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The Rooney Rule? Perhaps the NFL should forget the Rooney Rule, which the league relies on in a half-hearted effort to increase diversity among its head coaches. What the NFL needs is more leaders like Bruce Arians.
A profoundly American truth was showcased in Tampa, Fla., this week. When it comes to racial progress, one usually needs to be in a position of power – courageous, fearless, and often white because of systematic inequality – breaking logjam.
More than a year after coaching Tampa Bay Buccaneers reach Super Bowl victoryand two weeks after learning Tom Brady would return It may be the shortest superstar retirement in the history of the sport – Arians shocked football this week by announcing his retirement, hiring his carefully chosen successor, Todd Bowles.
The highly respected defensive coordinator of Tampa Bay, Bowles is one of a large cadre of Black assistants that the Arians have entrusted with significant power during his time running the Buccaneers and Arizona Cardinals. Despite the stock of experienced coaches the Arians have loaded into the NFL’s talent line, Bowles, 58, is only the fourth Black head coach in the league.
“A few people have already asked, why are you walking away from the chance to go to the Hall of Fame and win another Super Cup?” Arians, who will move into a consultant role with the team’s front office, said this week. “Friendship is much more important to me. It has been my dream for a long time.”
“I wanted one of my men to take over,” he added. “This is more important to me than anything else.”
Tampa Bay coaches are positioned to take over other big jobs in the league. Last season, the Arians’ team had the only staff member with three minority coordinators – Bowles, Byron Leftwich, and Keith Armstrong, who led the team’s offensive and special teams. Add to that assistant head coach Harold Goodwin. With Bowles’ promotion, Pirates upgraded two Black assistants, Larry Foote and Kacy Rodgers will coordinate the defense this season. In 2021, Tampa Bay staff were the only ones in the NFL to have two women in assistant coaching roles.
Consider how vigorously the union is struggling to diversify its recruiting. This week, with the discrimination lawsuit of Brian Flores, former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, marring the annual meeting of owners and coaches, NFL announces expansion of Rooney Rule. It will now include women in the number of minority interviews for head coach candidates (never mind, as written, the expansion will not allow a team to interview any candidate of color). The league has also elected a six-member committee to review diversity practices.
But the NFL’s few head coaches of color reflect the way a segregated society works. Friends rent friends. Jobs always go not to the most qualified candidate, but to those with whom employers are familiar and comfortable. Managers reflect their leadership in a league where roughly 60 percent of players are Black and the number of Black head coaches is often stuck in the low single digits.
At 69, with a championship ring and an ocean of respect for football acumen from his peers, Arians is leaving the coaching ranks, creating an opportunity for Black talent to rise. This is as important to his legacy as the awards.
Arians has been dubbed “the coolest damn trainer in the NFL” in part because of his air, his love of Kangol derby hats, and his embrace of a kind of old-school Black cultural style born of close familiarity.
Arians grew up in a multiracial community in York, PA. In the early 1970s, as a quarterback at Virginia Tech, a school that long resisted integrating into its football team, Black was the first white player to live with a roommate—James Barber, father of NFL stars Tiki and Ronde Barber. Arians and Berber cheekily called themselves “Salt and Pepper” and were loyal friends.
Arians said it was not by design to create the most diverse coaching staff in professional football. Instead, he hired “the best coaches I know”.
“Hearing voices that are not the same, dissimilar but all have inputs in a staff meeting, you get better output,” he said.
Arians see the whole field. What the black ability does to pave the way and clear it could be called alliance in some corners. Known for his sarcastic saltiness, he probably snarls at this explanation. According to him, this is the right thing to do.
It should be noted that he followed a similar plan to that devised by Tony Dungy, the first Black head coach in Tampa Bay and the first Super Bowl winner he accomplished while leading the Indianapolis Colts during the 2006 season. Black Super Bowl-winning head coach Mike Tomlin, entering his 16th season with Pittsburgh, has hired the first Black coordinator, Teryl Austin, to lead the defense.
Key to any discussion of various recruits, Arians admit, is an unfortunate truth: Black head coaches must be nearly perfect. They rarely get the second or even third chance given to their white peers. On rare occasions when they take over teams, they are often brought in to oversee under-skilled teams or are given little latitude to hire staff to support innovative techniques.
“A lot of head coaches come to situations where they’re ready to fail, and I didn’t want that for Todd,” Arians said, certainly considering Bowles’ unsuccessful tenure leading the talentless Jets from 2015 to 2018.
Arians added that Brady’s decision to return and the team’s moves to strengthen one of the league’s strongest squads this season “confirms for me that the time is right to pass the torch.”
“I wanted to make sure that when I’m gone, Todd Bowles will have the best opportunity to succeed,” Arians said.
He got it. So are the Buccaneers. The organization made Bowles the fourth African-American head coach in the team’s history; That’s a dazzling number, considering, by my calculation, more than a third of NFL teams have never had a single Black head coach in a non-temporary role.
In the modern era, the NFL didn’t hire an African-American head coach until 1989 for the Raiders. There are now four: Bowles, Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh, Lovie Smith in Houston, and Mike McDaniel in Miami. as bi-racial.
The league claims it put a lot of pressure to fix a dire track record, even though seven of the nine teams with open head coaching jobs in this recruitment cycle have offered the roles to white men.
Rather than tinkering with rule changes and adding deliberative committees, the NFL perhaps should take the Bruce Arians route.
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