As the NFL continues to co-opt the symbols of the Black Lives Matter Movement, Black head coaches are pushed to the margins.
Like most public-facing institutions in the summer of 2020, the National Football League faced a considerable amount of public scrutiny. In order to placate rising external demand for some sort of expression of Black solidarity on the part of the league, the NFL’s commissioner Roger Goodell recorded a statement in which he, on behalf of the league condemned “racism and the systematic oppression of Black people.” He then offered a quasi-apology for not listening to NFL players and declared that the league supported the Black Lives Matter movement. In the months to follow, the NFL put out a full-on public relations offence to pacify demands for racial justice within the league. The NFL pledged to donate $250 million over ten years to social justice causes supported by its players. The league, similar to the NBA, allowed players to wear one of six pre-determined, almost apolitical slogans such as, “Stop Hate” or “It Takes All of Us” on their helmets and even started allowing teams to play “Lift Every Voice and Sing” before each game.
It’s unquestionable that these changes, made during a particularly lucrative and fashionable junction of time to signal support of the Black community, fit squarely into the notion of interest convergence. Interest convergence, a theory posited by critical race theory pioneer Derrick Bell, stipulates that advancements in favour of Black interests only occur when, and are limited by, the economic and political interests of the white ruling class. However, what is particularly nefarious about the NFL’s newfound public stance is that it is a blatant attempt to obscure how racial capitalism fuels the NFL and its operations. There is no greater embodiment of the NFL’s superficial alignment with the Black Lives Matter movement than through the continued lack of opportunities available to Black head coaches in the league.
As of the writing of this article, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin is the only Black head coach in the NFL, a thirty-two-team league whose player pool is approximately 70% Black. Including Tomlin, there were only three Black coaches who helmed teams throughout the 2021 season. Two of them were let go during the traditional postseason firing cycle for diametrically opposing yet equally confounding reasons. David Culley was hired by the Houston Texans following the 2020 season, finally receiving his chance at a head coaching position after spending twenty-seven years in various assistant coaching roles. Already careening after allowing his predecessor to trade franchise stalwart Deandre Hopkins for an aging David Johnson, the Texans gave Culley a roster riddled with injuries. Culley was also tasked with addressing Deshaun Watson’s role in the organization after it became public knowledge that he faced twenty-two civil lawsuits for sexual assault and misconduct. It would take nothing short of an act of God to turn the fortunes of the organization around within three years, let alone one season, and yet that was all he was afforded. After the Texans finished the season with a 4-13 record, Culley was let go.
After spending a decade under the tutelage of Bill Belichick in New England, Brian Flores inherited a similarly decrepit situation with the Miami Dolphins in 2019. The team went into the season with the apparent intention of tanking for a quarterback in the star-studded 2020 draft. The Dolphins began their season 0-7, but as a harbinger for things to come, Flores managed to conclude the last nine games of the season with a 5-4 record. In 2020 the Dolphins improved further, finishing the season with a 10-6 record and having a defence that ranked among the league’s best in terms of points per game allowed. The Dolphins took a slight step back in 2021 but still finished above .500 with a 9-8 record. Despite the progress displayed over the 2020 and 2021 seasons, Flores was let go amidst rumours of a poor relationship with the team’s front office.
What is extractable from the Flores and Culley firings is that, like all spheres of professional life, Black coaches must meet a standard of excellence from the outset. This standard is often not conciliatory to the environments they enter into, nor is it the same standard that their white counterparts are expected to adhere to. By the nature of how coaching vacancies emerge, Black coaches are routinely expected to clean up the substantial messes that their white predecessors helped to create, often in a wholly unreasonable amount of time (i.e. Steve Wilks, 2018). Even when that reclamation project shows progress, if it does not go at a near-miraculous pace expected by the organization, then teams are quick to scapegoat their Black coaches (i.e. Jim Caldwell, 2017).
The greatest irony in all of this is the Rooney Rule, a policy of affirmative action that requires teams to interview at least one racialized candidate for each head coaching vacancy, was borne out of these exact conditions. The firings of Tony Dungy and Dennis Green in 2002 after both coaches had a single subpar season following years of sustained success in their respective roles, eerily similar to the circumstances behind the firing of Brian Flores. Since its implementation in 2003, teams have routinely used the policy as an administrative hurdle to jump during their hiring processes. Numerous teams have been caught conducting sham interviews with racialized candidates simply to meet the rule’s criteria. Given the lack of regulatory bite that the Rooney Rule has and teams’ inclination to hire based on connections to legendary coaching trees, the drive to hire and retain Black coaches is mostly non-existent. As a result, the representation of Black candidates at head coaching positions has been in a holding pattern for almost twenty years. The NFL currently has fewer Black coaches than when the policy was first instituted.
In a league that relies almost exclusively on predominantly Black labour to generate its nearly $10 billion in revenue, it’s truly jarring to see how inhospitable the NFL is to Black head coaches. The fundamental truth about increasing the number of Black head coaches is that there must be a coincidental reduction in space and opportunity afforded to the demographic that has always had a seat at the table. Until those in hiring capacities reckon meaningfully with its interest-convergent practices, then the gulf between the league’s social justice branding and its active role in perpetuating the systematic oppression it claims to condemn will only widen.