“Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities.” That was the title of a 2002 report by famed attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. and civil rights lawyer Cyrus Mehri detailing how Black coaches averaged more wins than their White counterparts but found it harder to get hired and easier to be fired. Nearly 20 years later, nothing has changed, as a damning Post investigation underscores. The NFL can do more.
Compiling and analyzing three decades of data, a team of Post reporters — including Dave Sheinin, Michael Lee, Emily Giambalvo, Artur Galocha and Clara Ence Morse — revealed the long-standing challenges facing the league’s Black coaches. They are vastly underrepresented; while nearly 60 percent of NFL players are Black, just 11 percent of full-time head coaches since 1990 have been Black. When they have been hired, Black coaches have been twice as likely to get fired after posting a record of .500 or better than coaches of other races. They have had to spend significantly longer in mid-level assistant jobs before getting head coaching positions. They have also often been made head coaches on only an interim basis.
Even more powerful than the numbers in “Black Out,” a continuing Post series, are the voices of the Black coaches who saw their hard work unrewarded. Maurice Carthon, who coached for 19 seasons after winning two Super Bowl rings as a running back for the New York Giants, interviewed unsuccessfully for five head coaching jobs before retiring. He spoke of one interview in which a team executive told him, “You know, you’re not going to get this job,” right as he stepped off the plane. In another, he said a team owner told him, “You know, in our organization here, we let the boys wash the cars.”
The NFL has openly acknowledged there are not enough Black coaches and team executives; “unacceptable” is how NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell described the situation to the league’s 32 teams in February. The league points to efforts it has taken over the years aimed at increasing diversity among its coaching ranks. It created networking seminars for minority coaches and front-office executives. It encouraged teams to foster diverse talent pipelines, for example by giving draft choices to teams that develop coaches of color who become head coaches. But the league says it ultimately can’t control what the owners do, and that the predominantly White male group, as The Post’s reporters have made painfully clear, is more comfortable hiring people who look like them.
In fact, the league is not doing all it can; the latest installment of “Black Out,” by Gus Garcia-Roberts, detailed the league’s failure to exert pressure on teams. It failed to enforce the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. That interview process — and how easily it is gamed — figures prominently in the lawsuit brought by former Miami head coach Brian Flores against the NFL and three teams. Just as the threat of a lawsuit in 2002 forced the NFL to take some action by creating the Rooney Rule, let’s hope Mr. Flores’s suit and the attention focused on NFL hiring will finally bring change. Or the league could live up to its words and do the right thing without being forced into it.
The Washington Post
