The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Between the Lines Ep. 5: Searching for Answers

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

In the final episode of Between the Lines, host Tashan Reed looks forward and highlights the prominent few around football who are working towards making the game more equal for all. And at the end, Reed comes to his conclusion after 18 months of reporting for the series.Voices in the episode include Mike Locksley, Richard Lapchick, Rod Graves, Oris Stuart, Jason Wright and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I mean, it's hard to tell somebody that no. You are, there is legitimate racial bias here. We use those words. We say it, but like I say, it falls on deaf ears after it said for a day or so. There are only three head coaches in the NFL who identify as black. That's the same number as there were last year, in the year before that, in the year before that, and the year before that. The hiring process is broken. You know, it's gone.

the fact that Eric Beeney doesn't have a job, says it all. As former NFL head coach Hugh Jackson pointed out, that's the only way Eric Beenemy ends up in the situation. And now even with Eric, and look, I know Andy Reid and Andy Reid's a tremendous person, but for me to hear Andy say that maybe Eric needs to go somewhere else, are you kidding me? Why would he need to go anyplace else? After winning his second Super Bowl as Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator,

Beenemy left to work for another team. But he didn't become a head coach. He took over as the commander's offensive coordinator. Being a head coach right now, it hasn't happened. It's not anything that's going to impact me moving forward. Because the only thing I need to be concerned with is what's important today. Be Enemy will be the primary play caller for the commanders, which is something he didn't do for the chiefs and was held against him.

If he's everything he should be, he should be able to do his job, just like Nagy did his job and got a head coach. coaching job. Just like Peterson did his job and got a head coaching job from you. Why does he have to be different? Doug Peterson was an OC under Andy Reed, didn't call plays, and got the Eagles head coaching job. I can't tell you how excited I am to welcome back Doug Peterson to the Eagles family. I'm standing here before you, just a humbled human being. There's a lot of people I want to thank. And Matt Nagy was an OC under Andy Reed, didn't call plays. and got the Bears head coaching job.

We set out to find the best leader for our franchise. Our research, preparation, and the interview process led us to Matt Nagy. Thanks for everybody showing up today. This is truly an honor. It's special. It's a dream. Eric B. Enemy was an OC under Andy Reed, didn't call plays, and still hasn't gotten a head coaching job after 16 interviews.

All right. So all that stuff about. about being a head coach, we could talk about that next year sometime. Right now, I'm focused on the job at hand. In this year's Super Bowl, the team that lost, the Eagles, saw both of their coordinators get head coaching jobs. Shane Steichen and Jonathan Gannon do not have the resume of Eric B. Enemy. What they are are white men. He was born to parents that had less melanin that's getting in their skin, and Steve Wilk, Rahim Morris. The pipeline is leaking here. The system is broken on how this league identifies the next head coach candidate.

Not only did Bian and me not get the opportunity they did, but he felt he needed to make a lateral move just to have the chance for one to come in the future. To watch two guys, and I know one of them extremely well, and watch two guys get head coaching jobs after losing a Super Bowl, when you have a guy that's won two Super Bowl has been there quite a few times. To me, that was a slap in the face to minority coaches.

I'm Tashon Reed. This is Between the Lines, Episode 5, searching for answers. The number of blackhead coaches in the NFL has been stagnant for years. University of Maryland head coach Mike Loxley is hoping to change that. It was really the first time at that point 28 years in coaching that my world just shut down. Locksley is thinking back to 2020. The world was paralyzed by a pandemic.

At the same time, there was a wave of social unrest in America. following the murders of Amad Arbery, George Floyd, and Brianna Taylor. It all gave Loxley time to reflect, and he ultimately decided to act. And as I kind of reflected on my career at that point, you know, here I was a guy that had been a head coach before, a failed head coach. And, you know, December of 2008, I got hired at New Mexico to be the head football coach. And now it's at that time, 2020, 12 years later, I'm the head coach. at my dream job of the University of Maryland.

