EL BARRIO, EL FALLS – Happy Monday… The NFL had its bye week before the Super Bowl. Luckily, there was plenty of action to fill in. I won’t touch the Commanders lawsuit, as Short Matt talked about it on Saturday, so here is what is on the menu for today: The Pro Bowl & Black Coaches in the NFL.
The Pro Bowl
The Pro Bowl Is A Joke… The NFL keeps trying to make this game relevant. They took from after the Super Bowl to before. They moved it from Hawai’i to Orlando to now Las Vegas. They have added a skills competition which is somewhat more interesting than the game. The skills contest consist of a 100 yard dash, skills catching comp, QB accuracy contest of spreading the field and another of threading the needle in double coverage. All these were more competitive than the game. If you check social media, you will see several complaints from fans of players not playing hard or even really tackling (even JJ Watt got in on the act). I don’t know if they gotta put an extra monetary reward for each player for winning but they need to do something or just put an end to it.
Black Coaches in the NFL
I am about to touch the third rail. We at MTM try to stay away from politics for the most part. Political stuff divides and we focus on sports and comedy which always unites. You should see the diversity of Yankee fans when they won the last series. However sometimes the sports story comes and finds you, Kaepernick, Rodgers and Djokovic for instance. The lack of black coaches in the NFL is something I have banged on and this lawsuit by Brian Flores, is the one piece, I have been dying to talk about.
I don’t people don’t realize how long it takes for a black person to accuse racism. It seems people think at the first sign of hardship, we jump to it. A black person does a long check list when we get bad service at a restaurant before we say the waitress or waiter was racist. We go through our behavior, the behavior of those around us, the time of day, what was the waiter’s behavior to those around us and then arrive that.
There is a lack of diversity in America’s board rooms and don’t board rooms don’t have a 75 percent black staff. So why are people shocked it’s in the NFL?
The problem, as it always is, is the lack of consistency and clarity. We understand there is general bias a GM might have, in wanting an offensive guy or a defensive guy or an experienced coach or a young out the box thinker, but when that bias still consistently overrules a black coach, you have to ask yourself, what is up!?
Want an experienced black coach, you have Todd Bowles, Flores, Hue Jackson (who just joined this suit), Leslie Frazier. Well, they are experienced but they didn’t win. Yet Wade Phillips has been an NFL coach 4 times, Adam Gase coached the Dolphins and Jets back to back. The new coach always takes over a mess and it can take franchises decades to dig out, everyone knows it’s not always the coach. Often it is a franchise QB that turns into a dud that kills the coach. Despite all of this, a bunch of number crunchers have proven that it takes Blacks coaches longer to get hired and quicker to get fired.
These guys were told get experience and work up the ranks and they have and they get over looked for a Kliff Kingsbury or a Matt Rhule. There is young black coaching talent like Byron Leftwich, Eric Bieniemy and Raheem Morris. I mean, Joe Judge was a position coach when the Giants snapped him up, no different than where Morris was at the time and Bienemy had just won with KC.
Black people will play the game and do what needs to be done to make us qualified but then the qualifications keep changing and you say well its the GMs prerogative, it is clear what is being unsaid. There is a reason the NFL won’t release the Gruden emails. They don’t want the world to know the majority of coaches and office personnel feel the same way.
Thanks for reading, comment below and come back tomorrow for our Ben Whitney, who will hopefully find us some comedy in sports to lighten up the room.
