Commissioner Roger Goodell gave his annual state of the NFL news conference during Super Bowl week.
Commissioner Roger Goodell gave his annual state of the NFL news conference during Super Bowl week.Matt York/Associated Press
The annual scouting combine just wrapped up, the trade market is open for business, free agency is just days away, and the draft will be here in less than eight weeks.
As usual, the NFL continues to shoulder its way front and center into our busy sporting calendar, always ready to grab its share of headlines even as the post-Super Bowl lull means we won’t have actual games for months. From domestic television ratings dominance to international expansion and its expanding in-person fan base, the NFL is a worldwide juggernaut. Commissioner Roger Goodell said it during Super Bowl week, explaining the league’s plan to eventually have every team play abroad at least once every season as “the ambition that we have to be a global sport.”
Out front and in charge — just the way they like it.
There is one headline the league would love to make go away, but it’s one that must stay in the forefront. With a record-high number of head coaching openings this past hiring cycle, not one Black head coach was hired. A transcript of Goodell’s yearly news conference held during Super Bowl week reflects the ongoing concern, with Goodell asked about it as much or more than any other topic. That’s notable given the way the presser can bounce from topic to topic, with no immediate follow-up questions, the first block being a league-sanctioned moderated section, and at least one kid reporter question included.
And as much as the conversation almost always comes straight back to the Rooney Rule, whereby teams are required to interview candidates of color for head coaching and front office positions, and as much as there is a promise to revisit the so-called accelerator program, which aims to connect potential candidates to the highest-level decision makers, nothing seems to be working. Amid a political climate that has chosen to demonize the very notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (though give the NFL credit for not backing down on its DEI commitments), the situation is both disappointing and disheartening.
What can be done?
Former Patriot Devin McCourty has some thoughts on the NFL's lack of Black head coaches.
Former Patriot Devin McCourty has some thoughts on the NFL's lack of Black head coaches.Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
I keep coming back to the chance to sit down with Patriots playing star-turned NBC commentating star Devin McCourty during Super Bowl week. He was his usual thoughtful self: The problem is so much bigger than one policy change. Until more Black voices are represented at the game’s highest levels, at the ownership level, drastic change just won’t happen.
“I think it’s hard. I think when you say the process isn’t working right, I think first we have to decide what the process is meant to do,” McCourty said. “Even last year, you think about the Patriots and you kind of knew they wanted Mike Vrabel, they brought in the Rooney Rule, kind of go-to coaches, even Byron Leftwich, who was out a year, he got an interview. I think we see that, that in the last X amount of years in the NFL, it’s usually the same guys coming in for interviews or those guys that probably aren’t going to get the job, they go in, could do a two-hour meeting and then they’re out of there. To me, it’s a little bit of the process working how it was expected to work.
“So the next question is, will the process ever change? Will it be, ‘We’re not going to just create one type of rule, we’re going to go in, study this process, try to break it down to the foundation of it, and then build it back up?’
“I’ve always said that the hardest thing to do — if they give us anything they think is the most important thing in our life and we’re due to hire someone, nine out of 10 times we’re going to hire someone that comes from where we come from, similar backgrounds, or some kind of connection that we feel most comfortable with. And I think that’s what we normally see around the NFL. I don’t think guys sit in a room and say, ‘Nope, Black guy, we’re not hiring him.’ I think the way it was created, with a lot of businesses and different things in our country, you hire what you are comfortable with.
“We don’t have Black owners. We don’t have people who are used to being in a room with Black professionals, and they see them in a certain way. I think there’s a lot that has to be done and I hope that over time those things start moving in that direction.”
These headlines aren’t going anywhere. The Super Bowl champion Seahawks are for sale, and reportedly expect to surpass the $6.05 billion Josh Harris’s partnership paid for the Commanders in 2023. But one look at the richest Americans shows the predominance of white males. Finding buyers, particularly diverse ones, isn’t easy.
Avoiding bad press isn’t easy, either. There’s a pretrial hearing set for April 3 in the Brian Flores lawsuit against the NFL. Flores’s win to keep the suit out of NFL-sanctioned arbitration and into a courtroom means we could hear more about his claim the NFL is “rife with racism, particularly when it comes to the hiring and retention of Black head coaches, coordinators, and general managers.”
More headlines to come.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her @Globe_Tara.