Locksley's tenure as head coach at New Mexico was an utter disaster. He went just two and 26 before being fired four games into his third season in 2011. Locksley thought he was capable of being a successful head coach, but he knew he'd have to prove himself before he earned a second chance. Because of mentorship, I was very intentional when I got let go at New Mexico as to what my next move should. be or would be. When it came to how to go about doing that, he was conflicted. While working as the Maryland offensive coordinator in 2012, he turned to Debbie Yao for advice.

Yao was the athletic director at Maryland during Locksley's first stint at the university in the late 90s. I remember Debbie Yao telling me that failure isn't final was kind of the word she used, and that unless in my mind I thought I wouldn't have another chance, if that's what I thought, then that's what would happen. She began to just say, listen, figure out what you need to do to get to where you want to go. And it started with her saying one of the best things you can do is be very intentional with the decision you make when you leave here and get under the umbrella, per se, of some of these coaches that basically impact or have the power to impact my future. When Maryland coach Randy Edsel was fired six games into the 2015 season, Loxley took over as the interim. head coach. They went just one in five down the stretch, and Loxley didn't get the full-time job.

Once again, Loxley found himself at a point of conflict. Then all of a sudden, I was presented with the idea of going to Alabama as an off-the-field coach. You know, when talking to Debbie, she said, that's the move you should think about making because it puts you under the umbrella of Nick Sabin. It gives you access. And for me, I looked at it as a win-win because it gave me a chance as a coach to not have to be making decisions, but to kind of rebrand myself, and it was the best move I ever made. Locksley spent one season as an offensive analyst at Alabama

before Nick Saban promoted him to co-offensive coordinator. After becoming the full-time OC the next season, Locksley became a head coaching candidate once again. And in 2019, Locksley returned to Maryland, this time as their head coach. You know, this is a dream job for me. I grew up loving the Terps. I've always wanted to be a Terp.

Locksley wouldn't have made that career recovery without a lot of help. He wanted to become someone who could do the same for others. And as Locksley looked around both the college football and NFL ranks, he saw an alarming lack of blackhead coaches. For me, I'm a big believer in being solution-based. You know, anybody can point out the problem. Anybody can tell you, you know, what's the issue. But, you know, I kind of get enjoyment.

out of the problem itself and finding solutions. Locksley's solution was to create the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches. Yeah, I can remember exactly where I was. I was walking around the perimeter of my home, and I picked up the phone. And the first phone call was to Mike Tomlin, and I said, you know, Mike T. I'm thinking about starting an organization, very similar to the BCA that he and I were raised on the Black Coaches Association that pretty much raised me in this profession as a minority coach.

The Black Coaches Association was once an answer. Founded in 1988 by prominent Black College Basketball head coaches such as John Thompson, Nolan Richardson, and George Ravelling, the BCA and the Fritzpollett Alliance played a significant role in developing the pool of black coaches that the NFL pulled from when it reached a league record seven black head coaches in 2007. The BCA started to decline before folding in 2016. And in a conversation with Mike Tomlin, the Steelers head coach urged Loxley to help bring back something similar.

I remember him saying, well, I'm in, he says, but I'm more into the preparing people for the opportunities. He likes the programming piece of it. And so once he said that, it made me think, you know, well, what would be our mission? And, you know, I came up with the three P's. Prepare, promote, produce. Those are the three P's that Locksley built the NCMFC on as he constructed the organization from the ground up. Within three years, the NCMFC has grown to over 1,300 members who work in football at the high school, college, and pro levels.

