“Need to go to dinner with the wives,” Skip Bayless claims the ‘old white’ NFL owners are uncomfortable with Black head coaches
Currently only 3 out of 32 teams in the NFL have Black head coaches.
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During every NFL off-season in recent years, two things happened again and again: those are Aaron Rodgers’ trade dramas and the sports media questioning the lack of diversity in the head coaching positions in the league. This off-season will not be any different. The Aaron Rodgers trade drama started ever since the Green Bay Packers lost to the Detroit Lions in the final week of the regular season and got knocked out of playoff contention.
And now, the sports media has started questioning the second one. Following the 2022 NFL season, plenty of teams that failed to achieve their goals fired their coaches and hired new ones. Furthermore, in that hiring circle, 5 teams have found new head coaches and only one of them is a Black coach. The Houston Texans hired the former 49ers defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans as their new head coach.
Apart from the Texans, four other teams have appointed a white head coach. Moreover, along with Ryans, there are currently only three Black head coaches in the league. The Pittsburgh Steelers HC Mike Tomlin and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers HC Todd Bowles are the other two Black head coaches. This very small number of Black head coaches in a league consisting of a majority of African-American players has worried the media for a long time.
This issue has been a talking point in the media for a long time and Fox Sports analyst Skip Bayless has chimed in to give his opinions on the issue. He believes that the old white NFL coaches are not comfortable working with Black head coaches.
NFL analyst Skip Bayless gives his opinion about the lack of diversity
During a recent episode of his show UNDISPUTED, Skip Bayless, with his co-host Shannon Sharpe, addressed the lack of diversity in the head coaching position in the NFL.
“I’m going to boil it down to these older White owners just aren’t that comfortable with a Black head coach because they need to interact, they need to go to dinner with the wives or the significants, or whatever, and they’re just not that comfortable,” said Bayless in a recent episode of UNDISPUTED.
“When they do have an interview, it’s gonna be a quicker click with a young White hot candidate,” Bayless said. “It’s just culture; it’s just the way life is, and I don’t know how to defeat it because each of these guys is an independent owner in the umbrella of the NFL. And it’s hard to legislate, ‘you must hire a Black coach.’”
As Bayless mentioned, it might be just culture and the way of life, but it certainly isn’t good for the league to have prejudicial owners. Football fans just have to hope it will get better with time and in the future, the owners might be more progressive.
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Aravind Raj
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