By now we’ve all witnessed the NFL’s horrendous and biased hiring practices, particularly when it comes to Black head coaches.
Well apparently, Pete Carroll has had enough.
At the recent NFL meetings, the Seahawks coach reportedly ripped league owners and GMs for their poor track record in diversity hires.
And as you could imagine, that didn’t sit well with the targets of his message.
“He just went off,” a source told ESPN’s Adam Schefter. “He was saying, you can do anything but until owners get to know these candidates before the actual interviews and understand that they have to hire people who are different than them, it’s not going to really change.”
That source also told Schefter that Carroll said that until owners accept that candidates will look and be different than the owners themselves, the league’s hiring practices won’t improve.
They might be angry, but it’s not like this is some new revelation.
In 2021, there were seven NFL head coaching vacancies and only one Black candidate, David Culley, was hired.
In 2022, there were nine head coaching vacancies and only one Black coach, Lovie Smith, was hired.
And both of those head coaches were hired by the Houston Texans, Smith after they fired Culley after only one season with the team.
Carroll’s comments came a day after the NFL announced that all 32 NFL teams must hire a minority offensive assistant coach for the upcoming 2022 season.
League owners have no one to blame but themselves.
Hiring two Black head coaches out of 16 potential openings, and having only one team make those hires, is embarrassing.
Shockingly firing a qualified and successful Black head coach like Brian Flores is ridiculous. The Dolphins then signing a bunch of players and trading for Tyreek Hill after Flores cleaned house, acquired draft capital and waited for talent to arrive is infuriating.
And for those responding with “[Miami’s new coach] Mike McDaniel is biracial”, understand what you’re saying first before you say it.
McDaniel never identified himself as Black.
The NFL identified him as biracial because as Dr. Tracie Canada, assistant professor of anthropology at Notre Dame, noted, “He needed to be marked and qualified in a certain way so they [the NFL] can be let off the hook. There’s a reason he’s being called biracial, because the NFL needs him to be identified that way.”
It’s good to hear Pete Carroll take the owners to task for a problem that has long existed.
Hopefully, his comments are a wake-up call for the NFL’s hiring system, otherwise known as team owners.
