Yeah, Wade just led the Cowboys to their first playoff win this century. I’m sure that the only reason Jerry hasn’t fired him is because he’s Bum’s kid. :rolleyes:
Yeah, after the Cowboys have underperformed under Wade’s great leadership, Wade saved his job for a least another week. If the Cowboys don’t win the Super Bowl and Jones does fire him, nobody else who’s smart will hire him. Of course, that still leaves a lot of NFL teams that will hire the retread.:rolleyes:
Before you go sniping at “retreads,” it might interest you to know that 10 of the last 12 Super Bowls have been won by “retread” coaches.
If the Cowboys or Chargers go all the way this year, that will be 11 of 13.
Bull. The ‘boys didn’t manage to win any playoff games under Bill Parcells’ ‘genius’ leadership. I’m sure that Jones was as disappointed as the team’s fans at the early exit after the 13-3 season two years ago, but freaky things do happen in football games, and that Seattle game’s ending was one of the freakiest. With this season (the excision of the historically expected late-season failure, the division championship, and especially that very decisive playoff win), I’m pretty sure that Wade’s job is perfectly safe right now, even if the Vikings pound them next weekend. (Which they quite likely will.)
You can rag on Phillips if the team falls back to 8-8 or something next season. Right now, he’s looking like a solid coach by the only measures that the team ownership cares about. And that ain’t pedigree, nor the color of his skin. (Despite Jerry sucking up the ‘Rooney rule’ fine when he hired Parcells. Which I think was the more honest thing to do–why pretend you’re actually looking at more than one candidate when you’re not? If you’re going to ignore the intent of the rule, just go the civil disobedience route–do what you want and accept the consequence.)
Really? You don’t think any of them would be hired on merits, but kept out due to a big racist conspiracy?
What do you think happens today? “Well, there’s no way I’d ever hire a black man, but now I’m forced to interview one, so…” and then they end up going against their racist convictions and hire them anyway?
“Wait a second, that smooth talking negro tricked me!!!”?
Yes. I am.
What % of NFL players are minorities? I’ll bet there are a hell of a lot more black guys in the NFL than white. Same for the NBA.
What % of wide recievers are black? Should we force teams to consider white guys for that job before they hire the better/fast/stronger black guy?
I see head coach as just another position, and there are definitely higher paying jobs ON the field than on the sidelines.
Sure. I think a couple of them would be hired on merit.
However, when asked about the Rooney Rule, minority head coaches always say that just being interviewed created opportunities for them that would not otherwise have existed.
There is… if not a conspiracy, then a form of weird groupthink right now keeping NFL teams - and more importantly, colleges - from playing white guys at tailback. There was a pretty good story in last week’s SI about it. I think something should certainly be done about it.
However, there is a big difference between head coaches and players. Head coaches are part of the league’s power structure; players are not. Head coaches often become general managers and owners. Players do not.
I disagree. There are advantages and disadvantages to every “position” in the NFL, including head coaches.
The high-dollar super-star wideouts can shine and maintain their “value” 95% on their own, regardless of a team being shitty. Yeah they need a QB that can hit them when they are open, but as long as they make the plays when they do have the chance they will survive regardless of the QB. They depend more on themselves than say, a head coach who could be the greatest coach in the world and have the shittiest team and not be able to do dick about it. They depend on the team more than just about any other person in the org.
Every position is different and they all follow different tracks. I don’t see a problem with a predominantely white HC group in the NFL and I don’t see a problem with an even MORE predominantely black WR corp. Let people stick where they thrive.
So you think the reason there have historically been almost no black or minority head coaches is that they aren’t any good? Really?
Is that the reason there are so few white WRs’?
That would be my guess.
I’m still trying to wrap my head anyone thinking that the Cowboys are in the playoffs because of Wade Phillips rather than in spite of him.
That too. It’s basically the same team that went 13-3 under Parcells, only without the headache of T.O. and without Roy Williams always getting beat deep.
In his defense, and God knows I’ve hated the Cowboys since the days of Landry (and even then to a large degree) so it pains me to say this, he’s a good regular-season coach. There have been countless coaches that fall into this category. Marty Schottenheimer, Dan Reeves, Bud Grant, guys that couldn’t quite get it done in the playoffs. Does that make them bad coaches? Certainly not, not any more than Dan Marino was a bad quarterback because he couldn’t win the Super Bowl.