Do the best job we can to prepare. You know, let's give the people the tools to be able to do the job that they want to achieve. I wanted to kind of grassroots it and grow it organically from bottom up. Every time there's a college football head coach opening, the NCMFC reaches out to the university to get a sense of what type of coaches schools are looking for and recommend diverse coaches who would fit. But then the next piece was promote. I know for me getting every time Kirk Hurstreet did our games at Alabama, those guys saying what a great job Mike Loxley does carries so much weight that I said,

How can we promote the job that minority coaches are doing to make sure that their names are out there? Simultaneously, they started an academy to help sustain the pipeline of qualified black candidates. Produce. Find ways to produce results where we can say, hey, when they say that the pipeline is dried up and we don't have coaches, say, no, no, we do. Here's some guys that fit what you're looking for. collectively, they've gotten the attention of decision makers in the world of football. The result of the efforts has been five black coaches who participated in the academy, landing head coaching jobs, in the last two hiring cycles. I'd say 90% of the college jobs that have opened the last two cycles or last three cycles.

The coalition has been a part of their process in some form or fashion. As I said, also, though, the NFL, we still haven't been. been able to crack the code. To be clear, the NFL League office has been receptive to the NCMFC. The issue has been translating that dialogue into action. The NFL level, I can tell you, we've had great conversations with the league office. There's no doubt in my mind that they are on board with figuring out how to increase the number of minority coaches at that level. But again, they work for the owners. And to me, the owners are the ones that, it's got to be something that they find important, that diversity is good for the league.

But somehow, some way, we've got to have these owners see the value in hiring coaches, diverse coaches that have the ability to move their organizations forward. The NFL gets the vast majority of attention when it comes to diversity issues in the coaching ranks. But Loxley stresses the issues trickles down from the pros to pee-wee football. This is something that happens across the board from the top youth programs, the top high school programs, the top college programs, the top NFL programs. They're all dealing with the same issue. And it's our job as an organization to continue to figure answers out and put us in the best position to fix such an egregious problem and issue.

Rod Graves is someone else who's making a difference. One thing that I can strongly say is that the recognition, the respect, that the league has shown for Fritz Pollard, and, you know, it has really been tremendous. The former NFL executive became one of the first black GMs in league history. In 2014, Graves left his career as an NFL executive to work in the league office as their senior vice president of football administration. Primarily, Graves sought to use his time, energy, and experience to try to increase opportunities for more people of color. After four years in that role, Graves became the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance. And much like Loxley, Graves thinks the NFL League office wants diversity.

There's been adamant and avid discussion about a lot of the proposals that have been made. There are a number of people that work alongside me and have contributed with their experience. You know, former league executives, former team executives, people from academic. Demia, a lot of those discussions, even some of the things that we're seeing now, we've been discussing with the league for some time. Graves has longstanding relationships with those working in the league office. He trusts that their interactions have been genuine. The way Roger Goodell and his office, and particularly Troy Vincent, Deja Smith, Jonathan Bean,

and others, Jeff Pash, they have all been very supportive of us being included. giving us an opportunity to talk through ideas, make proposals, and so forth. And I don't know that we could ask for a better situation in terms of being heard. There's been a corresponding shift in the makeup of the league office. They've adopted formal diversity and inclusion policies, and has resulted in an increase in diverse hires. But as Hugh Jackson says, they still fail to have that same impact within NFL teams. You know, they mandated taking the head out of the game because of concussions.

The league went through a five-year period, made a decision and said, hey, we're doing the right things by this. We have to take the head out. If diversity and inclusion and the head coaching position, the National Football League, is important as everybody says it is, why can't you mandate things? Well, we can't tell these owners what to do. Well, supposedly the owners are all for it. So which one is it? You know, so to me, somewhere there's not the right conversations that are being had. I mean, again, if we can't see what the league is telling us and if we can't see what the data is telling us, we look for data and everything else.

