Flores takes brave stand
Lapchick: Ex-Dolphins coach’s situation resembles Kaepernick’s
As someone who was instrumental in forcing the NFL to adopt its landmark Rooney Rule all those years ago, UCF professor and lifelong civil rights activist Dr. Richard Lapchick is disheartened the rule has not made much of a difference; he’s angry that league owners are making a mockery of it; and he’s saddened that fired Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores felt the need to risk his career by filing a landmark racial discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and three of its teams earlier this week.
“Brian Flores is a courageous man and is the coaching equivalent of Colin Kaepernick,” says Lapchick, the director of The Institute for Diversity & Ethics in Sport. “I don’t know if he will ever coach again because of this lawsuit. I hope he does because he has certainly proven he can do the job and do it well.”
It was Lapchick, along with civil rights attorneys Cyrus Mehri and the late Johnnie Cochran, who visited the NFL office in 2001 and threatened to sue the league for unfair hiring and firing practices regarding Black coaches. The trio presented the league with a study — “Black
Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities.” The study found that Black head coaches were less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired than white head coaches.
“In case after case, NFL owners have shown more interest in — and patience with — white coaches who don’t win than Black coaches who do,” the report said.
Sadly, here we are two decades later and nothing much has changed even though the Rooney Rule was officially adopted in 2003 and mandated that NFL teams at least interview minority coaching and general manager candidates. In a league where the players are 70% Black, there is but one Black head coach in the NFL and that’s Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin, who was hired 15 years ago.
Of the 33 coaching vacancies over the last five hiring cycles, only three have been filled by Black men. Of those three, Flores was just fired after leading the Dolphins to backto-back winning seasons for the first time since 2003 and David Culley was just fired after one season even though he took over a dysfunctional Houston Texans franchise and did an admirable job navigating the team through the Deshaun Watson fiasco.
“The NFL has done its best and tried as a league to do better,” Lapchick says. “They put the Rooney Rule in effect and it really did work for five or six years, but then it stopped. The league has strengthened the Rooney Rule over the years, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. The light should come on for everybody that this isn’t about the Rooney Rule, it’s about who the owners are.”
And the owners, for the most part, are a bunch of multi-billionaire white men who don’t want to be told who they can and can’t hire to run their businesses. Of the 32 owners in the NFL, none is Black. And while it’s understandable that Flores is suing the NFL because each individual team is under the league’s umbrella, the league office itself has done a respectable job of implementing diverse, inclusive hiring practices. However, it’s not like NFL commissioner Roger Goodell could have forced Jaguars owner Shad Khan to hire Byron Leftwich instead of Doug Pederson.
“Racism and any form of discrimination is contrary to the NFL’s values,” Goodell wrote in a memo to all league teams Saturday morning. “We have made significant efforts to promote diversity and adopted numerous policies and programs which have produced positive change in many areas, however we must acknowledge that particularly with respect to head coaches the results have been unacceptable. We will reevaluate and examine all policies, guidelines and initiatives relating to diversity, equity and inclusions.”
Translation: Hey, NFL owners, this is on you!”
I told Lapchick a story earlier this week about former Florida Gators basketball coach “Stormin” Norman Sloan in the 1980s. Sloan became upset that newspaper sports editors throughout the Southeastern Conference chose to barely cover college basketball while devoting countless column inches to college football coverage. When Sloan was asked what it would take for basketball to get the same quality and quantity of coverage as football, he fumed, “A few timely [sports editor] funerals would help.”
Although Lapchick won’t go as far as to say the current group of NFL owners must kick the bucket before more Black coaches are hired, he did say their attitudes and biases must die off. Lapchick believes the NFL players themselves, much like their NBA counterparts, are the ones who must invoke change.
It’s no secret that star NBA players past and present have wielded their power to get coaches hired and fired. Maybe that’s why nearly half of the league’s head coaches — 14 of 30 — are Black.
“Player activism is the only thing that’s going to help right now,” Lapchick says. “Player activism is in full force like it’s never been in the history of sports. When the Milwaukee Bucks refused to come out on the court in the NBA bubble during the racial reckoning two years ago and when the NBA supported the players and shut down the league and all the other leagues followed; that showed the power of player activism. When NFL athletes themselves turn their attention to the hiring process, that’s when you’ll finally see significant change.”
Until then, NFL owners will continue to operate our nation’s most popular sports league and turn the well-intentioned Rooney Rule into the great white lie.