League lacking diversity
Mix of Bucs’ coaching staff still a rarity in NFL
Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians views an NFL coaching staff as a group of teachers. In his experience, good teachers can be men and women of all races, ethnic groups and ages.
That was Arians’ way of explaining this week how he came to assemble a unique coaching staff.
When the Buccaneers play the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV on Sunday at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., they will be led by four Black coordinators — assistant head coach/run game coordinator Harold Goodwin, offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich, defensive coordinator Todd Bowles and special teams coordinator Keith Armstrong.
After Katie Sowers became the first woman to coach in the Super Bowl last year with the San Francisco 49ers, the Bucs will have two women coaches Sunday — assistant defensive line coach Lori Locust and assistant strength and conditioning coach Maral Javadifar.
And the diversity extends to age too: Arians hired 82-year-old assistant Tom Moore two seasons ago.
“A player is going to ask a coach, how are you going to make me better? He doesn’t really care if the answer comes from a male or female, Black, white, brown, yellow,” Arians said. “Just help me get better, because we’re really just glorified schoolteachers. … So if you can teach, you can coach. As far as the women, it was time. It was time for that door to be knocked down because they’ve been putting in the time. They’re very, very qualified. The ones we have are overly qualified. As far as race, that was not by design. Those are the best coaches I know.
“But to hear voices in a staff meeting that aren’t the same — don’t look alike, but they all have input — you get better output, and for the players the same thing. Not hearing the same thing over and over. To hear it from different people, different ages — from 27 to 82 — and every kind of ethnic group there is and male and female, I think our players learn from that. I know I do.”
Diversity in the NFL coaching ranks has been a major topic of conversation during the lead-up to Sunday’s game, and not just because of the example Arians is setting with his staff.
The game pits two Black offensive coordinators — Leftwich and the Chiefs’ Eric Bieniemy — who were left out of the most recent hiring cycle when seven head coaches were hired.
Chiefs coach Andy Reid repeatedly has said Bieniemy is deserving of a head coaching job, but Bieniemy has been passed over the last two seasons. He interviewed with six of the seven teams with openings this year. Bieniemy, 51, was an NFL running back for nine seasons and coached the Minnesota Vikings and Chiefs running backs for five seasons each before serving as the Chiefs offensive coordinator the last three seasons.
“I did not ask to be the poster boy of this particular situation that I am experiencing,” Bieniemy said. “At the end of the day, the only thing you want to do is to be recognized for all of the things you’ve accomplished, and for whatever reason that has not happened. And that’s OK. Because the only thing I know to do is to go back to work and continue chopping wood because that’s who (my mother) raised.”
Arians said he was upset Leftwich didn’t receive an interview opportunity this year.
Leftwich was an NFL quarterback for nine seasons before he joined Arians’ Arizona Cardinals staff as quarterbacks coach and then offensive coordinator in 2017 and 2018. He has been the Bucs coordinator the last two seasons.
“He’s everything everybody is supposedly looking for — a quarterback, a playcaller and he’s African American, so I mean, I don’t know what else you’re looking for,” Arians said. “He’s a great leader.
“I was very, very pissed that Byron didn’t at least get an interview this year for the job that he has done. I get way too much credit, and so does Tom Brady, for the job Byron has done.”
Of the new head coaches hired, two were minorities — the Houston Texans’ David Culley, who is Black, and the New York Jets’ Robert Saleh, who is Lebanese American and the first Muslim head coach in the NFL.
The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, the Miami Dolphins’ Brian Flores and Washington Football Team’s Ron Rivera are the other minority coaches in the NFL. Meanwhile, about 70% of NFL players in 2019 were people of color, according to the
Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said Thursday that the most recent hiring cycle was not what the league expected after it spent significant time in the offseason discussing diversity with team owners. The NFL adopted a plan in November to award compensatory draft picks to teams that lose minority candidates they developed to head coaching and executive jobs. The league also now requires two external minority candidates to be interviewed for head coaching positions.
Goodell said the topic is broader than head coaches, pointing to the three Black general mangers who were hired and a more diverse slate of coordinators. That includes Chicago Bears new defensive coordinator Sean Desai, who is Indian American. But Goodell said the league will have discussions with candidates and teams to see what went right and wrong during the hiring process.
“They’re not the outcomes we wanted, and we’re committed more than ever to make sure that we do that, but we want it to be a natural process,” Goodell said.
Arians didn’t receive a shot at a head coaching position until he was 60 and took over the Indianapolis Colts because Chuck Pagano was diagnosed with leukemia in 2012. The Cardinals hired him the next season, and he coached there for five seasons before he joined the Bucs in 2019.
It was that wait to get an opportunity that has made Arians conscious of providing opportunities to others who deserve it but haven’t been given a chance, including Javadifar and Locust.
Javadifar, whose parents emigrated from Iran, is a physical therapist and brings a different perspective to the Bucs’ strength and conditioning staff.
Locust’s career began as a semiprofessional player in Harrisburg, Pa. She pivoted to coaching after multiple injuries, working her way up over a decade at the high school and women’s semiprofessional levels before coaching in the National Arena League and the American Alliance of Football.
They acknowledged the significance of representing women as coaches in the Super Bowl while also noting they are more focused on doing their jobs to help the Buccaneers win.
“I do look forward to the day when it’s no longer newsworthy to be a woman working in the pros or making the Super Bowl for that matter,” Javadifar said.
Locust is hopeful progress will be made on the women’s side, in part because of the Women’s Careers in Football Forum, which was created in 2017 to help connect women candidates with coaches and executives. She said it was “isolating at times” as she tried to figure out the right steps to further her coaching career but said a network of support is being built.
“Where the guys have it sort of automatically in the coaching tree — ‘I coached with him at this college,’ ‘He and I played high school ball together’ — and they sort of have that automatic connection, ours has to be built,” Locust said. “It’s been nice to be on the forefront of the building of the framework for the rest of the women coaches that are going to be coming in behind us. It’s something that’s natural and organic, so we don’t really make a big deal about it, but it is nice sometimes to talk to somebody who understands you just a little bit better.”
Of course, such initiatives only will work if organizations and coaches take hiring diverse, qualified candidates as seriously as the Bucs and Arians do.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever been a part of anything like this,” Leftwich said. “This is not the norm of how the coaching staffs look across the league. It’s a blessing that BA has the view that he has. I just hope no one believes that he’s just giving us anything.
“If you know him, you know he’s not giving you anything. You’ve got to earn everything you pretty much get from him or his view of you. So nobody has been given anything. Everybody has earned this.”