Where are all the Black NFL coaches?
On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: 5 Things Sunday Host James Brown explores the NFL's Rooney rule which requires teams to interview minority coaches and staff when positions like head coach, general manager, and coordinator positions open. Former NFL executives Andrew Brandt and Doug Whaley, and USA TODAY sports reporters Tom Schad and Tyler Dragon give their insights on the process of hiring coaches and executives in today's NFL.
Show Notes
What's in it for interims? Carolina's Steve Wilks latest Black coach thrust into challenging role
A family affair: Nepotism and its networks fill many NFL coaching positions
NFL's path to top jobs still narrow, lengthy for coaches of color
Often interviewed, never hired: How hot-shot NFL head coaching candidates go cold
As NFL coaching carousel starts to spin, advocates unsure how Black candidates will fare
What we learned: Four key findings from USA TODAY's analysis of NFL coaches
PODCAST: Exploring USA TODAY Sports NFL coaches project and previewing Week 4
The NFL has a serious diversity problem. Here's what our USA TODAY Sports investigation found.
Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here.
Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
James Brown:
Hello, and welcome to Five Things. I'm James Brown. It's Sunday, February 5th, 2023.
Every week we take a concept or idea and go deep, and this week we talk about football, football coaches that is. There are just 32 NFL head coaching jobs, six or seven become vacant every year. It seems like football fans in the media have the same conversation every year, where are all the black head coaches? That's what we'll be discussing today.
There were five black NFL head coaches at the end of the 2022 season. Mike Tomlin, Mike McDaniel, Todd Bowles, Lovie Smith, and interim head coach Steve Wilkes. Wilkes was not retained and Smith was fired. The Houston Texans, replaced Smith with another black coach, DeMeco Ryans.
Tyler Dragon:
Anytime you have to implement a rule to interview a black head coaching candidate or a minority head coaching candidate, that's admitting there's a problem.
James Brown:
That's USA Today's sports reporter Tyler Dragon, he's been writing about the NFL for close to a decade. Our recent USA Today sports analysis found that in the last 20 years, about four white coaches were hired for every coach of color. This in a league where seven out of ten players are minorities, and most of them black.
Tyler Dragon:
The NFL has historically had a problem with hiring black head coaches and all minority coaches for that matter, whether that be head coach, assistant coach, coordinators, and you can even go in the front office, GM, assistant GM, president player personnel. I can go down and down the line, there's no majority black owner in the NFL. When I look at the NFL landscape from top to bottom, they are really behind when it comes to diversity and inclusion.
James Brown:
20 years ago, the NFL adopted a policy known as the Rooney Rule. The rule was named after Dan Rooney, then owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. It attempted to address the historically low number of minorities in head coaching positions. The first version of the policy required every team with a head coaching vacancy to interview at least one minority during their process.
Doug Whaley:
We should be able to have a system where the best person for the job gets hired, not the person you know the best.
James Brown:
That's Doug Whaley. He had a long career in the NFL working his way up through the Pittsburgh Steelers organization and eventually becoming the only black general manager in the 60-year history of the Buffalo Bills.
Doug Whaley:
The league in general is very tough because it's not like a lot of other industries where there's a criteria of how you get promoted. A lot of it is right place at the right time, a lot of it's knowing the right people, a lot of it is just hard work and accomplishments. The league in general is tough, but it is a lot tougher for people of color and minorities, and women.
James Brown:
Whaley says women and minorities struggle to break through In this insular world.
Doug Whaley:
There is an old boys network and there's a network where you're going to really protect and promote your own. Is it right, wrong or indifferent? It is what it is and that's the system, but that doesn't mean that it should keep perpetuating that system.
James Brown:
The Rooney Rule is 20 years old this year. Do you remember what your initial thoughts were when you heard that this kind of thing was being implemented?
Doug Whaley:
The first thing you say is kudos to Mr. Rooney, obviously the driving force behind it, and I worked for him so I'm biased, but also the league for identifying a problem and trying to come up with a solution. It was a positive thing.
