[TV orNotTV] Dog Bites Man: NFL Discriminates Against Black Head Coaches
PGage
Nobody, least of all African-Americans, will find this story in todays WaPost actual news, but it is helpful to have it documented and publicized. In a league where on average 60% of the players are AA, currently 9% (3) of the HC’s are AA - the same number as 19 years ago, when the “Rooney Rule” was established to require teams to interview AA candidates for coaching vacancies. AA coaches of teams that win 50% or more of their season’s games are more than twice as likely to be fired. AA head coaches had to serve longer at lower levels of the profession than comparable white coaches.
Like any complex problem there are several factors involved, but the main was is racism - and not in some systemic, abstract, impersonal sense, but in the very specific, personal and human sense. It is the racist attitudes and values of the team Owners.
BTW, I label this as an un ambiguously TV topic. As the Post notes: “75 of the country’s 100 most-watched television programs in 2021 were NFL games.”
--