Looks like Jim Harbaugh is going to the Vikings, according to SI.
That’s part of it. Probably most of it. The “good old boys” aren’t black. See also Eric Bieniemy, who I hear every year being mentioned as a great pick but overlooked. Somebody hire the man.
For problems outside of racism look at Houston. Jack Easterby’s previous experience was as chaplain and basically a motivational speaker for players, and then joined Houston with the nebulous title of “Executive Vice President of Team Development”. He got really close to Cal McNair, team CEO and son of the owner, and was involved in getting rid of the GM after only being there a couple of months. He then was promoted to a position where he was running just about everything. He was even GM himself briefly.
Nick Caserio was hired as GM in large part because he was close to Easterby.
Easterby is behind some of the worst decisions in Houston, such as trading away Hopkins for nothing, and has overseen the team turn from a contender to sitting on the bottom with the likes of the Jets and Jaguars. But he’s still there, making things worse and hanging out with his buddies.
Jeff Fisher held the record for the most number of losses for a head coach, and only had six winning seasons for over two decades in the NFL. Yet he stuck around forever because people liked him. From what I’ve heard he is a legitimately nice guy, but still. The Rams finally put in a new coach (McVay) after firing Fisher, and the rest is history.
(Fisher will also be the head coach of the Michigan Panthers in the USFL, good luck kitties!)
Look at how many head coaches have their own kids as coaches on their rosters. Enough that it’s a cliche. Racism is a huge problem in the NFL, but it’s not the only problem. Cronyism and nepotism is also running rampant. Yet when I say “good old boys”, I do mostly mean racism, especially in this context.
Nepotism in a problem. Hiring friends and mediocre retread coaches is also a problem, but one that’s diminishing relative to what it was in the previous few decades. White guys hiring white guys is a problem.
But your statement suggests that Daboll, who’s hiring started all this, is somehow a beneficiary of being an insider and not based on his resume. I think we ought to be precise when throwing out these criticisms.
This article seems a bit ironic in retrospect:
They mention Flores and Bieniemy as the top candidates, which was probably wishful thinking.
I do think it’s fair to note that the Bears were not mentioned in Flores’ lawsuit.
They are mentioned but aren’t part of the material complaints. All 32 teams are mentioned by name.
I suspect the guy has a strong individual case against the Giants and Dolphins, but I think the complaint is pretty much trash. It’s obviously written for public consumption and for snippets to be used in tweets.
A few of the obvious issues:
- Describing a business where the employees earn millions of dollars and have substantial freedom to change teams “like a plantation”.
- Implying that ~70% black players should translate to black owners, executives and coaches. Please show me evidence that a typical career progression is from NFL player → coach or NFL player → GM.
- Citing wins and losses as the only valid measure of performance for a head coach.
- The list of injunctive relief is wildly impractical. Can you imagine a team being unable to fire a coach without airing every shred of dirty laundry publicly?
Overall the document reads like a SDMB post. If the other coaches referenced are participating in this suit you’d think they’d offer some material accusations and not just some supposition that was cooked up after browsing PFR for 15 minutes.
As an aside, it would be a pretty baller move for Daboll to withdraw from the Giants job citing a lack of organizational integrity. The Giants are likely to get absolutely hammered by the league in the form of lost draft picks and fines, Daboll should bail now. He’ll have no shortage of other suitors.
By floundering after he left Andy Reid’s orbit, Matt Nagy probably has turned people off Bieniemy. Which is totally unfair.
We’ll know the NFL has gotten past its racist hiring practices when guys like Flores, Todd Bowles, Raheem Morris and Leslie Frazier get hired to second gigs after getting fired from their first ones.
I’m not persuaded that the Bieniemy thing has anything to do with race. There’s a fairly long list of very successful coordinators who took a long time to get an HC offer. Fangio was a DC for close to 20 years before getting tapped. Mike Zimmer took over a decade to get an offer. It took Arians over a decade as a OC to get a gig. Sean McDermott took 8 years. Even nepotism incarnate Kyle Shanahan took 9 years as a OC before he got the top spot. There are a number of reasons to doubt that Bieniemy is some wunderkind in the mold of McVay. There’s a handful of Coordinators in the league without HC shots who are as impressive or more impressive than him…and who haven’t been stuck coaching into February the last couple seasons.
