OPINION: The NFL fails to promote black leadership. Like most US institutions

There are three things in life in this country that you can always depend on: death, taxes and sportswriters criticizing the NFL for its lack of black head coaches.

With the firing of David Culley by the Houston Texans after just one term, the league is left with only one black coach, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers. And while Tomlin, who has never lost a single season in 15 and was the youngest manager to win a Super Bowl, is probably sick of being asked to say something he has absolutely no control over, he doesn’t usually hold back a comment. when asked.

During a segment on HBO’s “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel” in February 2021, he told Gumbel, “We can’t keep doing the same things we’ve done and think the outcome is going to change.”

And that was when there were three black coaches in the league.

But there’s one aspect of this conversation that’s often overlooked when it comes to this annual critique of the NFL’s hiring practices: There aren’t many walks of American life that are very different.

In August, ESPN reported that after Dennis Green became the first black coach of a Power 5 conference football program in 1981, only 39 dark-skinned coaches had been hired by such a school since then. In fact, more than half of those colleges have never had an African-American instructor, including the two programs that played Monday in the national championship, Georgia and Alabama. Georgia hired a black athletic director once, in 2004. That’s it. And that’s still an advantage over Alabama, which was reportedly one of 24 Power 5 schools that had never hired a nonwhite head coach or athletic director.

But it’s not just football.

In the same month that the conversation between Gumbel and Tomlin took place, Fortune noted that since it began publishing its Fortune 500 list in 1955, only 19 of the 1,800 CEOs listed were black. In 93 years, only six dark-skinned men have received Oscar nominations for best director and none have won. When Kevin Merida was hired in June, he became the second African American to lead the Los Angeles Times in its 140-year history. Devils! Since the United States Senate first met in 1789, there have only been 11 black senators.

So I suppose we could spend this time repeating the same tiresome discussions about the shortcomings of the NFL and the racism tied to it. Or we could look at this issue through a panoramic lens: Black leadership is in short supply everywhere.

This is not an attempt to excuse the NFL. Contempt has been earned.

But NFL teams are owned by businessmen who spend a lot of time interacting with other business leaders. They are aware of who is in the room making decisions and, more importantly, who is not. Don’t you think they’ve noticed how few black CEOs there have been in the half-century of Fortune 500 lists? Time and time again we hope that a league that infamously resisted black leadership at the quarterback position for decades is somewhere in corporate America, Hollywood and the so-called liberal media.

In September, ESPN contributor Richard Lapchick noted that the Sports Media Report on Race and Gender found that the industry that likes to ridicule the NFL for having overwhelmingly white and male leaders remains overwhelmingly white and male. .

When I mentioned this to my husband, a retail executive with more than 30 years at six companies told me he had never had a black boss. I too have had less than a handful. And you?

This conversation about NFL coaches is one we can have about many industries and fields in this country. This is not a lack of qualified candidates.

It’s not just about tightening the Rooney Rule or updating human resource policies. And surely this is not a coincidence. It’s about the sensibilities of a country that welcomed its first black president with a “birther” movement led by a reality star whose conspiracy theories about the first black president were legitimized by the media and likeminded elected officials. .

In fact, the only person in the whole ordeal who was forced to show proof of anything was the black president.

The reason for all of this is the real conversation we need to have, instead of picking quotes from Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that may make some people feel good. Because it’s not just the NFL that has trouble valuing black leadership.

Is United States.

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