If there were good minority candidates they would be hired
having a few token black coaches is a backwards step for race relations
Tough to follow up that enlightened wisdom.
Lovie Smith wasn’t given a chance.
There’s only 32 teams, its hard to apply EEO standards to a pool of positions so small. Today’s game is about money, not race. You don’t get money unless you win and you don’t win unless you hire the best personnel. Race is irrelevant. I’m black and I say they should quit their bitching.
Ergo, the NFL is a racist.
I missing the pre-game show, but you do know that the NFL is going over the rule right? So it’s not just random talk:
I wouldn’t consider Mike Tomlin a “token”.
The general population of the US has blacks at around 12%, right? And 4/32 is 12.5%. So currently there’s one less black coach than you’d expect. Unless you think the coaching should reflect the player demographics, but there’s no reason for that to be the case - most NFL coaches never played in the NFL.
Last year, with Crennel, Lovie Smith, and Raheem Morris, they were overrepresented at 18.75%.
So, big fucking deal. The NFL is a meritocracy. Does anyone seriously think any owner is thinking “Well, I think this guy could get me to the playoffs and turn my team around and sell tickets and merchandise, but… well he’s not white, so we’ll pass”?
no I don’t either Mike Tomlin is a good coach
I just don’t think there’s a need to have minority coaches for the sole purpose of saying you have minority coaches
What’s especially egregious is when a team knows exactly what direction they want to go in, they’ve had a specific target in mind for months, and they’re going hard after him, but they still have to conduct token interviews anyway. How shitty that must be for the interview candidates. What happens when everyone knows the interviews are token and no one will bother to take them? Is the team punished?
The candidates often just don’t come in, if that becomes clear ahead of time.
It’s happened once when Detroit hired Mariucci off the 49ers back in '03. The Lions claimed nobody would come in to interview, and some potential candidates claimed it was because they knew there was no purpose to coming in for a token interview. They were fined a quarter mil, if I recall correctly, which isn’t all that bad a punishment for any franchise.
I don’t know if the rule still serves a purpose, but it certainly served a purpose before it was developed. The number of minority (not just black) coaches wasn’t reflective of general US demographics back then. And certainly, not all, or even a majority, of the minority assistants and position coaches now are token hires.
Please explain the source of your expertise on race relations.
The Lions were fined $20,000 in that situation a few years ago - although like I said in another thread, the real punishment was that they wound up with Marty Mornhinweg as their coach.
The rule itself is a good idea, I think. You get jobs like this by impressing the people who hire the coaches and GMs, which you do by doing a good job and getting yourself in the interview room. There are eight new head coaches and five new GMS this season, all of them white guys. There are, I think, three black head coaches and one Latino coach in the NFL and four black GMs out of 32 teams. 67 percent of NFL players are black.
I’m a liberal, and I’m not getting too worked up about the lack of diversity in the recent coaching hires. 32 head coaches is a small sample size and all that. If I could magically wave my arm and increase the number of minority coaches, I would do so, but of course that’s not possible.
The Rooney rule has been a good thing, by and large. It leads to some unfortunate side-effects (one of which SenorBeef just mentioned) but it’s a good thing overall. It’s not a magic cure, though.
Why do you feel that the coaching staff demographics should closer match the NFL player demographics than general populaton demogrpahics?
Edit: That makes me wonder what the racial demographics of high school and college football are. There are way more elite black athletes as a percentage of the population than average, so you see the overpresented in the NFL. But there’s no requirement that a coach was an elite athlete - you could’ve played at the high school or college level or not at all and still be a good coach.
I see no reason to use that as the basis of a comparison. The demographics of the NFL look nothing like those of the country as a whole. Here’s a demographic look at Division I of the NCAA. There aren’t too many coaches who used to play in the NFL, but I think most of them played in college at least.
You seem to be implying that the fact that the NFL is mostly black players is relevant to what percentage of coaches should be. I think you’d need to make a case for that - I personally don’t see the necesary correlation between being an elite athlete and being a good coach.
I think it’s a better basis for a comparison than the general population, yes. But the pool of NCAA football players is about evenly split between white and black athletes. The NFL is nowhere near that either.
There’s more of a reason to expect the demographics to resemble NFL players than the general population. Every NFL coach has at least played football before. In fact, as best as I can tell, every currently employed NFL head coach played in college, which has over 50% black players at the Division I level. There’s no reasonable metric for arguing black NFL coaches are overrepresented, and plenty for arguing underrepresentation.
Prior to the Rooney rule, there were white coaches for the sake of having white coaches. The rule has been good for teams because it has reduced the recycling of failed coaches. Can you point to a single minority coach that was hired entirely because they were a minority?
Teams are occasionally granted exemptions. Some individuals will take the interview for the networking. There’s a considerable amount of evidence that indicates that merely being interviewed once increases a coach’s chance of being hired in the future.
So far as I can tell, nobody is arguing that the Rooney Rule isn’t a good rule. What they are arguing is that there is nothing inherently wrong with minorities not getting hired. Short of mandating a certain percentage of minority hires, there’s nothing more to be done.
Good. I hope they do get hired. Mike Tomlin, Tony Dungy, et al., have been good for the league and have worked out pretty well as these things go. But the earnest handwringing of the media with their insinuations of racism, totally unfounded except for the implication that because racism exists this must be a case of it, is uncalled for.
I’ve never heard it called overt racism, only institutional. IME, most commentators go out of their way to not call it racism. The problem is that black coaches weren’t being given any chance to prove themselves as candidates for head coaching positions. Dungy probably could have been successful in the late 1980s had he been given a chance.
Bottom line: if qualified candidates aren’t being considered, and these candidates have skin color in common, what is the cause?