Let me try to explain without rambling: Mike Silver highlighted in his first article that the fast track to getting a head coaching job in today’s NFL is through having a hand in the play calling on offense. Jobs such as WR and RB coach had a glass ceiling in place that prevented coaches from getting there where QB coaching jobs were the fast track to OC jobs, and so on. Could a part of this dearth of black offensive coaching candidates be connected to that? There’s also the possibility I could be crazy.

I just think there’s a lot of room to work on this, and it’s sad that I see so many people distill this problem down to “there’s no black coaches.. well there’s no white CBs!” when the two things are not the same. We know that the NFL isn’t a meritocracy. That isn’t to say owners are purposely being discriminatory but it’s part of the machinery, and people tend to hire what they’re comfortable with. It’s how the Dolphins pass up Tomlin because he’s too hip-hop and go with Cam Cameron who looks more like what we think of as a head coach.

It’s a major problem that deserves some major thinking, and I’m glad that people such as Michael Silver and Bomani Jones are being so vocal about this dialogue. My only hope is that Goodell doesn’t send down some mandate, or quota. This isn’t exactly an issue you can order people to fix. The one thing that makes me sad when I think of all of this is that I’m sure in the 80’s when Bill Walsh helped start the program to get players into coaching he would have thought we would be further along than we are right now.

Thanks for the feedback and glad you’re a fan of the site!

My point with this article is if someone wants to cry foul about minority candidates being overlooked and then can only use Hue Jackson and Jim Caldwell as his examples, then there’s an even bigger problem: there are no good minority candidates.

Part of that is because people like David Shaw and Tony Dungy have removed themselves from the discussion, but honestly there are very few “hot” minority candidates — why that is the case is a topic worth investigating, unlike wondering why no one wants Hue Jackson or Jim Caldwell to run their franchise.