You get into the NFL by being an elite athlete, which there’s a racial component of (I mean, I know we’re supposed to pretend race doesn’t exist and yada yada but there’s no other way to explain it)
Whereas you get to become an NFL head coach by having elite leadership/scheming/various other abilities.
There’s some overlap. People that have played football at some level are more likely to discover their strengths as a coach and enter the field, or their love of the game will drive them to be coaches, etc. But I’m not convinced that being an elite athlete or even a great player has any real bearing on being a coach.
So essentially the elite athlete racial correlation that makes for the NFL being mostly black is not connected to elite leadership/scheming/other coaching qualities which are much more distributed demographically.
I don’t like the idea of people being hired because of their race, religion or whatever…
The only guy that I think should hae been given a shot this year was Arizona’s DC. I’ll admit, I don’t know that many people black or white, qualified for a HC job in the NFL. But I was happy to see only one retread (Andy Reid) get a job. Everyone else is a first time HC in the pros, correct?
Lovie Smith may get another job someday. I doubt Romeo Cornell will.
But ultimately, you want the best person to get the job. Winning makes everyone colorblind.
I just thought the CBS guys like James Brown were being way overdramatic calling it “a sobering topic” and making it seem like the greatest injustice ever that no minority coaches were hired this year.
That’s how I saw it, yes. You can call it an aftereffect of racism or a different type of racism, but the point is that it’s a racial issue even if it’s the result of things other than direct hatred or a refusal to hire black people.
It’s cultural. The demographics of every sport have changed over time. They change because of a variety of socioeconomic issues related to opportunity and exposure to the sport, not because one race is better at sports than another. Read GD thread about this some time if you can stand it.
How are you going to discover an aptitude for coaching if you aren’t interested enough in the sport to play it in a serious way? I think almost every NFL coach played in college. I remember there was one exception a few years ago, but I forget who it was. If you’re into football, you probably play until you reach your ceiling and then go into coaching. Let’s look at the playoff coaches from this season:
Jim Harbaugh (retired NFL player)
John Harbaugh (played at Miami of Ohio)
Bill Belichick (played at Wesleyan)
Mike Smith (East Tennessee State and one season in the CFL)
John Fox (played at San Diego State)
Gary Kubiak (retired NFL player)
Pete Carroll (played at Pacific, failed tryout with the World Football League)
Mike Shanahan (played at Eastern Illinois)
Mike McCarthy (played at Baker University)
Marvin Lewis (played at Idaho State)
Leslie Frazier (retired NFL player)
Chuck Pagano (played at Wyoming)
Again, it makes no sense to compare this to the population at large because people don’t decide at random to try their hand at coaching football. You don’t have to be an elite athlete to play college football. You do at Alabama, perhaps, but there are more than 100 Division I teams. Look at the colleges mentioned on this list: a few aren’t Division I, and none are elite. So the question of why the demographics of NFL head coaches (three black HCs) look nothing like those of Division I (almost half the players are black) remains.
It’s a shame a serious issue related to football got discussed during a football game. That must have been terrible.
The racial demographics for the sport have changed because actual racism used to keep non-white players out, quite a long while ago. Are you seriously saying that 67% of the people who show an interest in playing football are black and therefore there’s no athletic disparity component to this? Presumably at the college level, every player is just as interested in being an NFL player, so why the disparity between college racial demographics and pro?
I think it’s much more plausible than saying most NFL players are black because black people are better athletes, yes. Consider how difficult it is to make it to the pros and the possibility that people who come from a better economic background or have other options will eventually choose to do something else.
At Wesleyan and Pacific and Idaho State? I doubt it. Maybe they would play in the NFL if they could, but if that were the case they wouldn’t be at these schools.
Does this, to you, explain the disparity in the high school, college, and pro ranks? I mean - significantly more blacks play in the NFL than in college, but you’d have to think anyone in college talented enough to make it to the NFL would choose to do so, unless you think all the non-blacks are signing up to be billionaire playboy secret agents instead.
I think that would pretty much do it, yes. As the competition gets tougher and there are more demands on a player’s time, people are going to drop out. What you are left with is people who think a longshot NFL career - which in most cases lasts just a couple of years and doesn’t leave you rich at all - is their best option. As much as most people would love to play professional sports, there really are safer and more stable career options.
To further Marley23’s point, this argument doesn’t hold up well when you start to examine other sports as well.
African Americans were over-represented in the MLB as recently as the 90s. They’re currently under-represented compared to the general population in MLB. The reverse is true for Hispanics. Elite racially based athletic success as an explanation completely falls apart for baseball.
Young athletes will go where they believe they have the best shot to succeed, whether that is professional athletics or out of sports entirely.
I think coaches and players come from the same larger talent pool. Most coaches and are not former NFL players, but almost all of them are former high school and college players. I think that would probably be true of most NFL executives. If I ran down the background of every single current NFL coach I think you would find all of them played in college. (I see Todd Haley is one exception: he never played college football, but his father was an executive with the Steelers.) If you’re interested in football to the point you’ll make a career of it, it stands to reason you tried to play it, and it stands to reason that you’d most likely get into coaching after you can’t play anymore because of injury or insufficient talent.
And it’s true I’ve left out some factors. We didn’t discuss why athletes choose one sport over another, for example, which I think is what Great Antibob was referring to. Like I said, some people have made good arguments about this in GD (others say it’s race and bang that drum endlessly).
This is just a thought but maybe the proportion of black coaches in the NFL might reasonably be expected to approach the percentage of black college grads. While college graduation does not seem to be any indicator of prosperity as a player in the NFL, I would venture to guess that all NFL coaches are college graduates. Further it might be argued that the more talented you are, that is, the more gifted you are athletically, the less inclined you might be to apply yourself to those areas necessary to succeed as a professional coach.
Still one more problem is that coaches seem to beget coaches and if your dad was a successful coach you have got a big leg up. Since the fathers of today’s prospective coaches were seemingly ineleigible for head coaching positions that bootstrapping is also unavailable.
I am asking how PSXer came to know so much about this issue, especially regarding the claim that this sets back race relations. And for that matter I’d like to know why he is so sure none of the black candidates were qualified.
I’d be comfortable in arguing that sports are one of the most fair meritocracies that exists in the world, and that as a multibillion dollar industry, owners aren’t going to screw themselves out of success due to racism.
In the past, when they colluded so that all teams excluded minorities, both as players and owners, no one had a competitive disadvantage because it was a level playing field. But once one team began accepting minorities and gaining a competitive edge, they all had to follow suit lest they be left behind.
Now to allow racism to guide your decision is just bad business and something that could cost you tens of millions of dollars. Even if NFL owners were secret members of the KKK, I still don’t think they’d pass over a black candidate that they thought could lead their franchise to more prominence (and merchandizing sales).
So I’d say NFL front offices probably do a pretty good and fair job of sorting through qualifications now.