Lots of people think they know football.
Most don't. Watching is not the same as studying. Being able to fake the jargon is not the same as knowing. Caring deeply about the fortunes of one team or another is not the same as developing a deep understanding of the tactics and techniques that successfully leverage talent. While professional football presents as the most elemental of contests--strong men attempting to physically impose their will on other strong men in an effort to control real estate--it is a dauntingly deep subject. It's so complex its best coaches spend unholy hours "scheming" game plans. More than any other game Americans play for big money, football is a game of nuance and design.
As they say, a good coach can take his and beat yours. He can take yours and beat his. At the game's highest levels, a head coach can be the most important individual attached to a team.
I don't particularly like admitting that because there's a lot of coach worship inherent in sports gasbaggery. Coaches aren't--and aren't supposed to be--moral avatars. Like the rest of us, they ought to be bound by standards of decency and decorum. We ought to expect them to do the right thing. When they don't, we shouldn't make excuses for them. But while the pious and arrogant stereotype is irksome, a good football coach is worth his salary.
And very hard to find. There aren't enough to fill the 32 head coaching positions available in the National Football League. Some teams have to settle for mediocre (or bad) coaches.
No billionaire owner wants to settle for a mediocre coach. (Let's posit that every NFL owner wants to win as often as possible.) If everyone is trying to hire the best possible coach, isn't it reasonable to assume the best candidates get hired?
If not, why not?
You know the answer. Because football is a team endeavor, there's a subjective component to evaluating talent. Not everyone agrees on the criteria for what makes a good coach. There's no perfect correlation between won-lost records and coaching ability. Case in point: The Arizona Cardinals just hired former Texas Tech head coach (and briefly, USC offensive coordinator) Kliff Kingsbury as their new head coach. Kingsbury is 39 years old and coached at Texas Tech for six years, compiling a won-lost record of 35-40.
Unimpressive. But there's an argument for Kingsbury's hiring. Before coming to Texas Tech, he coached quarterbacks at Houston, where his pupil Case Keenum broke a number of NCAA passing records, and at Texas A&M where he was Johnny Manziel's position coach. He had QBs Baker Mayfield and Patrick Mahomes at Texas Tech; the former is a leading candidate for NFL Rookie of the Year while the latter is the league's presumptive MVP. The Cardinals have a young raw quarterback named Josh Rosen, which they took with the 10th pick of last year's draft. And, because they were pitifully bad this past season, they also have the first pick in this year's draft.
So the Cardinals hired Kingsbury to either work with Rosen or with the new young quarterback they might take as the first pick in this year's draft, which could be the Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray even though he's undersized for a football player and has already signed a contract to play baseball in the Oakland A's organization. They figure that if Kingsbury can coach a transcendent quarterback, things will turn out all right.
It's a gamble. I don't know if it's a good one. Because, like you, I don't know football.
But I do know the NFL has a problem. Roughly 70 percent of its players are black. At the beginning of the season, only eight of their 32 teams were led by black coaches. Six of them got fired. (One of them was Steve Wilks, who was replaced by the white Kingsbury after a single season in Arizona.) Now there are two black head coaches, with the Miami Dolphins still considering a couple of black candidates. This looks bad.
Especially after the fiasco over the national anthem and the essential blackballing of the outspoken Colin Kaepernick. It looks bad enough that Dale Hansen, the outspoken Dallas sportscaster, crawled the league last week for its "covert racism."
I appreciate Hansen's outspokenness. I don't think he's exactly wrong, but he's not quite right, either.
The problem isn't so much racist owners, though I would be surprised to learn there were no covert racists in the executive suites, as a lack of imagination abetted by the cover of subjective analysis. There are few black coaches because there are relatively few candidates, and there are relatively few candidates because of a kind of racial profiling that begins when kid football first begins being organized by adults.
The reason there aren't more black head coaches in the NFL is because, starting with youth leagues, black players are assigned certain roles, while white players other roles. White kids are more likely to play quarterback because we are used to the idea of white kids playing quarterback.
At the entry level, it's not such a great honor to be a quarterback. On some youth teams, the quarterback exists to hand the ball off to the more talented. Still, experience at the position plays a role in determining who plays quarterback in high school and college. Having played quarterback, you have a better chance of coaching quarterbacks. And, if like Kliff Kingsbury, you develop a reputation as a great quarterback coach, a better chance of becoming an NFL head coach.
It took generations for black quarterbacks not to be seen as a novelty in the NFL (though you could argue blacks are still under-represented at the position). Without affirmative action like the Rooney Rule--which requires NFL teams to at least interview black candidates for coaching jobs--we might never get to the point where a black coach has a fair chance of landing an NFL head coaching job.
It's not that there aren't a lot of good black candidates for head coaching jobs, it's that teams don't have good ways of identifying them. Just like we don't have good ways of identifying good white candidates. The only way to find out whether someone can coach or not is to give them a chance.
And we don't really give black people chances at the same rate we give other people chances in this country. Because it's easy to rationalize our institutional racism. A lot easier than coaching football.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 01/15/2019