timschochet said:
Here’s the problem,
@djmich: when we consider these issues we can’t ignore history. One of the worst aspects of institutional racism in this country has been the widespread notion that black people aren’t as smart as white people, and can’t be trusted in positions of authority or responsibility. That is why whenever a black QB is attacked for not being smart enough, as Rush Limbaugh did with Donavan McNabb long ago, many people suspect racism.
And that is why if there is a league with so many black players and nowhere near enough black coaches, it’s always going to anger people, rightfully so. Because the lingering impression is that blacks are only prized for their physical abilities and not for their mental capacities.
And that, in a nutshell, is why we need more black coaches.
I think there seems to be a pre-supposition that there is some sort of natural progression of NFL players becoming NFL coaches. But I’m not so sure that’s how it works most of the time.
About 50% of college FBS players are black. About 37% are white.
About 58% of NFL players are black and 25% are white.
So we need to ask ourselves 2 questions I think:
1) What causes those percentages to shift in favor of black players from college to the NFL and
2) At what age/stage of life does the average NFL coach begin coaching?
I don’t know the answer to that, but my gut says:
-black athletes gain and white athletes lose from college to the NFL because black athletes are outperforming white athletes in football
-white athletes that realize they aren’t moving on to the NFL are hopping into coaching earlier than black athletes and it’s giving them a long term advantage. There could also be an unfair financial component here where white coaches are able to live off of the peanuts that young coaches often make thanks to family support while others may not have the financial option of grinding for peanuts for years.
If those are actually the reasons, then I’m not sure how the NFL fixes things without simply being patently unfair to white players/coaches who wipe out of football earlier and don’t have the chance to make NFL player money but start the coaching grind earlier. Do they lose out twice to black athletes because of a wrongly perpetuated belief that the path to NFL coaching goes college player>NFL player>NFL coach?
We already know that black players have some sort of unfair advantage over white players to getting into the NFL and making those big bucks by looking at the numbers. I think we’re probably all in agreement that that is the case because those men earned their spots in the NFL through performance. That makes sense to me as to why black players are over represented in the NFL compared to their percentage of US population, even though it comes at the expense of white players.
But so far the best, basically only, argument I see being made for a similar over representation of black coaches at the expense of white coaches is “because there are more black players than white players”, but that argument has zero merit unless there is proof that playing in the NFL has a strong correlation with better NFL coaches. Until someone can show me that data/proof, consider me unpersuaded as to the merits of that argument.