I mean, it's very obvious what the data is telling us in this situation, for sure. The data says that the owners don't want to make change among the head coaching ranks. What's interesting, however, is that they have been willing to do so among the data. NFL executives. There are eight black GMs and five black team presidents, which are both NFL records. Jackson believes the discrepancy has to do with how front-facing the head coaching role is in comparison. When you think of the GMs, they're not the people that are out front. The head coach is out front. But it's really interesting how they can make decisions about these GMs. And you mean to tell me out of those eight men, none of them want to hire a minority as their head coach.

that just doesn't strike me that way. They would be, you would think they'd be more comfortable with their own as well. And so the fact that that hasn't happened to me, that says a lot too, but it tells you that they're not in control of that situation. Loxley, on the other hand, thinks it all comes back to access to ownership. Well, a lot of these GMs and executives have come through the ranks. They have access to these owners. They're sitting in these war rooms and draft evaluation meetings that coaches don't always have. have the ability to be in. And so I'm really hopeful that the seeds that have been planted with

the five presidents, the eight GMs that are minorities, I'm hoping that the fruits of this labor of being able to the access that they've been given to these owners now will maybe help grow the number of minority coaches. Examples of that coming to fruition are few, but they do exist. Houston Texans head coach D'emico Ryan's, for example, had a relationship with team CEO Cal McNair because his late father, Bob McNair, was the team owner when they drafted Ryan's as a player in 2006. To me, that's where the next step for us as an organization is. We'll continue to try to open up the access of the owners when you think about the league

and some of the conversations I've had with the executives in the league. They want to figure this out. And they're just a byproduct of the ownership of these teams that may be. take up the NFL. After the break, we'll look at how another major sports league, the NBA, managed to figure things out, while the NFL continues to lag behind.

To listen to every episode of Between the Lines, Ad Free, and bonus full-length interviews with people like Doug Williams, Bumani Jones, Hugh Jackson, and more. Subscribe to the Athletic Audio Plus exclusively on Apple Podcasts. The NBA is far ahead of the

NFL when it comes to diversity. But that wasn't the case initially. When it was founded in 1920, the NFL had two black players, Bobby Marshall and Fritz Pollard. It wouldn't be until 1950 when the NBA signed its first black player with Nat Clifton joining the New York Knicks. My earliest memory was looking outside our bedroom window in Yonkers, New York where I was raised and seeing his image swinging from a tree with people picketing under the tree. Richard Lapchick is a human rights activists. His father is Joe Lapchick, the Knicks coach who signed Clifton. Him taking a lot of hateful calls that he didn't know I was listening to as a child on the extension phone. The issue of race and basketball was unavoidable for the Lapchick family. Those issues literally collided

with a punch to Lapchick's face during a summer basketball camp in 1961, which was run by the basketball coach at Power Memorial High School. He had five of his white players and a black player there. One of the white players who's been a D1 coach for the last 35 years was dropping the inward and the black kid gone till dusk. I finally challenged him on the third day. He knocked me out cold. The black kid's name at the time was Lou El Cinder and Kareem and I began a lifelong friendship that has had a profound impact on hopefully both of us, but definitely me.

I just knew that at that moment that I was going to spend the rest of my life working on the area of civil rights. I didn't know what it meant, but because I suddenly had a young urban African-American lens, I was able to see what racism was doing in his community and other communities of color. And I wanted to do something about it. Lapchick's career as a college professor focuses on examining the intersection of race and sports. In 1988, he put together his inaugural racial and gender report card. It assessed the hiring practices of women and people of color in America. America's most prominent pro and amateur sports leagues and organizations. And then in 2002,

his work in the field led to the creation of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, also known as Tides, at the University of Central Florida. The reports issued by Tides and the overall effort to push for diversity has become far more widely accepted across the world of sport. We never asked permission to do it. I think through all the leagues who are angry. originally. I think they've all transitioned into commissioners that know that diversity's business imperative as well as a moral imperative. So it's going to be good for their business to have diverse front offices and coaching staffs. Initially, that wasn't the viewpoint for any of the sports entities that Lachick covered in his report. But one stood apart in its response,

the NBA. David Stern, who took over as the least commissioner in 1984, led the charge. Well, I do think that the climate of the NBA since David Stern became commissioner has been, let's put the best product on the field and in the stands. And when David took over, everybody said the league was too black. You know, he wouldn't have any part of changing that. He just wanted to put the best talent out there, including in the coaching race. And I always remember that, I mean, he didn't like me doing the racial and gender report card in the beginning. And he said, you know, I wish you wouldn't be doing this. He said, my goal is that not only will somebody, nobody notice when a black coach is hired,

