Written by There is little job security for NFL head coaches. It has been said NFL stands for Not For Long, rather than National Football League. But the league which has struggled to promote African American and other minority coaches to head coaching positions, despite having put forward and expanded its Rooney Rule to promote diversity in hiring, had a particularly bad week last week when the Houston Texans fired David Culley after just one season and the Miami Dolphins cut ties with Brian Flores, despite consecutive winning seasons and leading his team to wins in 8 of its last 9 in 2021. That left just one active African American head coach, Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin.
Neither Culley or Flores expected to be fired or should have been by any neutral measure. Culley had taken over a crisis situation in Houston. with a star quarterback away from the field because of sexual assault allegations and very little forward momentum. But in a season where the Texans figured to be bad and were, Culley found and developed a low-cost rookie third round draft pick in Davis Mills into a competent NFL quarterback. With DeShaun Watson’s future in doubt both in Houston and in the sport due to his off-field behavior that was akin to pulling a rabbit out of hat and leaves the franchise in a far better situation than Culley found it a year ago. Similarly in Miami, Flores had in his three seasons, built a potentially outstanding defense and had Tua Tagovailoa beginning to show some of the promise that made him the 5th pick in 2020 Draft.
Much has been made about how poorly the league is doing in hiring minority coaches. But that Culley and Flores are gone after just one season and three seasons, respectively, points to an even worse trend, the failure to retain minority coaches.
But here is the ultimate irony, back in the mid-00s while teaching at New York University, I helped lead an analysis of head coaching hiring and the subsequent success of these hires going back to the beginning of the salary cap era in 1992 across a variety of experience and biographical factors. This analysis has been reported on in ESPN and even got me hired to assist in a head coaching search by an NFL team. The high level outcome of that analysis is there were two categories of coaches who far out performed the median. They were previously fired NFL Head Coaches. Once the league avoided retread coaches, from 1966 onward only Weeb Ewbank and Don Shula took second franchises to a title. But it is now clear they’ve blown that category out with Bill Belichick, Tom Coughlin, Pete Carroll, Tony Dungy, Andy Reid, Gary Kubiak, and Bruce Arians all winning titles. In fact only five coaches have won a title in this Century without being a head coach somewhere else in the league first.
The other category that far outperformed the median, in our initial data set, minority head coaches. It stands to reason when you think about it, talented individuals who were overlooked excelled when they finally got their chance.
But here’s the rock and hard place problem, minority coaches struggle to get hired and they are fired far too quickly once they are. That is why the league is down to one current African American head coach, Tomlin whose .643 winning percentage is third among active coaches. That alone ought to prompt some consideration.
It is not enough to just interview African American candidates, NFL owners need to give these candidates a fair chance once they hire them. It is often said belonging is the end state of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the NFL’s owners are too often treating talented minority coaches as disposable and that is preventing meaningful progress both coming and going.
If the average NFL head coach gets the equivalent of three seasons, African American coaches aren’t even getting that on average. Three of the last five coaches to be fired after just one year are African American and in being back to one active African American head coach we are right where we were in 1990. It is difficult to believe so little progress has been made, especially when one considers that 19 different African American head coaches have been hired in the modern era, discounting interim hires, and 9 of this number are above .500 overall. That is why this week was so disappointing for those of us who see, or at least want to see, sports as a level playing field.