Progress report: The NFL is backpedaling

We tend to believe that progress is linear. That once a barrier is broken, the door will open wider, but for Black coaches in the NFL, it is getting more and more narrow. Why is that?

Sports are cast as a tool of racial progress in America.

At least that’s the story I learned growing up as a white cisgender male. The competition on the field, the camaraderie in the locker room, they are part of a tonic that helps dissolve the prejudice, the bigotry, the hate of the past.

And essential to this storyline is the belief that progress is largely linear. Once a barrier is broken, a trickle will grow into a stream will become a river until everything is flowing free without any artificial restriction from prejudice or bias. Oh, there may be hiccups along the way. We may backpedal from time to time, but we are slowly, inexorably working our way toward a more equal, more fair future just look at the way sports have worked in the past.

Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and his tremendous ability, his undeniable humanity made it so clear, so obvious to everyone how unfair, unjust segregation was. Not only that, but his on-field success helped dissolve prejudice, not completely. No, that would be too much. But significantly because even the most bigoted white owners were so competitive, so hungry for wins that they ultimately sacrificed their own prejudice at the altar of winning, which is the real religion of America.

It was this line of thinking that led to the saying that USC running back Sam Cunningham did more to integrate Alabama in 60 minutes of football than Martin Luther King Jr. did in 20 years. It says something about these sort of stories that the myths that have grown to accompany Cunningham’s performance bear no resemblance to what really happened.

But what if that’s not what happens. What if progress stalls? What if it peaks? What if it regresses? What if, after a barrier is broken, the door is shut again. Or narrowed. What do we do when this story we tell ourselves about sports as a transformative and progressive force in our society instead starts backpedaling, which is what appears to be happening for Black coaches in the NFL?

This is a subscriber only post, and while I don’t expect to solve the issue of the declining diversity among NFL coaches, I do want to start a discussion that I plan to revisit over the next few months. I’ll also have Episode 4 of the podcast, which will be posted early next week in which I talk about a surprising discovery made about some embarrassingly typical male insecurities, but that’s on Tuesday.