Rooney rule.”
In conclusion the league and public are still searching for answers on how to improve the hiring process in the NFL. Minorities are still fighting an unfair fight for work equality, even in the profession where their players are mostly black. Former African American head coach Anthony Lynn told the Ringer’s Tyler Tynes about a conversation he had with his grandfather when Lynn was a child. He mentioned how his grandfather said, “To go where you want to go, you’re going to have to run faster.” The rules of the game are still not fair in the NFL. The solutions remain an enigma.