But as we see now, just like anything, people that have children and even to yourself, when someone says you have to do something, you're obviously automatically going to have a bias towards it. I think that we're starting to see that response from a lot of ownerships and a lot of hiring practices. If you have to do something, then you're going to be fully invested in it as something that you chose to do.
James Brown:
Yeah, if I bought something for a billion dollars, which is the minimum going price these days, I'd want to be able to hire who I want to hire is what I'm thinking is going through these owners heads.
Doug Whaley:
I'll break it down to even more simpler terms. No matter what you make, if I came in here and told you how to spend your money, what would you say?
James Brown:
It'd be a tough conversation.
Doug Whaley:
Exactly. And then I say, "Okay, well I'm not going to tell you how to spend your money, but I'm going to tell you before you spend your money, you have to go through this process." You're going to be like, "All right, let me just check that box and go through this process, but I'm still going to do what I want to."
James Brown:
Tyler Dragon, sports reporter at USA Today says things played out differently than expected.
Tyler Dragon:
Owners and front office people who are in charge of hiring, they found loopholes in the rule.
James Brown:
The league is being sued by Brian Flores, former Miami Dolphins head coach. He's accusing teams including the New York Giants and Denver Broncos of conducting sham interviews with him last year. The league and the teams deny his claims, but Dragon isn't convinced.
Tyler Dragon:
You can just interview a black or minority head coach and know that you're not really going to hire them, you're just making sure you cross all your Ts and dot your Is before you make that hire of the white coach you want.
James Brown:
There's also disparities in the type of coaching roles black coaches are hired for.
Tom Schad:
One person called this positional segregation.
James Brown:
That's USA Today's Tom Schad, he's part of the NFL Coach's Project, USA Today's ongoing series analyzing the demographics of football coaches.
Tom Schad:
Overall of the on field coaches in the NFL, it's something like 43% are coaches of color. But then when you look down at specific positions, running back's coaches is a great example that ended up being kind of the crux of the story. 93% of running back's coaches in the NFL at the start of the season were coaches of color compared to something like 18% or something of quarterback's coaches.
James Brown:
As the league becomes more driven by quarterbacks, coaching quarterbacks is becoming a fast track to becoming a head coach. Only one head coach in the last seven years. Anthony Lynn, who is black, went from running backs coach directly to head coach. He coached the Los Angeles Chargers. Schad says this goes back a while.
Tom Schad:
We did a lot of reporting on this in the fall, and you had some people who basically suspected that a lot of it stems from playing positions.
James Brown:
He says that argument is flimsy at best.
Tom Schad:
The thinking basically went there are lots of black men who played running back, so when they transition to coaching, that's the position they know, it's the easiest way to get into the business.
We also looked at quarterbacks coaches, and there are lots of white quarterbacks coaches who never played quarterback, and so it starts to break down in ways like that where... I think that might be part of the answer to why it exists, but I certainly don't think it's the entire answer. I think a lot of it is the underpinning of a lot of the reporting that we've done, which is just unconscious bias.
James Brown:
Schad interviewed Herm Edwards, he played in the NFL in the seventies and eighties. Eventually he became head coach of the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs in the 2000s.
Tom Schad:
He was never coached by a man of color at any point in his career, and he said on the teams that he was a part of the coaching staff, there was always one coach of color, and it was almost always the running back's coach.
James Brown:
So what's happening here? And what goes into hiring a head coach? Andrew Brandt would know.
Andrew Brandt:
I think there's some basic qualities you look for.
James Brown:
Brandt is a sports agent turned NFL executive who spent about 10 years with the Green Bay Packers. In that time, they hired two head coaches. These days, he runs a sports law program at Villanova University and hosts the Business of Sports podcast.
Andrew Brandt:
Someone that has familiarity with your roster, a lot of our interview time was spent, what do you think of this player? What do you think of that player? How would you use that player? What's your familiarity, and what's your schemes? What's your systems? Also, what's your assistant coach set up?
It's very rare for a coach interview to come in and say, "Yeah, I'll figure that out later." They have who they want to be their coordinators, to be their assistant coaches, in some cases, to be their quality control coaches, to be their equipment managers, to be their strength conditioning staff. What's the setup of their operation? Were they invited to lead your team?
