Draft incentives for hiring minority coaches?

The NFL kicked off its 101st season on Sept. 10 with just four head coaches of color, two general managers of color, one team president of color and two people of color at the team ownership level.

But the NFL spans so far beyond those men, and a handful of women, at the highest level of football. The Athletic wanted to know: What does diversity actually look like in the NFL, from top to bottom, and what is the league doing to make tangible, sustained change?

We began this search with coaches, the most forward-facing group outside of the league’s approximately 2,000 players, roughly 70 percent of whom are Black. We compiled coaching roster data for each team since 2013 to gauge not just where the NFL is, but where it might be headed.

Some of the data reveals progress, like the number of people of color in entry-level coaching jobs. Other aspects are troubling, from the declining number of people of color in head-coaching roles over the past two years to the lack of consistent upward mobility for assistant coaches of color.

It’s not just who is getting hired, but who those head coaches are hiring, promoting and developing. In many cases, the league has a long way to go to build more meaningful diversity in its coaching ranks.

“It’s got to be a commitment and it’s got to be intentional,” said Rod Graves, a former NFL general manager and the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance. “I don’t think there’s any way of getting around that. There has to be a belief that diversity is good for the game. There has to be a belief that the game belongs to everyone that’s prepared. If you have that mindset, you’ll see more opportunities for our men and women of color.”

What Graves said increasingly aligns with what the league is saying and doing through initiatives that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago. The NFL is now requiring every team to create diversity and inclusion plans through an executive vice president and chief people officer, Dasha Smith, who was hired earlier this year. (She has since hired Jonathan Beane in a senior vice president role to help oversee all the league’s D+I efforts.) The league strengthened the Rooney Rule this offseason. Awareness is at an all-time high, but concerns regarding team ownership persist. Progress ultimately will be measured by what happens next.

“First, and most importantly, we knew we had to change,” Goodell said this summer, speaking to participants of the annual Quarterback Coaching Summit, co-sponsored by the NFL and the Black College Football Hall of Fame. “We weren’t getting the results we have to have. There was a commitment to do that. And second was then discussing, how would we make those changes? It had to be bold and it had to have impact. We think they’re bold. We’re going to see how the impact goes this season. We were looking at the short- and long-term steps that need to be taken. I believe, personally and strongly, that this is good for our league, it’s going to strengthen our league, it’s important for our league to be successful in the future, and it’s a critical component of what we do.”

NFL coaching demographics: A general overview

A snapshot of coaching-staff demographics for this season provides a reference for the progress the NFL hopes to make. The league, as part of the diversity and inclusion plan approved by team owners in May, is collecting detailed demographic information on employees for every team and in the league office. That information is not being made public, but The Athletic’s accounting of coaching staffs since 2013 shows variance at the team level from year to year, plus signs of progress in entry-level positions that could feed the pipeline.

Teams entered this season with between three and 11 coaches of color per staff, with staffs ranging in size from 16 to 24 members. The Denver Broncos are on the low end with 15 percent (three of 20) coaches of color. The Dallas Cowboys, Los Angeles Chargers, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Pittsburgh Steelers are on the high end with at least 50 percent. The head coaches themselves factor into those percentages.

A look at the coaching pipeline

Adding diversity to the coaching pipeline is often referenced as a priority for producing more candidates of color for top jobs, notably as head coaches. Three points stand out after studying the data and speaking with Black coaches/executives:

• The league is hiring many more coaches of color in entry-level positions, such as offensive assistant and quality control, which could prime the pipeline in the future if those coaches rise from those ranks.

• The league has otherwise had a harder time growing numbers among coaches of color in higher-profile positions such as offensive coordinators and quarterbacks coaches.

• Black coaches and execs think there are plenty of quality candidates of color to fill vacancies among head coaches, coordinators and quarterbacks coaches, even if representation in the pipeline is weak from a numbers standpoint.

About 34 percent of on-field coaching positions have been filled by coaches of color since 2013, but only nine of 55 head coaches hired over that span — 16 percent — went to coaches fitting that profile. The table below shows which jobs those 55 head coaches held when hired. (Note that the cumulative hiring rate for head coaches of color has remained about 15 percent since the Rooney Rule was implemented in 2003, a big increase from the past. The actual number of minority head coaches at a given time fluctuates, sometimes significantly, based on when coaches are fired. The numbers plummeted when five head coaches of color were fired after the 2018 season. Over the five years before that, 31 of 34 head coaches fired were White.)

Thirty-two of 55 head coaches hired since 2013 were NFL offensive or defensive coordinators at the time of their hiring. Twenty-six of those 32 coordinators (81 percent) were White. Eighty percent of offensive and defensive coordinators since 2013 have been White. Growing diversity among coordinators is obviously one way to increase the number of prominent head-coaching candidates of color. Whether those candidates are actually hired is a separate issue.

Seeking ‘sustainability’

More so than in any offseason in recent memory, diversity was part of the league’s agenda in 2020. The diversity numbers from the most recent head coach hiring cycle forced the issue to Goodell’s desk in January, and the renewed conversation and commitment to erasing racial inequities in recent months have only amplified the need for change in all levels of the NFL, including coaching.

