It's Not Just the Cops- How Institutionalized Racism Reigns in Pro Football

via The New York Times

Hi. My name is Connor Campbell Mahan Lothrop, and from those of you that don’t know me and can’t discern it from my name(s), I am white. I am from a white, economically stable family in the suburbs of the D.C. suburbs. I recently graduated from a high school where 85% of the students are white and just 5% are black. I can count on my fingers the number of black teammates I’ve shared a pitch, diamond, court, or race course with since kindergarten. This Fall, I will attend a college constructed by enslaved black men and women, a school that has had racial problems linger even into this decade. And yet there is one obvious truth I can see through my pronounced paleness and privilege: Black Lives Matter. Black Lives are needed. Black Lives are loved.

I am entirely unequipped as a white person to deal with the senseless violence our black community faces from the establishment on a daily basis. However, I can still do everything in my power to help this community to finally, four hundred years after the first Africans arrived in Jamestown as slaves, see true justice. It is my responsibility to use this platform, however small, for good. So, for every view this article gets, I will donate $0.50 to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and $0.50 to the American Civil Liberties Union, and continue to do so up to $250. I encourage you to donate as well, and continue to educate yourself on the matters of whose lives matter. 

This is not a ploy to gain viewers. It is not a sham to make me look good. This is my unique way of helping to fix a system that has been broken, is broken, and will continue to be broken until we, the people fix it. And now, since you came here for some sports…

The National Football League just finished celebrating its one-hundredth season to much fanfare from *checks notes* themselves, their media partners, and their in house social media accounts. When the AAFC, as the NFL was known back then, kicked off in 1920, things were different. The country was recovering from a devastating pandemic, a brutal Presidential race was heating up, and race relations were tense...well, some things never change.
In many other ways, the league itself is very different than it is now. The only two surviving franchises from that first season are the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears. Most offenses ran a variation of Pop Warner’s single wing offense (a really fun rabbit hole if you’re here for the X’s and O’s), the forward pass was only allowed five yards, and there were almost no black players. 

The NFL never had a true color barrier like Major League Baseball. Baseball had no black players between 1883 and Jackie Robinson’s debut in 1947, and only made case-by-case allowances for the occasional Native American or Hawaiian (Prince Oana is my KING). Pro football’s path was more complicated. From 1920 to 1933, African-Americans could play in the League, but they were never stars. In 1933, at the peak of the Big Sad (sorry, Great Depression), Joe Lillard and Ray Kemp both left pro football; they would be the last African Americans in the NFL until 1946 when the Los Angeles Rams signed two black college stars. This was not done out of the goodness of their hearts, but because Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine would have prevented them from playing in the publicly funded Los Angeles Coliseum if there were no integration. The NFL began to reintegrate slowly, with some teams *cough, Washington Football Team, cough* instituting caps on the number of black players. It wasn’t until the NFL-AFL merger in 1970 that the league’s color barrier was finally torn like the curtain at the temple. 

That doesn’t mean that race is no longer a factor in professional football. Quite the opposite is true. Debates about race are now focused on positions on a team and leadership within an organization instead of whether the game should be whites only. In Pro Football Logic’s 2017 Census, the league was surveyed at 68% African American (compared to the 13% of the American population). If you only look at that number, it could be considered a win for the black community. But look deeper, and there are some disturbing trends. African Americans are well represented at positions where athletic traits like speed and strength are more valued than technique and mental acumen. There were zero white cornerbacks in the study, and running backs and receivers were both more than 93% black. Defensive linemen and edge rushers both topped 80% of players being black. On the other side of the coin, only 18% of quarterbacks were of African descent. Out of 106 special teamers (kickers, punters, and long snappers), only one was a black man at the time of the study.

So why the color disparity at some positions? Money and status. Take special teamers, for example. How could African Americans be represented at 0.09% of a position group when they make up over two-thirds of the league? Kickers and punters tend to be transplants from the soccer pitch, which is very white in today’s America. They also have to pay for expensive camps to learn better technique and show off for scouts. Very few high schools can afford to have a kicking specialist on staff and most kickers are not fully showcased in a large, in-game sample. High school coaches aren’t going to let their kids take many fifty-yarders against rival schools. Long snappers are usually former offensive linemen that are too small or unskilled to compete at a higher level, but affluent enough to pay for camps. This confluence of factors leads to a ridiculous overabundance of white dudes running special teams. Marquette King is the only black special teamer of note in the last decade. He was sixth in the league in yards per punt in 2017, but was let go by the Raiders, played only four games for Denver in 2018, and by 2020 was bombing punts in the XFL.

Similarly, it seems the modern youth quarterback needs to go to dozens of specialty camps and hire a personal coach to be successful. Call it the Trevor Lawrence model. Often, young black passers don’t have the financial stability to go to camps all summer and learn the perfect pocket presence. Because they have fewer snaps and less time to develop advanced skills, they usually end up relying more on athleticism than high-level QB skills. This leads to black passers being overlooked by scouts and coaches at higher levels, even if they are top talents like Lamar Jackson. As a reminder, the reigning NFL MVP never got a serious look from a Power Five school and won his Heisman trophy for Louisville. 