but nobody will notice when a black coach is fired. It's just, okay, we brought in the best people, hired the best person, could be a white guy, could be whatever. And that's just the way the NBA has generally operated. Much like the NFL, the NBA is a global sports league with mostly black rosters that has a history of struggling with diversity among the coaching and executive ranks. That didn't immediately change after Stern took over, but his willingness to hear a lap check out contrasted with the NFL, which essentially had to be forced to listen. I went with Johnny Cochran and Cyrus Mary in 2001. Cyrus is another civil rights attorney to the NFL to threaten legal action if they didn't change their hiring practices because they had the worst record at the time and the Rooney Rule was the result of that.

There have obviously been tweaks of the Rooney Rule. There have obviously been pronouncements after pronouncements over the years about what needs. to be done, yet the NFL has struggled mightily in the past four or five years to raise the number of blackhead coaches. The NBA has almost always been quicker to react to matters of race than the NFL. Bill Russell became the league's first blackhead coach in 1966. That was 23 years before the Raiders made Art Shell the NFL's first blackhead coach. With that being said, the NBA still had just seven blackhead coaches when the 2020 season began. That's more than the NFL has had at one time since the late 2000s, but NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who replaced Stern in 2014, still noted that it was a problem. The NBA formed the coach's equity initiative in 2019 to do something

about it. And after just three years, the NBA went into the 2022 season with 15 blackhead coaches, which represents 50% of the league's head coaches overall. It was a dramatic turnaround. I don't think anybody went out and said, let's hire old black head coaches. They just, each team went out and said, we're going to try to get the best guy out there and did. There's plenty of room for growth among the executive level, but the head coaching progress is still incredible. So how did they do it?

We have been very focused on sharing data about where we are, looking at what. What's getting in a way, how biases build up and then, you know, get ingrained and locked in. That's Orris Stewart. From 2015 through 2022, he was the chief people and inclusion officer for the NBA. To hear Stewart talk about the goal of his job, it seems simple. Make sure the NBA hires the best people. To make sure the best talent reflects the diversity of the marketplace, reflects the diversity of our fans, reflects the diversity of our fans,

reflects the diversity of the best talent at the level. And so we've got to look at all of our business practices and processes and preferences and preferences to make sure that we are not inadvertently excluding people who can help us roll the game. When Stewart came aboard the NBA in 2005, the league's coaching and executive ranks were overwhelmingly white. Stewart says the league, like most corporations, had built hiring practices that were implicitly biased against people of color. If I'm a leader and I'm building an organization, I'm building practices around an organization, and I'm naturally inclined to want to surround myself with people who have

similar interests, similar background, similar experiences, similar pedigree, if you will, then I'm going to build systems that support that and reinforce that. And so those systems grow up, they mature, they get baked in. and then it's really hard to do something different. It's hard to act different because, you know, you brought in to those practices. Stewart's explanation for implicit bias in hiring practices can be applied to any business. It shows how disadvantages for certain groups of people can be built into the foundations of a business, even without any ill intent. Stewart provides an example of how even organizations like the NBA can end up.

with a lack of diversity in their hiring practices. The process for acquiring talent, recruiting talent, that funnel that starts with deciding you're going to hire someone and creating a job description all the way through to the point where you make the selection at every single stage of that process, right, in a job description, where you're going to source those candidates, evaluating resumes, interviewing the candidates, and making the final selection, there's bias that shows up in every single way. one of those steps. And so as organizations, we've got to understand that, and then we've got to take that extra step of identifying and building new processes to interrupt that by it. That takes

a lot of energy. And so most organizations, even if they have interests and recognize the value of addressing these matters, most organizations fail to interrupt. And so you get the same outcome. And you repeat the same patterns, you get the same outcome. One of Stewart's mandates was to break apart that bias at every step of the hiring process. Stewart says the way the NBA improved its diversity in the head coaching and executive ranks was through continually looking at each step of the hiring pipeline and either improving that process or changing it completely. We created a database that profile coaching candidates, more than 300 coaching candidates, now profile in that database.

