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Last Thursday afternoon, inside the NFL league office, there was a collective exhale of breath that had been held for years.
The Atlanta Falcons had named Raheem Morris as their next head coach, and that meant four of the six head-coaching hires so far this cycle were men of color. It had already clinched the most diverse cycle for head-coaching hires ever for an NFL that has tried — and for years, has failed — to get these kinds of results.
“It’s our toughest area and we’re finally making progress,” one league source told CBS Sports. “Things we’ve focused on the last two to four years are finally coming to fruition.”
It’s not a victory lap for the league so much as an acknowledgement of a breakthrough. The NFL head-coach fraternity has always been majority white, and the league’s recent efforts to diversify that specific group never seemed to work.
Between 1963 and 2023, 26 men of color were hired to be head coaches in the NFL, according to league data. Fifteen of those men were hired between 2012 and 2023, while 62 white coaches got their jobs during that same time period.
The league office has regularly made tweaks to the Rooney Rule. It created a Diversity Advisor Committee. The league mandated diversity training for teams hiring head coaches, and it encouraged a search committee that includes white and people of color in the process.
But all along, people around the league said a similar refrain: You can lead a horse to water. No matter what programs the league instituted, it was still up to NFL team owners to make the decision.
But a different league source told me they felt a change coming this cycle because “the conversations were different” with NFL owners and decision-makers.
The New England Patriots filled their vacancy first by promoting Jerod Mayo to head coach, which had already been written into his contract the year before. The Raiders locked in on Antonio…
Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-accomplishes-most-diverse-cycle-for-head-coaching-hires-ever-but-theres-still-work-to-be-done/
Author : Jonathan Jones
Publish date : 2024-01-30 21:41:55
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