“Any way you cut it, there’s an over-representation of white coaches – and lot of the attention is placed on Black coaches, because most of the players in the NFL are Black,” said George Cunningham, a professor of health and kinesiology at Texas A&M University whose research focuses on diversity in sport. The percentage was nearly the same for general managers. The NFL’s own Diversity and Inclusion Report published in February 2021 found that 82 percent of head coaching hires in the league between 20 went to white men.
Meanwhile, just five out of 32 coaches during the 2021 season were racial minorities. In 2021, about 71 percent of NFL players were races other than white, according to data from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. ‘Over-representation of white coaches’įlores’s lawsuit tops decades of criticism about the league’s hiring practices and the under-representation of minority coaches. “But I think this risks his future career in the National Football League significantly … I would be surprised that he’s hired again as a head coach.”įor his part, Flores has said the “need for change is bigger than my personal goals” and that he “hopes others will join me to ensure that positive change is made for generations to come”. “I think Flores is a courageous man,” Lapchick added. “Brian Flores’s lawsuit is what I call a smoking gun,” Richard Lapchick, the director of the Institute for the Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, told Al Jazeera, noting that despite an initially terse response from NFL officials, league commissioner Roger Goodell has since made a “genuine” appeal for the league’s 32 teams to change their hiring practices.
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Observers are also questioning if Flores’s lawsuit, which alleged “systemic racism” in the NFL and likened the league to a “plantation” where “the owners watch the games from atop NFL stadiums in their luxury boxes, while their majority-Black workforce put their bodies on the line every Sunday,” will make him the latest figure to sacrifice his career in professional sport in exchange for organisational change. Many are asking if a class-action lawsuit by Brian Flores, the Black former coach of the Miami Dolphin whose contract was terminated in January despite two winning seasons, will represent a turning point. The Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams are set to face off on Sunday in the most-watched annual television event in the United States – the National Football League’s (NFL) 56th Super Bowl.īut a continuing saga about the league’s hiring practices – and dismal diversity in its highest ranks of coaches and managers – has forced NFL officials and teams to face an uncomfortable reckoning amid the media glow of the season’s most prominent – and profitable – spectacle, which is expected to attract 117 million viewers.
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