There’s a fun brouhaha over pro football coaches, with the recently fired black coach of the Miami Dolphins, Brian Flores, alleging various scandals such as Miami owner Stephen Ross offering him $100,000 per loss in 2019 in order to get a top draft pick. Flores says the owner didn’t like him for rejecting his offer.
Teams pick in reverse order of their record to improve bad teams. The NBA instituted a lottery in 1985 to discourage teams from intentionally losing to get Patrick Ewing, but the NFL doesn’t have a lottery.
Flores also alleges that a certain senior Denver Broncos executive (i.e., quarterback legend John Elway) was disrespectfully hungover while giving Flores his affirmative action Rooney Rule interview:
The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is an example of affirmative action, even though there is no hiring quota or hiring preference given to minorities, only an interviewing quota.
But this being the current year, everybody is instead talking about his discrimination lawsuit charging Systemic Racism in the NFL. After all, what else could explain why there is only one current black head coach (two-time Super Bowl winner Mike Tomlin of Pittsburgh) out of 27 (the other five jobs are presently vacant)? After all, either 58% or 68% of NFL players are black according to the two most quoted sources. (Ironically, it’s easier to find precise counts of coaches and executives by race than of players.)
That got me thinking about the backgrounds of NFL coaches. Since I don’t know much about football, I went to Wikipedia’s list of NFL head coaches and looked each one up.
The most notable thing I found is that you don’t have to have been an NFL player or even much of a college player to be an NFL head coach. Of the 27 current coaches, 22 never played in the NFL, one (Kliff Kingsbury) had a cup of coffee, and four had substantial careers of nine to fourteen seasons (Ron Rivera, Mike Vrabel, Dan Campbell, and Frank Reich). Vrabel had one All Pro season, while the other three were more role players noteworthy for doing their limited jobs well.
Reich, for instance, has been called the greatest backup quarterback of all time. He played three years behind Boomer Esiason in college and then 14 years in the pros, with his prime behind Jim Kelly on Buffalo’s Super Bowl teams. He engineered the biggest comebacks in the history of both college bowl games and pro playoff games (the 35-3 comeback over Houston).
I could only find Wonderlic IQ test scores for two head coaches from the NFL draft combine: Kingsbury scored a 31 (roughly a 120 IQ) and Vrabel a 26 (110). If somebody were serious about following up on the question of whether there is racial discrimination among coaching hires, they could go through all the assistant coaches who were NFL draft prospects for which there are published Wonderlic test scores.
All 27 head coaches played some college football, but often in small-time environments: two at William & Mary, one at Wesleyan (Bill Belichick), Penn, UC Davis, Rochester, Baker, Saginaw Valley, John Carroll, Dayton, Toledo, Mount Union, Pacific, and two at Miami of Ohio.
They generally come across as being football fanatics who’d do anything to stay in the game. (Exceptions might be Belichick, who preferred lacrosse in college, and Andy Reid, an English major who was writing a newspaper column and thinking about becoming a full-time writer until his coach suggested he try coaching.)
NFL head coaches also tend to be more academically inclined than the usual college football players: I didn’t see any Communications or Grievance Studies majors, and more than a few Economics or Finance majors. They often seemed like the minor character in Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons: the fraternity boy who sneaks off to the library to study.
The usual initial route is to wind up your college career with no hope of being drafted by the NFL, then being invited by your coach to come back as a graduate assistant. Then off to an assistant job at some no-name college, then eventually a “quality control assistant coach” for a pro team, which appears to be doing the jobs so boring that even other football coaches don’t want to do them (and football coaches are workaholics). It helps to have a wife who is happy to pack up the house and move to Fargo because you just got offered your dream job as offensive line coach at North Dakota State.
In general, the state of Ohio appears to be the Cradle of Coaches, followed by neighboring states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Brian Flores is unusual not just for being black but for having grown up in the Brownsville public housing project in Brooklyn, a basketball town, with his father, a Honduran immigrant, off at sea in the merchant marine most of the time. The guy has a right to be sore about getting fired after going a respectable 24-25 with a lousy franchise.
