The NFL’s dismal number of black head coaches shows a lack of “generic decency” from a league that hasn’t kept its promises, President Biden said in an interview airing Super Bowl Sunday.
“They haven’t lived up to what they committed to and lived up to being open about hiring more minorities to run teams,” Biden told NBC News‘ Lester Holt, referencing the football league’s purported commitments to diversifying leadership.
“The whole idea that a league that is made up of so many athletes of color as well as so diverse, that there’s not enough African American qualified coaches to manage these NFL teams, it just seems to me that it’s a standard that that they’d want to live up to,” the president said. “It’s not a requirement of law, but it’s a requirement I think of just some generic decency.”
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged Wednesday that the NFL has fallen “short” in its goals of hiring more coaches of color and “is not doing a good enough job” in its efforts.
When asked if the NFL should be held to a higher standard on diversity issues because of its outsized cultural impact, Biden said he believed it should be held to a “reasonable standard.”
The NFL is no stranger to controversies surroundings it mostly-white run league, where 71 percent of players are people of color. The league of 32 teams currently has just one black coach, one Latino coach and one Arab-American coach, while the rest of the coaches are white.
In 2003, the NFL established the start of the “Rooney Rule,” which now requires teams to interview minority candidates for top jobs such as head coach. But the rule came under intense scrutiny recently when former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a class-action suit against the NFL on Feb 1, calling the process a sham.
Flores, who is black, said the New York Giants interviewed him for their head coaching position even though they had already chosen a white coach, Brian Daboll, for the job.
“Mr. Flores was forced to sit through a dinner with Joe Schoen, the Giant’s new General Manager, knowing that the Giants had already selected Mr. Daboll,” the suit reads. “Mr. Flores had to give an extensive interview for a job that he already knew he would not get — an interview that was held for no reason other than for the Giants to demonstrate falsely to the League Commissioner Roger Goodell and the public at large that it was in compliance with the Rooney Rule.”
Flores also claims that Denver Broncos brass were “completely disheveled” when they interviewed him in 2019, adding to the notion that it was just another “sham” interview simply meant to satisfy the letter of the Rooney rule.
“In making the decision to file the class action complaint, I understand that I may be risking coaching the game I love, and has done so much for my family and me,” Flores said in a recent statement. “My sincere hope is that by standing up against systemic racism in the NFL, others will join me to ensure that positive change is made for generations to come.”
