Why Black head coaches lost ground in the NFL, and what teams should know when hiring

Two decades ago, Washington attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. and Cyrus Mehri produced an influential report titled, “Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities,” using civil-rights enforcement strategies to show how Black coaches were being treated unfairly.

The 2002 report, now featured at both the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, precipitated the NFL’s adoption of the Rooney Rule one year later.

The hiring rate for Black coaches increased as Tony Dungy, Jim Caldwell and Mike Tomlin reached Super Bowls, but the momentum has been lost in recent years. Hiring rates for Black coaches have stalled and even receded. This time, advocates can no longer cite superior on-field results when encouraging team owners to consider Black candidates.

Call it the Houston Texans effect.

The most pivotal variable for success in the sport — quarterback play — has doomed the 15 most recently hired Black head coaches to a combined 194-312-3 (.384) record, helping to deliver the NFL to its current crossroads as five teams seek new head coaches.

Superior performance for Black head coaches? Not recently. Inferior opportunities? Absolutely, and especially when one considers how White head coaches from the sizzling-hot Kyle Shanahan/Sean McVay tree have found themselves aligned with top quarterbacks (Aaron Rodgers, Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert) and good ones (Kirk Cousins), fueling their success .

The 32-team league has seen the number of Black head coaches fall from an underwhelming 6.0 per season from 2015-18 to what it considers an unacceptable 3.3 per season since then, culminating with Brian Flores’ discrimination lawsuit following his firing from the Miami Dolphins last year.

With the 2023 hiring cycle ramping up, a proper accounting is timely.

It’s all about the quarterback

The league focuses on hiring because it’s the one variable it can regulate, but a leading reason the NFL failed to sustain its overall numbers of Black head coaches has been hiding in plain sight.

The 15 Black head coaches hired since 2011 have combined to win only 38 percent (194-312-3) of their games while disproportionately paired with lesser quarterbacks, preventing them from having the staying power required to maintain and grow the NFL’s total number of Black head coaches.

Quarterbacks are key drivers of success over time for every coach. Bill Belichick’s winning percentage with Tom Brady (.774) and without Brady (.476) is a famous example.

For whatever reason, the 15 most recently hired Black head coaches generally failed to land with quarterbacks good enough to drive success over time. Caldwell with the Detroit Lions and Anthony Lynn with the Los Angeles Chargers are the only coaches from this group to produce winning records across tenures lasting more than a single season. They had Matthew Stafford and Philip Rivers, established upper-tier veteran quarterbacks.

Leslie Frazier won 39 percent of his games as the Minnesota Vikings’ coach with Christian Ponder as his primary quarterback. Vance Joseph won 34 percent as the Denver Broncos’ coach with Case Keenum as his primary quarterback.

David Culley and Lovie Smith were both one-and-done with Davis Mills as their primary quarterback for the Texans. Steve Wilks (with Josh Rosen in Arizona), Romeo Crennel (with Matt Cassel in Kansas City) and Hue Jackson (with DeShone Kizer and many others in Cleveland) won less than 25 percent of their games in largely hopeless situations.

Bowles’ 8-9 record with Brady this season stands out, but he took over from Bruce Arians after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had peaked. Because the transition was made in March, Bowles was not in a position to tweak the coaching staff or make other changes that might have been set in motion earlier in the offseason if he had taken over in January, as most head coaches do.

Top QBs are watering the McVay/Shanahan tree

The trend in recent years has been for teams to target assistants from the Shanahan/McVay coaching trees. White coaches hired from McVay’s staff have enjoyed built-in advantages that could create unrealistic expectations for team owners searching for coaches in the future.

Matt LaFleur, who worked with Shanahan in Washington and under McVay on the Rams, landed in Green Bay with Rodgers. LaFleur has a 48-17 record (.723) with the future Hall of Fame quarterback in the lineup, compared to 0-1 when Rodgers did not play.

Zac Taylor, a McVay protégé, struggled early in his tenure with Cincinnati and was rewarded with the No. 1 pick just as Burrow, considered a generational prospect by some, was entering the draft. Taylor is 24-17-1 (.583) when Burrow starts and 4-19 (.174) with other quarterbacks.