More than 100 front office users have access to and use that database. Stewart likens that database to a basketball coach's LinkedIn, much more interactive than a spreadsheet with a bunch of names and emails on it. I have the ability to fill in some basic foundational data about who I am. My basketball background is, what my coaching tree has been, what players, what teams I've participated in. But I can go further than that. I can share my philosophy around coaching.

I have the ability to profile myself through videos and through articles and through other media and content that tells a much more complete and holistic story about who I am and my potential as a coach and as a contributor. This database is a networking tool, a virtual way to introduce yourself and build a possible connection with the people that do the hiring. Beyond what I might hear about someone from someone else in my network, I now actually get to hear about and see this coach present himself for herself in their own words. Stewart says while the NBA succeeded in changing their processes, the solution isn't static. It's always changing. And organizations that are committed to diversity must continue to evolve. Let's prime that pipeline early and then let's keep the flow.

going and let's believe that we'll get equitable, inclusive outcomes at the end. The NBA's effort has largely been its success. Despite some similar initiatives being created in the NFL, Commissioner Roger Goodell hasn't been able to get their owners to respond in the same manner. The league is far from the only billion dollar corporation with this issue. If you analyze the leadership makeup of just about any other well-known business in corporate America, you'd likely find similar numbers. Another thing that sounds crazy, but I think the NFL has been more aggressively forward-thinking than corporate America writ large. Washington commanders president Jason Wright, who's worked at high levels in both corporate America and the NFL,

has had a firsthand account of how things operate in both worlds. Most of corporate America still doesn't do the Rooney Rule. And the NFL is already like, hey, Rooney Rules not going to work well enough. We got to revamp. But most of corporate America is still reticent to do that because it's like, you know, reverse racism or quotas or whatever it is. Take your pick, whatever protestation there is just to having a diverse slate for senior roles. Most corporations don't even do that. They might pay lip service to it on their website, but there's no real policies.

And the NFL has been more structural and forward thinking on some of those things. Now, you can debate the efficacy, which we are all. all doing right now. We know it's not working well enough. Commissioner said that and so. I think all the owners would agree with that, I think. But those policies have at least been in place. It's not an excuse for the NFL's lack of

progress, but it's indicative of the fact that this is a problem that's not just about football. It's a pervasive issue rooted in the racist structures that America was built on. The NFL has just fallen in line, and has a multi-billion

dollar entity composed of 32 separate businesses operating under the same umbrella, it makes finding uniformity in breaking norms something that's tough to achieve. There is definitely, it's a fair list society here. So there's definitely differences in team to team. It's usually driven top down by ownership, president and hit coach. They set the sort of parameters on what's in and what's out on a given topic, just like any workspace, frankly. Just like any company is sort of set top down. And Every organization makes their trade-off decisions. Owners essentially have free reign to run their business how they want to.

And since there's hardly any diversity at that level, there's a uniformity in their unwillingness to prioritize diversity. That's what perpetuates the stagnant cycle the league is stuck in. It's easy to explain the lack of diversity among ownership. Teams don't go up for sale often, and there aren't many diverse individuals who could afford to buy them in the first place, but there's no excuse for the lack of black executives, coaches, and decision makers. You could say the pool of talent is heavily slanted towards black men for the main

product of the NFL. And because of that, there should be more matriculation, certainly into coaching ranks at the senior levels, because that's directly the skill set, at deep understanding of football knowledge and proximity to the game, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And certainly on the business side, because there's at least a handful of guys that can do this business work to do with the right training and development. So I think because the talent pool at the core of the industry is so black, it begs to question what else should we be people? Through 18 months of working on this podcast, I reached an undeniable conclusion. The NFL only stands to benefit from diversity. The league is already a vastly successful business, but it could make even more money if it had a