Since reintegration, dozens of talented African-American quarterbacks have entered the college or pro ranks...and been converted into defensive backs, receivers, and running backs. Most recently, Kentucky QB Lynn Bowden was selected in the third round of the 2020 draft by Las Vegas with the understanding he would revert to his former position as a pass catcher. He threw a last-second touchdown pass to lead Kentucky to victory over the Virginia Tech Turkeys in the Belk Bowl. Terrelle Pryor and Braxton Miller (also famous for annihilating Tech defenders) both dominated at Ohio State before reverting to other skill positions in the NFL. Both are now out of the league.

Even black passers that do win are subject to more scrutiny than their white counterparts. Studies have shown that black quarterbacks lose the starting positions more easily than their white counterparts. Cam Newton has an MVP Award, but is without a job in June and his drive has been questioned ever since he didn’t dive on a fumble in Super Bowl 50. While Lamar Jackson single-handedly saved the Raven’s 2018 season, everyone, including me, was concerned about whether he could replicate his moderate levels of success a year later. He won thirteen games and the MVP award, and only Derrick Henry could stop his squad in the postseason. Not bad for a running back.

Colin Kaepernick is the utmost example of the plight of the black quarterback. He was an above-average signal caller with good underlying numbers. He suffered late in his career because of weak supporting casts and uncreative playcalling and ended up out of football for kneeling during the national anthem. He has been out of the league since 2016.

The racial disparity gets worse as you go higher in the NFL’s organizational structure. In 2017, 13 of the 128 FBS college football coaches were African American: just over 10%. The NFL is not much better. Just 3 NFL coaches--Mike Tomlin of Pittsburgh, the Charger’s Anthony Lynn, and Brian Flores in Miami--are black. A quick reminder that the league is 68% black, leaving a 58% difference between players and coaches. 

So much of why black ex-players struggle so much to become coaches is due to the system. The typical NFL coach is an ex-quarterback (or some position on either side of the ball that requires on-field leadership, like center or Mike linebacker) who finishes his playing career and gets a job as a graduate assistant for his alma mater or low-level coordinator on an old team. He then gets a job as a position coach, usually quarterback, and parlays that into a coordinator position. He earns his dues there before seeking out a head coaching job at the highest level. 

That system is prohibitive to black ex-athletes. To start, they aren’t often trusted to play those high leadership positions like quarterback or center. This makes it harder for them to coach those positions later in life. The NFL generally assumes an offense needs their coordinator and passer to mind-meld in order to create a proficient offense, but that’s hard for someone who hasn’t played quarterback and might not be in the best position to bond with a white millionaire from Texas. Tomlin and Flores both came up on the defensive side of the ball; Flores comes from The Disciples of Belichick (cursed are they) as a defensive assistant, and Tomlin was a defensive back from William and Mary who worked his way up as a defensive position coach and coordinator. Only Lynn comes from an offensive background. He won a pair of rings as a backup running back for Denver in the late nineties, then retired and spent fifteen years coaching the position around the league before finally notching gigs as a coordinator and eventually head coach. 

The situation is worse as we progress upwards on the ladder. Ozzie Newsome set new standards for African-Americans in executive roles by building a consistently strong Ravens team, but Chris Grier is now the only black general manager in the NFL since Newsome stepped down a year ago. It’s fair to say his Miami job was not very desirable at the time of his promotion from director of college scouting in 2016. Worse yet, no NFL team is owned by a black man (Micahel Jordan is the only black person to own ANY major US franchise). The lack of black executives point to how little African-Americans are trusted to make high-level decisions. Mainly, they are asked to scout and coach defense. Even outside of football, they are financially impaired by society to a degree where only men who are able to accrue enough wealth and status to buy a team--and Jordan only did so through athletics and savvy marketing. 

It’s disgusting to think about the degree to which black voices are suppressed off of the football field. African-Americans make up two-thirds of a body of men who put their physical well-being on the line sixteen times a year for a paycheck, rising concussions and other brutal injuries on every snap. However, they struggle to hold positions of meaningful leadership on and off the field, and 53% of the money that people pay to watch them play goes into the pockets of thirty-two old white guys. If this sounds like a familiar system, well…

The NFL is at least taking steps to try and reconcile with their broken, race-based system. They established the Rooney Rule in the mid-aughts, which required organizations to at least interview one minority candidate (now including women) for head coaching and executive positions. It’s no longer enough, though, as this article from the Undefeated outlines. If the League were able to acquire transcripts of those minority interviews, an independent arbitrator would be able to determine if the spirit of the rule was properly followed. It was recently proposed within the league that the rule be expanded in a different way--requiring two minority interviews. 

The league is also letting its players speak out more. When Colin Kaepernick knelt for the anthem four years ago, the owners blackballed him out of the league. Now, superstars are making their voices heard no matter what the NFL says. Players released a Black Lives Matter support video that played on the NFL’s Snapchat and Instagram platforms. The last two MVP’s, Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson, are both black quarterbacks with diverse playing styles that should come to define the next decade of pro football. Both have spoken out in support of the movement that hopes to end police brutality and institutionalized racism. Change is coming to the NFL. I hope that by the time I have children, they’ll be watching successful black players, coaches, and executives run the league. Until then, we must join our African-American brothers and sisters to fight for that dream among others. 

Many facts and figures from this story were obtained via The Undefeated, a news outlet supported by ESPN that celebrates the excellency and struggles of African-American athletes. Please continue to educate yourselves on the BLM and how you can make a difference.
Thanks to Brooke Jones as always for reminding me how Oxford commas work, and to Silvia Gach for providing an extra set of eyes.