James Brown:
He also wants to get a sense of their mentality.
Andrew Brandt:
I always used to ask questions like this, what do you do when you get up in the morning? He looked at me crazy and he said, "Well, go to the bathroom." I said, "What do you do before you go to the bathroom?" "Brush my teeth?" "What do you do..."
What I was looking for is the kind of person that I don't know, does 50 pushups right out of bed, that makes a to-do list right out of bed, that has a routine. Because I've learned that the best indicators of future success are self-motivation and self-discipline. If they could bring that character into our building, others would pick up on those same qualities. Which again, through experience, I've learned those are the key indicators for success.
James Brown:
So personality plays a big role?
Andrew Brandt:
Personality's always going to play a big role. Can this person lead 20 coaches, 60, 70 players depending on practice squad, can they lead? Leadership is defined in a lot of different ways. I think leadership's basic premise is can you get people to do things that they necessarily don't want to do just because of you?
James Brown:
Relationships play a big part too. That's something Doug Whaley, the former NFL GM we met earlier, learned in his career.
Doug Whaley:
I had access to the decision maker and the decision maker saw how I worked, how I thought, how I interacted with people, and how I led. That's why I didn't have to do the interview. It was when the GM above me and I was the assistant GM, he decided to retire, that decision maker was there in meetings with me, was there socially, professionally, and he understood that I could do the job.
James Brown:
Whaley is part of a group that launched One Global Culture Events, which helped minority candidates in pro sports connect with upper management.
Doug Whaley:
Having them sit in non-interview settings with the decision makers, presidents, and owners, everything I've talked about. If you look at solutions instead of just focused on the problem, that's where I think we all should be focusing our energy. Not only minorities, but people that are the decision makers. If they truly want to change the system or if not, then we realize that they're just given it lip service.
James Brown:
Tyler Dragon, sports reporter for USA Today, says the league already has similar programs in place.
Tyler Dragon:
It still remains to be seen if that is going to lead to results.
James Brown:
Andrew Brandt agrees that the league has a long way to go and suggested similar programs to the one Whaley describes, but warned that the issue is complex and without easy answers.
Andrew Brandt:
Yeah, I think the obvious point is that people tend to hire people like themselves, and that's not just true in the NFL, that's not just true in sports. It's true in business, it's true in life, and diversity only comes with some steps to increase representation and NFL is doing that. Maybe they're not doing it as well as others, but I think sometimes they get faulted unfairly for things.
James Brown:
He says that there's been some improvement with diversity in the coaching ranks.
Andrew Brandt:
We see coaches, as I mentioned, like Ron Rivera, Mike McDaniel, Robert Saleh, not exclusively African American. So you can look at different ways to judge minorities. The other part of it is I think from my view, there are more women in front offices now as well, and although a very small minority, more women in the coaching. That is something that never seems to get noticed when we talk about the Rooney Rule.
James Brown:
He says that change is even happening in his sports business classes.
Andrew Brandt:
When I started teaching seven, eight years ago, I'd have a class of 50 students, it'd be 47 guys and three girls. I'm proud to report today, my classes are basically 50/50. Women being interested in this area of business or law, from my viewpoint, has really grown.
James Brown:
A more diverse pipeline could help down the road. Doug Whaley says this could too.
Doug Whaley:
I'll give you a quote from Bill Nunn, Hall of Fame scout from the Pittsburgh Steelers, the head personnel man for the 1974 draft that drafted four Hall of Famers is the gold standard of anybody in the personnel business. His saying was, "It's great to have a mentor, but it's even better to be a mentor." So all minorities, look for a mentor, but pay it forward by being a mentor.
James Brown:
If you like this show, write a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening, and do me a favor, share it with a friend. What do you think of the show?
Email me at jabrown@usatoday.com, or leave me a message at (585) 484-0339. We might have you on the show.
Thanks to Tyler Dragon, Tom Schad, Doug Whaley, and Andrew Brandt for joining me. And to Alexis Gustin and Shannon Ray Green for their production assistance. From all of us at USA Today, thanks for listening. I'm James Brown, and as always, be well.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Where are all the Black NFL coaches?