Kevin O’Connell, who also worked under McVay, landed in Minnesota with the solid-if-unspectacular Cousins ​​and went 13-4 in his first season. His Vikings set an NFL record for most victories in one-score games, which will make Minnesota a candidate for regression in 2023.

A third McVay protégé, Brandon Staley, became the Chargers’ head coach right after the team transitioned from Rivers to another star quarterback in Herbert. Staley’s 19-15 mark with Herbert met rough expectations, as Vegas oddsmakers projected 20 victories for the Chargers over the past two seasons.

NFL team owners looking to find successful coaches might naturally see this group succeeding and decide hiring others from the same tree is the way to go. Yet, for all anyone knows, LaFleur’s record without Rodgers could easily resemble Taylor’s 4-19 mark without Burrow.

These are transcendent truths.

Caldwell over his career has a 24-8 (.750) mark with Peyton Manning, compared to 36-28 (.563) with Stafford and 0-8 with Curtis Painter.

Jackson went 8-7 for the Raiders when Carson Palmer and Jason Campbell were his starting quarterbacks. He was 0-23 in Cleveland with DeShone Kizer and Cody Kessler in the lineup.

Wilks’ ability to post a 6-6 record with Carolina on an interim basis this season stands out because Sam Darnold (4-2), PJ Walker (2-3) and Baker Mayfield (0-1) were his starters. Wilks had gone 3-10 in Arizona with Rosen and 0-3 there with Sam Bradford.

Hiring rates aren’t all that matters

The NFL has acknowledged its minority hiring problem, specifically its Black hiring problem, in the pursuit of head coaches.

Black head coaches accounted for eight percent of hires (3 of 47) in the five years before the NFL’s 2003 adoption of the Rooney Rule, which required teams to interview at least one non-White candidate before making a hire. The rate has increased to 18 percent of hires since then (25 of 137). Even with a recent downtick in the rate, the rolling five-year average hiring rate has remained within a relatively tight band.

Between 35 and 40 percent of assistant coaches have been Black in recent seasons. The percentage of Black coordinators increased from between 15 and 20 percent in recent seasons to nearer 30 percent in 2022, driven by an increase in Black defensive coordinators. The league in 2022 began requiring teams to employ at least one Black offensive assistant. The urgency is not accidental.

The total number of Black head coaches declined from seven in 2017 and 2018 to three in 2019, 2020 and 2021 after Jackson, Wilks, Bowles, Joseph and Marvin Lewis were fired simultaneously. Alarm bells sounded as the numbers fell and as the Las Vegas Raiders skirted the spirit of the Rooney Rule by hiring Jon Gruden without an open process.

The NFL now requires teams to interview at least two non-White candidates before hiring head coaches. Teams must document interview duration and all personnel who participated. In-person interviews with candidates from other teams must now wait until after the wild-card playoff round. Remote interviews do not satisfy the Rooney Rule. These measures slow a process that has sometimes produced hasty, prearranged hires.

Closing thoughts

Although having only 15 Black head coaches hired from 87 total hires (17 percent) since 2011 contributed to the current low numbers, pairing most of these coaches with ineffective quarterbacks turned the problem into a crisis.

There’s little reason to expect the trend to continue, unless the worst organizations hire Black coaches disproportionately, as the case seems to have been with the Texans recently.

The 10 Black head coaches hired from the Rooney Rule’s 2003 adoption through 2010 won about half their games (488-468, .510), in line with what we would expect the record to be for any randomly selected group of coaches.

The Rooney Rule in its original 2003 form helped to drive moderate increases. Strengthening the rule has not produced an immediate spike, but it still might encourage gains in the future. And if the next wave of Black coaches fares better on the quarterback front, the league could see the number of Black head coaches approach and possibly exceed previous high-water marks.

The five teams with head coaching vacancies at present — Denver, Indianapolis, Houston, Arizona and Carolina — will provide some clues as to what the immediate future might hold.

(Top photo of Steve Wilks: Eakin Howard / Getty Images)