[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
Until fairly recently, coaches simply didn’t put black players under center, because “they weren’t smart enough” :rolleyes: to play quarterback.
In the modern NFL, and to a lesser extent, college and high school, coaches don’t give a crap what color you are as long as you can throw the ball, make good reads, and grasp the offense.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think you need to assume racial animus or distrust of black intellectual abilities to explain the historical lack of black NFL quarterbacks.
First of all, “smart” is a relative term, esp. when applied to athletes. I do not think I’ve ever heard (nor do I expect to hear) the word “cerebral” in the same sentence or even paragraph as the names “Marino,” “Namath,” or “Unitas.” These guys certainly had “football smarts,” but they were not thought of as (nor did they need to be) “intelligent” in the classical “Bell Curve” IQ sense.
Second, since the end of Jim Crow, there were plenty of black QBs in the high school and even college ranks. By the early 1980s, when Doug Williams was considered something of a pioneer in the NFL, it was fairly unremarkable to see a J.C. Watts or Turner Gill at QB in the Big 8. What’s the difference?
The difference had largely to do with the styles of offense. Very, very few high school or college teams ran a pro-style, dropback passing offensive scheme till the mid-1980s (if not later – the option offense persisted at elite college programs into the '90s, and I’m sure some high schools were running the single wing within living memory). Time and again, you would see black QBs moved to other positions when they moved up in the ranks. The handful of lower-level programs that were running an offense that might effectively groom a guy to play pro QB were (for whatever reason) heavily white.
Now, that raises a different question: why were blacks able to thrive in option or other offenses where a running QB was an asset, but not in dropback passing offenses? The perceived reason had little to do with smarts, a lot to do with speed (which is why black guys pushed out of the QB position were often converted to receivers or running backs). I have no idea whether there is a genetic basis for black guys being faster, but I know that a lot of black guys who were faster thrived in offenses where footspeed and running were rewarded (and hence would have had little incentive to develop pass-rush-reading or receiver-targeting skills). Slow white guys with bad knees who found themselves as QB didn’t have the option of scrambling, so they had to make a virtue of necessity with passing skills. The stereotypical knock on black QBs was not “he’s dumb.” It’s “he won’t stay in the damn pocket.”
Now, with more lower-level programs deploying sophisticated passing schemes, there’s more and more black (and white) guys who have the opportunity to develop those skills rather than just being a de facto running back at QB. At the same time, interestingly, the NFL has discovered that QBs can actually be an asset as runners (classsic dropback passers usually ran only of necessity, and with poor results), so being a speedy scrambling guy willing to take the ball and run when your receivers aren’t open is an asset for a black or white QB, rather than the knock that it used to be.