The Rooney Rule is a good idea, but it’s difficult to implement. It makes sense that interviewing a minority candidate will naturally lead to more minority coaches, but the theory rarely works in practice, and I don’t see how it could ever be made to work in practice unless the fine becomes so extreme that it’s cheaper to hire a minority candidate than it is to hire the coach of your choice. The reality is that the owner can hire whomever he/she chooses, and those choices are typically made well before the interview process ever starts, so it always comes down to the “token” interview, and that offends everybody from the fans to the media to the candidates themselves.
As always, a well-intentioned idea simply doesn’t work. So, what to do? I have no idea, and I doubt anybody else has any good, practical ideas, either.
I think that’s a big part of the issue, especially in a year like this one, where there’s several “name” candidates available. When an owner already knows who he wants before the interviews even start, any other interviews are going to be fairly pointless, unless the chosen candidate snubs the team’s offer.
C’mon astorian, you can read better than that. I wasn’t sniping at all coaching retreads, I was sniping at head coaching nepotism. For examples I used Wade Phillips and Jim Mora the Younger, the latter of whom nobody has jumped up to defend, I see.
Wade seems like nice man who has my sympathy for working for Jones. If I owned a football team though, I’d never hire Phillips to be head coach. If you like him, great. You can have him.
But quite a few of the successful retreads I refer to probably WOULD have raised your ire.
Bill Belichick was a bust in Cleveland. Did he not look like another unqualified “retread” when the Patriots hired him?
Dick Vermeil was a retread who’d been out of football for ages when the Rams hired him. Did THAT look like a great move?
At the time those guys were hired, it LOOKED to a lot of people as if the Old Boys Network was at work, and that better qualified black men had been passed over yet again.
As for Wade Phillips… there’s no doubt that being Bum’s son gave him a huge advantage, in a business where “getting a foot in the door” is half the battle. But he’s been in this business a LONG time now, and has proven himself repeatedly to be a very capable defensive coordinator. I’d be HAPPY to have him as my favorite team’s defensive coordinator.
As a head coach, he’s been so-so, at best. But remember that he didn’t set out to be the Cowboys’ head coach. Like Jim zorn, he was hired as a coordinator by a flaky owner, and then booted up to head coach at the last minute. Jerry Jones doesn’t WANT a real head coach. He thinks of HIMSELF as the head coach. Wade Phillips isn’t really in charge of much, and if he’d hired a black man as head coach, that black man wouldn’t really be in charge of much.
I remember reading the same article, and I think it pointed out that it’s a bigger issue than getting blacks into coaching and QB positions, but there really are a lot of positions in football where you will see very different racial distributions.
And, really, I have to ask, why does race matter at all? It sounds to me, from the article that about Tony Dungy, that it’s really more a matter of creating opportunities. The Rooney Rule creates some opportunities but I think it could be expanded to help break a lot of the problems we see now. Sure, there’s more black coaches but, as pointed out, they’re disciples of Tony Dungy, so really, I think the fact that they’re minorities is more incidental. I think many of them would have gotten a look without the Rooney Rule too.
Why not, rather than requiring an interview with a minority, instead require a minimum number of interviews, like say 5, and have no race requirement at all. Sure, you could interview the guy you really want and 4 random assistants, but now you’d be creating the possibility of 4 more people getting that crucial interview experience. If there’s, say, 6 vacancies in an average year, and thus a minimum of 30 interviews, you don’t think at least some of them would be black? Moreover, it would also help the random white guy, who may deserve the chance, but isn’t getting an interview because he’s not a retread coach and he doesn’t even get the token interview under the Rooney Rule.
As for the racial issues with positions, well, that’s not really something the NFL can fix since most of that is done long before the players ever smell the NFL. However, the NFL probably could initiate some programs to try to encourage more black QBS and more white RBs in the youth.
See, I thought this thread was going to be about Dan Snyder’s recent skirting of the Rooney Rule. He had Jerry Gray, the secondary coach, interview for Zorn’s job while Zorn still had it, then he called up the commissioner and asked if that covered his obligation to interview a minority candidate. With that out of the way, Zorn was fired essentially the day of his last loss, and Shanahan was on his way into town. With all the rumors about Shanahan leading up to the end of the season, did Gray really get a fair interview?