greater number of individuals who come from varied backgrounds throughout its ranks. And we know that, if nothing else, those who call the shots, the NFL team owners, value money above all else. So why have they, and the NFL as a whole, been so resistant to diversity for more than a century? Racism is the answer. Minorities were meant to be a part of this league when it's first start. It's an uncomfortable resolution for some to hear, but it's the truth. It took lawsuits. It took different things to get players first to be involved and then coaches. The NFL's race problem wouldn't have persisted this long without two sectors of individuals existing throughout the decision-making ranks.

In my experience, the NFL does have a race problem. Number one, racist people. But more than that, the owners have a race problem. And number two, people who are unwilling to do. change a system rooted in racist principles. These 32 billionaires, they're the ones who have to say, yes, we're doing it. Obviously, that's not exclusive to the NFL. America is located on stolen land and was built by slave labor.

This is what our country has always been about. White people fundamentally believe that black people are intellectually inferior. And at some point, we just have to drill in on that fact. And whether it's the NFL or any other major structure within America, those two aforementioned groups have been unwilling to budge. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon, which paints a bleak picture when it comes to exploring solutions for the country's fatal flaw.

Until people finding it in their heart to look at you as a human being and not see you anything other than that, it's not going to change. That doesn't apply any differently to the NFL. If things are going to get better and stay better, it's going to take all of us around the decision makers committing to an intentional, concentrated, and relentless effort to make it happen. It's almost as if we just take it as fact that owners and the league officials have all the power. The game is still about the players.

If they don't play, there is no game. That means players wielding their power to amplify the topics they're passionate about and leverage for change with the players. within the league. If you're going to benefit from the drive and motivation of these players that comes from a very specific place, yeah, they have an obligation to give back to the community. That means head coaches being willing to give more diverse colleagues opportunities. That means general managers and team presidents building out front offices that are representative

of various groups and embracing the fact that it only makes them more successful to do so. The right house would be honest with you. lies within the ownership of these teams. You got 32 owners. When these interviews are being taken, nine out of ten, and there's no minority, there's no blacks in the room. That means Commissioner Roger Goodell in the league office, making it a genuine priority to make diversity a part of the NFL's culture

and holding the owners' feet to the fire to do the same. And I think people got to start being a little bit more honest about what they see and really diving into what it really is and people don't want to because those are hard conversations to have. And that means media members like myself, using our respective platforms to help ensure that this discussion never dies. The reality is there is a pervasive disbelief

in our society in black intellect. But time has told us that getting all of those groups on the same page about anything, let alone race, difficult task. And even in moments where it's happened, the summer of 2020 stands out, that unity has quickly dissipated. Watching Roger Goodell, like, get on TV and, you know, trying to sound like he win it. Like, you know, we know there's a definite limit. There's a ceiling on this ally ship, right?

That's where another element has to come into play. An external force. Historically, it's always been necessary to cause major racial change within the NFL. From the reintegration of the league, all the way up through the Rooney Rule. Oh, no, you got to take them to court. That is the thing that they respect. Like this level of money and power, that's the thing that they respect. They respect lawyers. That's taking it out back to fight.

Whether it's legal action, loss of sponsorship dollars, public pressure, or some mix of the three, the NFL has proven it's going to have to be forced to act. It'll take time. yes, more time, before we'll find out whether the internal and external pressures will ever coalesce into forcing the NFL and its owners to accept, confront, and rectify their race problem. All of those impacted are aware that that day may never come, but their only option is to continue to fight with the hope that a breakthrough will eventually come. I'm Tashon Reed.

and this has been Between the Lines. Thank you for listening to Between the Lines. Deshawn Reed is the creator and host of the series. Madhavia and Mike Smelts are the executive producers. And special thanks to Robert Mays and Michael Beller.