Tracking diversity data over time shows the numbers aren’t an anomaly. Across the NFL, the percentage of people of color in the coaching ranks hovered between 32 and 35 percent from 2013-20. Some years have given the illusion of progress, like in 2018, when there were eight head coaches of color, but by 2019, five of them (Bowles, Wilks, Marvin Lewis, Hue Jackson and Vance Joseph) had been fired, replaced in each case by a White coach (Adam Gase, Kliff Kingsbury, Zac Taylor, Freddie Kitchens and Fangio, respectively).

“I’m concerned about sustainability,” Graves said. “I have yet to see the NFL put forth a business argument that starts with the belief that diversity is good for the game. Until that happens, I think we’re subject to the ebbs and flows that we’ve seen in past years, where we hit a few numbers, we claim victories and then we drop off. I just think we’ve got to get on the road to sustainable progress.”

According to Graves, arguments about the need for diversity won’t affect change if made only in the abstract. Team owners will need to see how having people of color and women in prominent decision-making roles across their organizations will help their businesses, and why having a football coaching staff that more closely reflects the racial makeup of the players may make their teams more successful.

The people leading football’s diversity efforts, such as Graves, Vincent and University of Maryland head coach Mike Locksley, who recently launched the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches, have been making that case for years.

Will team owners actually hear it?

Rooney said he was encouraged by the discourse among his peers during open discussions among all 32 team owners in a series of virtual meetings this spring and summer and also through his one-on-one conversations, which led to what Rooney described as the passage of an “aggressive” agenda of policy changes that could have an impact.

“I think there’s a buy-in to the fact that we can do better and what we’ve done,” Rooney said.

The policy changes enacted include:

• Expansion of the Rooney Rule to require teams to interview at least one diverse candidate for all general manager, coordinator and senior staff positions, in and out of football operations. Teams also will be required to interview two people of color for all head-coaching vacancies.

• Elimination of an anti-tampering rule that served as a roadblock for assistant coaches looking to move up. Teams previously could block assistant coaches from interviewing for a coordinator job, regardless of their contract status or job title.

• Increased commitment to networking events designed to connect diverse job candidates with head coaches and general managers.

• Creation of a league-wide employment database and mandatory diversity and inclusion plans for all 32 teams.

Vincent earlier this year said the antiquated anti-tampering rule was part of a “broken system” that disproportionately affected coaches of color. The Fritz Pollard Alliance and leaders within the league had been pushing for years to have it repealed.

“I thought that was excellent. Putting in writing what a coordinator and quarterback coach is, it is not a title, it is the guy doing the job. Blocking guys from advancement was always a bad idea,” Arians said.

Smith, who had been executive vice president and global chief human resources officer for Sony Music Entertainment before taking over the league’s diversity efforts, is collecting a range of data — race, ethnicity, gender, etc. — for every position in every organization to create a fuller snapshot and develop a strategy. That has never been done in such detail, nor has it been collected in a league-wide database. Coaching data is among the most visible.

“What I’m really trying to implement and really trying to get the clubs to implement is that (diversity and inclusion) should be embedded in everything that is done within the organization,” Smith said. “It’s not a siloed event. And really, that should be sort of front of mind in everything that is done as it relates to employees, as it relates to vendors, as it relates to education programs, as it relates to how our leaders lead and making sure that they’re leading in an inclusive way.”

The NFL also considered some more radical changes this offseason, including a proposal to use draft picks to incentivize teams to hire diverse candidates for head-coaching vacancies. That proposal was tabled in May after it was widely criticized before the team owners met. One alternative could be for the league to reward teams that lose diverse assistant coaches to promotions on other teams.

“I do recognize that there’s no silver bullet here,” Goodell said. “We are not done. We are going to continue to look and see what other things we could be doing that will lead to the type of results that we expect.”

The renewed push is not coming from just within the NFL. Hundreds of Black football coaches, many of them from the college ranks, convened on weekly Zoom calls this summer to fortify their own coaching networks and find community during months of unrest across the country.

Locksley recruited a distinguished board of directors for his group, the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches, with a mission to “prepare, promote and produce” qualified diverse candidates at all levels of football.

That board, which includes Tomlin, Alabama head coach Nick Saban, Dolphins general manager Chris Grier and former Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome, will compile lists of diverse coaching candidates, including NFL assistants who are ready to be coordinators, quality control coaches who are ready to be considered for a role as a quarterbacks coach, college coaches trying to get into the NFL and high school coaches looking to get into college coaching.

“We have to have a multi-tier process for preparing them for their next jobs, or the jobs they want, while at the same time promoting and producing them at the highest level and making sure we can produce qualified candidates, names of people that can do the job and have the ability, when they go into the interview, to get the job,” Locksley said.

Many of the initiatives and ideas would have been unthinkable five years ago. What matters now is how much different the NFL might look five years in the future.