A memo to NFL owners: Diversity wins
While watching the state of Florida add another prestigious athletic victory, as Tampa Bay was crushed Kansas City just one week ago today, I began to reflect on all the news stories about the NFL’s failed hiring practices leading up to the Super Bowl.
For the third straight year, the head coaching carousel in the NFL mostly left black coaches frozen out. Over the past four hiring cycles, only four black coaches have been hired for the 27 vacancies. As I write this today, there are just three black head coaches in the NFL: Brian Flores in Miami, Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh and the newly hired David Culley in Houston.
This was despite the fact that the NFL had put in solid new policies to strengthen the Rooney rule, which requires diverse pools of candidates as well as other measures to open the door for potential Black head coaches.
Sport has always been a powerful change agent. The National Football League has a huge platform as a result of its historic mass popularity with fans. When sport lives up to its ideals, its social justice platform is enhanced. However, it can likewise be diminished when it does not live up to those ideals. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at UCF publishes the Racial and Gender Report Cards on all the major men’s sports and the WNBA. It is one measure of that.
TIDES found that the NFL achieved a B+ for racial hiring practices — increasing significantly in the 2020 Report Card. That was the good news at the league level especially. However, for the second consecutive year, the NFL had only four head coaches and just two general managers of color at the start of the 2020 NFL season. This stood in stark contrast to the 69% of players of color on NFL rosters and the record-high of eight head coaches and six general managers of color only two years before, in 2018.
Leading up to the game I had heard Andy Reid and Bruce Arians, the two Super Bowl head coaches, decry the fact that Kansas City offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, Tampa Bay offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich, and defensive coordinator Todd Bowles had not been offered head-coaching jobs. Reid and Arians lauded these coaches and said they had played major roles in getting their teams to the Super Bowl.
The answer as to why the hiring record is so poor seems obvious. The owners are the ultimate decision makers. In the NFL, the owners are overwhelmingly super wealthy white men. The NFL has only two owners of color: Shad Khan, a Pakistani-born American business owner and the principal owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Kim Pegula, an Asian-American woman and owner of a significant interest in the Buffalo Bills.
According to figures from the Federal Election Commission, NFL owners donated $5.9 million to either the two parties or campaigns affiliated with them. Republicans received more than $5 million, compared with less than $900,000 donated to the Democrats.
So here is something for the owners to take note of: Diversity wins.
Leadership by Black coaches on both Super Bowl teams was credited with getting the teams to the game and especially was credited with helping lead the Buccaneers to their victory. The Bucs were not only the first team to have four key coaches who are black (in addition to Leftwich and Bowles, Keith Armstrong was the special-teams coordinator and Harold Goodwin was the run game coordinator and assistant head coach). They were also the first team to have two women on the sidelines coaching: Maral Javadifar and Lori Locust.
This year we saw that change can be real and swift after player activism exploded in the NFL with the players’ impassioned video message to the league and the commissioner. I believe that Roger Goodell heard that message and was changed by it. When player activism turns to the hiring process, I am confident that agenda will be pushed even further to the forefront.
So owners, open your minds. See what’s best for your team to win. Maybe your team can be the next Tampa Bay Buccaneers success story. It wasn’t magic. It was diversity.
Richard E. Lapchick (rlapchick@ucf.edu) is chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida. He also is director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) and president of the Institute for Sport and Social Justice. Follow him on Twitter @richardlapchick and on Facebook at facebook.com/richard.lapchick.