We still haven’t seen him as head coach of a real NFL team yet; the closest was as HC of the Jets.
The TB defense has a lot to do with their championship last year. They dominated KC in the big game. Bowles should get credit for that.
People will always find excuses to hand wave away the extremely low number of Black coaches in football.
If you don’t think Black people have the mental capacity to coach, you won’t see a problem.
Might as well just come out and say it.
Apologies if this has been discussed upthread.
Last year, the league initiated an interesting new policy to reward teams that help develop minority coaches and executives. If one of your minority coaches or execs is hired for a higher position with another team, you receive compensatory third round draft picks. For instance, when the Bears hired the Chiefs’ Ryan Poles as their new GM, KC was awarded two third round picks.
This rule incentivizes teams to hire lower-level minority coaches and execs, and give them real responsibilities. But it does nothing to incentivize teams to hire minority head coaches or general managers, because people at those positions are almost never hired away for higher positions.
In fact, it may dis-incentivize certain hires. Denver, for instance, might not have considered hiring the Chiefs’ Eric Bieniemy as their head coach, because that would have given their division rival two extra draft picks.
All in all I think it’s an excellent policy, but as often happens good intentions can have unintended consequences.
I didn’t like the policy.
A lot of minority coaches didn’t either - they said it made it sound like minority coaches weren’t good enough to ‘earn’ chances on their own and teams needed bribes to develop minority personnel.
The issue is what it’s always been - the people at the top (the owners) are the ones ultimately making the top hiring decisions, either personally or in consultation with their current GM/HC. And they tend to to limit themselves to the same pool of candidates, some of them having failed at multiple stops along the way. And those candidates, taken from a limited pool, tend to take their assistants from a similar limited pool. Things are surely changing but slowly.
They owners are not going to really change their ways unless the league office forces them to - unlikely as the owners clearly dictate to the league office rather than vice-versa.
Or the owners themselves decide it is not only morally right but that ultimately improved success on the field will come from actually considering a wider pool of candidates. Dan Rooney came to this conclusion himself and encouraged other owners to do this but that part hasn’t worked out. Maybe that’ll change in 50 years when the younger generation takes over.
Case in point: Joe Judge. Sure, he was a coordinator - a special teams coordinator. But did anybody really think he would produce better than all those other OC and DC candidates across the league? Or that Dave Gettleman was going to turn the front office around and make them a perennial contender? Apparently, the Giants did. They hoped the relative success of the Patriots and Panthers attached itself to individuals.
And now that the Joe Judge experiment has failed and Gettleman has been allowed to gracefully retire rather than be fired, they’re going back and running the same hiring playbook, i.e. pick up a coordinator (Daboll) and front office guy (Schoen) from a recent successful team - the Bills in both cases this time. They’re hoping, like most NFL franchises do, that success somehow follows people, rather than really considering how and why successful franchises are successful.
Likewise firing Jim Caldwell (who was actually building something decent in Detroit) and replacing him with Matt Patricia.
Or firing Lovie Smith after a 10 win season to be replaced by Marc Trestman (and then by John Fox and Nagy - oof)
There’s now some rumbling that the Browns paid coach Hue Jackson for “tanking” in 2016/2017.
Are worms crawling out of a really big can? Time will tell.
I’ve been having this same argument with a friend of mine for 10 years now. I always point out that they started that season 7-1 but went 3-5 in the second half, and there was a clear feeling around the league that the team was bottoming out. Smith would not likely have done better than Trestman’s 8-8 the following year.
That said, Trestman, Fox and Nagy were all bad hires. /tangent
Yeah, Lovie got a 9 year tenure with the bears with only 3 playoff wins. I don’t think he’s a good example of anything.
Speaking of retreads, Doug Pederson to the Jags:
Their first choice was reportedly Byron Leftwich. The hubbub out there is he wanted Trent Baalke out as GM and that didn’t happen so he pulled his name from consideration.
On a positive note, they should have a good draft position in 2023.
I don’t really know much about Pederson or why he was fired from the Eagles, but he has a winning record as a HC and a Super Bowl ring, But your language seems down on him. What’s the issue?