In an NBC interview airing ahead of the Super Bowl LVI matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals, Biden called for greater diversity in the coaching ranks of NFL teams. The president noted the disparity against the number of players from communities of color and called the need for more diversity a matter “generic decency.” Biden made similar comments during a Super Bowl interview in 2021.
“The whole idea that a league that is made up of so many athletes of color as well as so diverse, that there’s not enough African American qualified coaches to manage these NFL teams, it just seems to me that it’s a standard that that they’d want to live up to,” Biden explained. “It’s not a requirement of law, but it’s a requirement I think of just some generic decency.”
The race disparity between NFL head coaches and players has long been a source of controversy. In 2021, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida determined that 71 percent of League players were people of color, with 25 percent being white and 4 percent being classified as “unknown,” according to NBC News.
By contrast, only three people of color currently hold head coaching positions out of 32 teams in the NFL: Mike Tomline of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Robert Saleh of the New York Jets and Ron Rivera of the Washington Commanders. In 2006, the League boasted seven Black head coaches, the most at any time in its history. Over the course of the league’s existence, only 24 out of around 500 head coaches have been Black.
On February 1, Brian Flores, former head coach for the Miami Dolphins, sued the NFL over alleged racial discrimination. Flores accused the league of practicing racial discrimination, keeping him personally out of top coaching positions, and operating “much like a plantation.”
“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, taking vicious hits and suffering debilitating injuries to their bodies and their brains while the NFL and its owners reap billions of dollars,” the lawsuit reads.
In 2020, the NFL expanded its “Rooney Rule,” a policy aimed at expanding the league’s diversity in head coaching and senior operations positions. Named after Dan Rooney, a former diversity committee chairman, the expanded version of the rule requires teams to interview at least two external minority candidates for every head coach vacancy. The rule only sets a quota for interviewing, however, and has no hiring requirements.