In contrast to Flores, a large fraction of head coaches are the sons and sometimes grandsons of coaches, although one, Arthur Smith of Atlanta, is the grandson of billionaire Frederick Smith, founder of Fed Ex. Belichick’s dad, for instance, was an assistant coach for three decades at the Naval Academy, so as a kid he sat in and listened to the coaching staff dissect game films.
Of the 27 head coaches, 17 played offense in college. I don’t know if that is a significant difference, but blacks are more common on defense than offense.
In general, football coaching is kind of a who-you-know profession in that there are “coaching trees,” in which head coaches once served as assistants to famous head coaches, such as Paul Brown, Sid Gillman, Marty Schottenheimer, Bill Walsh, Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick, and now the L.A. Rams’ Sean McVay (who has had four assistants become NFL head coaches in his five years in the league), or to their assistants, or to their assistants’ assistants.
Being an assistant to a winning coach can do wonders for your career. For examples, Flores is a Belichick protege. (This is similar to academic genealogies linking professors to their dissertation advisors.)
This sounds highly unfair, but NFL teams now employ almost two dozen assistant coaches and there is a huge amount of turnover, so talent and work ethic do tend to rise toward the top.
In most sports, owing to the Moneyball revolution, there has been a trend away from lifers toward younger and smarter coaches and executives. (A heartwarming exception is Brian Snitker, who finally become manager of the Atlanta Braves in his 40th season with the franchise and last fall won the World Series in his 45th season.)
Football has had less of a statistical revamping because coaches always watched such an insane amount of film that they didn’t need that many quantitative analyses to notice patterns.
But McVay represents a trend toward younger coaches who are offensive prodigies.
Let’s look at the careers of the two Super Bowl coaches.
Sean McVay of the Los Angeles Ram is coaching in his second Super Bowl in five years, despite turning only 36 last month. He was the youngest head coach in NFL history when hired at age 30.
His grandfather John McVay played for famous Massillon H.S. in Ohio, where Paul Brown launched his coaching career. (Ohio and Western Pennsylvania were the heartland of American football a century ago.) He went on to coach Dayton U. and the New York Giants, and had the most success as the general manager of the mighty San Francisco 49ers of the Montana-Young-Rice era. He was named NFL executive of the year in 1989.
His father played defensive back for Indiana U.
Sean was the star quarterback of the state champion Marist H.S. in Georgia, and was named offensive player of the year over Calvin Johnson. He went on to play some receiver for Miami of Ohio, but averaged only 8 yards per catch (i.e., he was slow). I doubt he was invited to the NFL draft combine.
Right out of college, he was hired as an assistant coach by John Gruden of Tampa Bay of the NFL. Then he spent a season as a minor league assistant coach under Gruden’s brother Jay. Then became an assistant tight end coach for the Washington Redskins, then their offensive coordinator, then head coach of the L.A. Rams. He instantly turned around a terrible offense. His career record including postseason is now 61-29.
So, McVay is a coaching blue blood. He probably couldn’t have had quite as record-setting velocity of ascent if his grandfather hadn’t been a famous NFL wise man.
On the other hand, he is, by all evidence, really good at his job.
The head coach of the upstart Cincinnati Bengals is Zac Taylor, only 38, who was McVay’s quarterback coach with the Rams. He was hired as head coach by the Bengals at 36. His first two years there were dismal, with rookie QB Joe Burrow getting hurt in 2020. But Burrow was healthy and good this year and the Bengals got hot and are in the Super Bowl.
Taylor was a star high school quarterback but was not widely recruited. He bounced around on the bench of various colleges before finishing his college career with two good (but not great) seasons as the starting QB for Nebraska. He went undrafted and got cut from the pro team that signed him before even arriving in training camp. He spent a year with the Canadian Football League, then got a job from his father-in-law Mike Sherman, a former Green Bay Packers head coach, as an assistant coach at Texas A&M. Then he was an assistant coach in the NFL and college (McVay’s old school Miami of Ohio), then spent two years under McVay with the Rams before getting the head coaching job in Cincinnati.
In summary, it could be that NFL teams are leaving zillion dollar bills on the sidewalk by not hiring as many black head coaches as there are black players. But, the more you look into the coaching business, the more it seems like an insanely competitive profession because guys love football.
I’ve talked to high school junior varsity assistant coaches and they tended to be impressively competent. It’s possible that NFL head coaches are not, but…I doubt it.
