For 26 years, Sherman Lewis was the Susan Lucci of the NFL — always an assistant coach, never a head coach; and at 83-years-old, he will almost certainly never relinquish that bittersweet distinction.
But was this due to racism (Lewis is African-American) — or something else?
Every time a head coaching vacancy comes up, owners will very likely want to see that vacancy be filled by a "proven winner" (although the Eagles flew in the face of this not once but twice recently, hiring first Doug Pederson and then Nick Sirianni — and both of them won Super Bowls).
This goes (at least) all the way back to 1976, when the Saints hired Hank Stram, who had won Super Bowl IV with the Chiefs, to be their head coach. Stram lasted two years in New Orleans, going 7-21 in those two years before getting fired at the end of the 1977 season.
But this is not the only example of the trend of teams hiring "proven winners" to fill vacant head coaching positions. After six years, when the then-Houston Oilers went 59-38 under "Bum" Phillips and only had one losing season therein, he moved on to New Orleans, where he went 27-42 and never posted a winning season. Leeman Bennett was 47-44 in six years with the Falcons, including two Elite Eight appearances, but then went on to be 4-28 in two years as head coach of the Buccaneers.
Closer to our own time, Mike McCarthy, who was 185-123-2, including winning the Super Bowl in 2010, with Green Bay, then moved on to Dallas, and was 50-38 as head coach of "America's Team," with both of his two losing seasons marred by injuries to Dak Prescott (McCarthy was fired in January).
The bias in favor of "proven winners" — nearly all of whom just happen to be white — continues (and Pederson flopped in Jacksonville after been canned by Philadelphia in 2020 — but then again, what coach doesn't flop in Jacksonville?).
After winning Super Bowl LII with the Eagles and getting canned three years later because he "lost the locker room," Doug Pederson was immediately snapped up by the Jaguars, who fired Pederson after he went 23-30 in three years in Jacksonville.
NFL owners are still stuck on "proven winners" largely because they believe that hiring such coaches will lead to higher TV ratings and more prime-time games. No team wants to have all 17 (presumably, soon to be 18) of their games start at 1:00 PM Eastern time.
But what are the owners supposed to do — hire some 28-year-old black position coach from another team just to be thought of as "woke?"
Until the number of black head coaches in the NFL reaches a critical mass, things aren't likely to change much — and "racism" has nothing to do with it.
The self-declared "pundits" cannot expect owners to "do the right thing" by hiring unproven head coaches just because of their race, nearly always leading to their teams remaining perennial doormats.
While it is true that last week, a federal appeals court agreed to hear a discrimination suit filed by Brian Flores three years ago (!). The defendants are the NFL as a whole, plus three of its teams (the Broncos, Dolphins and Giants). But don't expect anything to come out of it — because even if Flores prevails, our MAGA President will simply sign an executive order quashing it, just like he signed an executive order last week banning sex-change operations for those under 18 (some of his supporters thought the age limit should have been set at 21).
Meanwhile, the state supreme court in Nevada, which Trump carried in 2024, sided with Jon Gruden in his fight to have his de-facto lifetime ban from the NFL lifted for sending allegedly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic e-mails to former Washington Redskins club president Bruce Allen on various occasions in the 2010s.
If Gruden wins and Flores doesn't (or if Flores wins and his victory is overturned, one way or another), the NFL is going to end up with a huge hypocrisy problem.
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