NFL says all teams must add minority offensive coach, expands Rooney Rule to include women

[+OverSword]

Quote

 

All 32 NFL teams will hire a minority offensive assistant coach for the 2022 season, part of a series of policy enhancements announced Monday to address the league's ongoing diversity efforts.

The coach can be "a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority," according to the policy adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting, and will be paid from a league-wide fund. The coach must work closely with the head coach and the offensive staff, with the goal of increasing minority participation in the pool of offensive coaches that eventually produces the most sought-after candidates for head-coaching positions.

"It's a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions," said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the chairman of the NFL Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee. "We clearly have a trend where coaches are coming from the offensive side of the ball in recent years, and we clearly do not have as many minorities in the offensive coordinator [job]."

 

Link

How do you define minority in a league in which African Americans are the majority? It's true that most head coaches are white men but there are also black head coaches and plenty of minority coaches on every team in the league.  Wouldn't every team try to hire the best for the job regardless of skin tone in order to win a super bowl?  Should the NFL require that the players more accurately reflect the racial makeup of America and allow only 15% of the players on each team to be African American?  How would that go over?  This quota crap is re-friggin-diculous. 

[Zebra3]

I know of a prisoner-baby-trans-murderer that would fit in nicely as the Raiders defensive coordinator if they wanna go super woke.

Edited April 11, 2022 by Zebra3

[+Liquid Gardens]

2 hours ago, OverSword said:

It's true that most head coaches are white men but there are also black head coaches and plenty of minority coaches on every team in the league. 

We are way out of whack compared to just merely 'there are also'...

70% of NFL players are black

29.6% of assistant coaches are black

9.4% of head coaches are black

~ 7% of VPs and General Managers are black

What's the explanation for that disparity?  Those stats should just be ignored, as well as American history, this is just the effect of hiring supposedly 'the best people for the job'?  Ha speaking as a long-time former metro-Detroiter, are you familiar with the track record of the white coaches for the Detroit Lions, as compared to a recent black coach?

Looking up some additional stats, all but 2 current NFL head coaches played at least college ball, and those 2 played high school.  So why the huge difference between the makeup of players vs coaches?  It's impossible to ever establish yourself as the 'best person for the job' if you aren't given the opportunity to do that job.

2 hours ago, OverSword said:

Should the NFL require that the players more accurately reflect the racial makeup of America and allow only 15% of the players on each team to be African American?  How would that go over? 

Yes, that will then help us try to compensate for those decades/centuries where white people were discriminated against and denied opportunities, which was never.  Player does not equal coach, there are far more objective measures for evaluating players than coaches.

[XenoFish]

Whatever happened to hiring people to do a job, because they were willing or could actually do it? 

[+OverSword]

5 minutes ago, Liquid Gardens said:

What's the explanation for that disparity? 

Because great players rarely become coaches so the mediocre players who love the game and will participate at any level become coaches earlier, thus being more qualified to coach at the high levels at a younger age.

7 minutes ago, Liquid Gardens said:

speaking as a long-time former metro-Detroiter, are you familiar with the track record of the white coaches for the Detroit Lions, as compared to a recent black coach?

The problem with Detroit and other perennial losers is not so much the coaching, it is the front office practicing nepotism and unable to make the big decisions to get to the next level.   If you can't bring yourself to make the kind of changes it takes to be competitive then you deserve to lose.  Is it racism?  In the year 2022 I find that hard to swallow regardless of numbers.

They stopped checking fares on the light rail locally because surveying who was receiving the most warnings and fines revealed that 70% of infractions were given to black people. Racism?  That's what the authority operating the trains decided.  Witnessing the exodus of people that would stumble over each other when the fare inspectors got on the train or watching who did and who did not tap onto the system with their card on their way in the station gave me the impression that it was probably not racism that was resulting in so many more black people being fined.  Certainly numbers are part of a story but they are not the whole story.

[+Liquid Gardens]

58 minutes ago, OverSword said:

Because great players rarely become coaches so the mediocre players who love the game and will participate at any level become coaches earlier, thus being more qualified to coach at the high levels at a younger age.

That seems to ignore the number of mediocre black players who love the game and will participate at any level.

1 hour ago, OverSword said:

The problem with Detroit and other perennial losers is not so much the coaching, it is the front office practicing nepotism and unable to make the big decisions to get to the next level.

I'm not sure but you may have just defined a scenario of 'systemic racism' I believe.  Fully acknowledging that the problems with the Lions go way beyond anything we're discussing here, as we see the 'front office' of NFL teams is typically very under-represented by black people.  Yes nepotism can refer to friends also but usually refers to relatives, and the majority of non-black front office people are going to have non-black relatives.  Sure, maybe Detroit's front office has no racist people at all and they are making hiring decisions partly based on nepotism and who is related to them.  But even though there may be no one person who is making any racist decisions, the effect of the system is racist (and probably a lot more 'ists') as using this nepotism method systematically is excluding people because of their race and disadvantages certain minorities.

[+OverSword]

7 minutes ago, Liquid Gardens said:

That seems to ignore the number of mediocre black players who love the game and will participate at any level.

I'm not sure but you may have just defined a scenario of 'systemic racism' I believe.  Fully acknowledging that the problems with the Lions go way beyond anything we're discussing here, as we see the 'front office' of NFL teams is typically very under-represented by black people.  Yes nepotism can refer to friends also but usually refers to relatives, and the majority of non-black front office people are going to have non-black relatives.  Sure, maybe Detroit's front office has no racist people at all and they are making hiring decisions partly based on nepotism and who is related to them.  But even though there may be no one person who is making any racist decisions, the effect of the system is racist (and probably a lot more 'ists') as using this nepotism method systematically is excluding people because of their race and disadvantages certain minorities.

I have to agree with that.

For the longest time there were no black QB's in the NFL.  There are a lot now.  It did not take special rules or quotas to address that, just common sense.  

[+Liquid Gardens]

56 minutes ago, OverSword said:

For the longest time there were no black QB's in the NFL.  There are a lot now.  It did not take special rules or quotas to address that, just common sense. 

Sure, but why were there no black QBs?  I don't think it's anything having to do with their athletic abilities to play the position.  That seems to be evidence that there were other factors at play then keeping their number low, so I'm not sure why we shouldn't then suspect that these same factors affect other positions, probably more-so.  Common sense has little to do with it, if they weren't using common sense in the not-that-distant past then I don't know that we should expect it fully today.  Plus it's kinda bogue to send the message that people not treated equally should just wait for common sense to hopefully sink in and that's all we can do.

Again, I think a lot of this has to do with the differences between players and coaches.  There are a lot more players that can clearly demonstrate how they are superstars athletically, whatever issue concerning their race that works against them is countered by the team's desire to win.  I don't think that's not how it works with coaches, there aren't that many clear 'superstars' compared to players as the objective measures for coaches depend greatly I think on how good or bad the players they're coaching are.