Condi is right, put attention on women putting in the work
Out of all the positions Condoleeza Rice is qualified for, being the head coach of the Cleveland Browns isn't one of them.
That's right, not even Cleveland.
The former Secretary of State's name was floated for the vacant Browns job in a media report on Sunday, maybe as a gendered take on a Rooney Rule candidate, but faster than you can say, “You go girl,” she quickly quashed the idea in a Facebook post.
“I love my Browns — and I know they will hire an experienced coach to take us to the next level,” Rice wrote on Facebook.
“On a more serious note, I do hope that the NFL will start to bring women into the coaching profession as position coaches and eventually coordinators and head coaches. One doesn't have to play the game to understand it and motivate players. But experience counts — and it is time to develop a pool of experienced women coaches.”
Rice has plenty of bonafides. The former Stanford provost was on the College Football Playoff selection committee from 20132016, despite grumblings about whether she was qualified for that role (Spoiler, she was). She was one of the first women to gain membership at Augusta National. From all reports, she has an insider's understanding of football and golf, is friendly with NFL owners, and seems to be floated for the most prestigious government, private sector and sports jobs that become available. She's kind of a big deal.
But Rice can't coach an NFL football team for the same reason Dale Earnhardt Jr. can't play synthesizer in a Kraftwerk tribute band – their expertise lies elsewhere.
The issue with the anonymous report is this: floating an unqualified woman for a job unwittingly props up that old notion that diversity hires are window dressing and that women and people of color don't have to put in the work to earn those spots. (Spoiler No. 2, none of that is true).
“I think you saw from Condoleeza's response that no one wants to jump the line,” said Sam Rapoport, the NFL's director of football development. “What we've heard from a lot of women is they want an opportunity to show what they know and can contribute. They want to get in that line.
“And some have aspirations to be coaches and some don't, some want to be positional coaches or coordinators. For anyone that's entering into the pipeline, the desire is to start the way everyone started — at the bottom — and learning and working your way up and if you deserve that spot then you get it. That's all we can hope for.”
Although Rice raises an excellent point about women in coaching, the truth is, the NFL does have a pipeline. For the last three years, Rapoport has been tasked with linking the league with women who play tackle football. Rapoport is well qualified as a former quarterback herself who applied for an NFL internship in 2003 when she was just out of college by mailing
a football to the league office and informing them that she’d just completed a 386mile pass.
Get it? The quarterback completed the pass? The NFL did because she got the position.
Rapoport is savvy enough to know that getting “a woman” in any role in the NFL is not going to cut it. Her job is to get qualified, football natives into those roles — women who grew up watching and playing the game. For years she was throwing them touchdowns.
Those are the women breaking barriers in the NFL right now. In 2017, the NFL held a weekend symposium for women who played tackle football, and those women nabbed 32 opportunities in coaching and scouting. The next year, the NFL expanded the field beyond women who had been players, and those women went on to find 19 roles in the game.
Several became NFL training camp coaching interns — that’s how Jen Welter broke the gender barrier with Arizona in 2015 — but seven others went on to coach high school teams. The NFL isn’t always the best place to get your first coaching job, and smaller colleges and high schools provide women with an opportunity to call plays and take leadership roles much faster.
Rapoport also wants to make sure those opportunities are going to women of all backgrounds, and 59 percent of those in the pipeline from those two weekends are women of color.
There are now dozens of women the NFL has identified as qualified, who are working their way up the ladder at teams like the Jets — which have hired six women as scouting interns in the last two years.
Not all of them will stick, nor should they. The NFL is a competitive league not just for players, but for the coaches, the public relations professionals, even the interns. Job security isn’t a given.
Nor is it always a straight line. Kathryn Marsh, nee Smith, got an internship with the Jets, was hired as the first full-time coach by the Bills in 2016 and now works under Rapoport at the NFL.
“To me that’s the right way to do it,” Smith said, “get in at those entry-level roles, make connections and build your career... You can have a goal but you don’t know what kind of track you’re going to take to get there.”
But some of the women hired will impress their bosses and get promotions. Some like Marsh will move up laterally. But it’s a familiar story -- you get a shot, you take it.
In a way, we owe Rice a small debt for substantively addressing the issue when it came up, rather than just issuing a polite, “No thank you.” She’s in a position to actually understand how taking an unearned honor sets back women and people of color in a way that just doesn’t happen with the majority demographic. It’s no fun watching film until your eyes won’t close, going to sleep visualizing a promotion, only to hear someone say how easy it must be for a black woman to get ahead.
And by passing on the possibility of the Browns head coaching job, Rice has freed herself up for the much less troublesome role as a presidential candidate in 2020. That’s a job that actually matches her resume.
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