In 2013, eight teams hired new head coaches.  Three teams tapped rising offensive coordinators – Mike McCoy, Bruce Arians, ^[1]Who, of course, was also coming off an award-winning season as interim head coach of the Colts. Rob Chudzinski – while four other hires were head coaches with offensive backgrounds (Andy Reid, Doug Marrone, Chip Kelly, and Marc Trestman).  That means just one head coaching hire came from a defensive background: Gus Bradley in Jacksonville.

Given the current era where the rules are slanted towards the offense, one can understand how teams might be inclined to look towards offensive coaches when selecting a head coach. Consider that scoring is about 60% of the game, which could make owners and general managers break ties in favor of offensive candidates. Then, remember that the pool of teams looking for a new head coach: teams that struggled the prior year. And since offense is so important, that usually means a team that had a bad offense. It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s easy to imagine the average team looking for a head coach as one that just went 5-11 with a bad offense and is looking to turn things around with a new, sexy offensive hire.

There was something else you may recall from 2013: the lack of minority hires. At the end of the 2012 season, there were 15 job openings for general managers and head coaches; none went to a minority candidate. The hiring process for GMs is much more opaque than it is for head coaches, but there was one main explanation given for the fact that all 8 head coaching hires were white: black coaches are disproportionately defensive coaches, and the league was shifting towards offense when it came to coaching hires because of the reasons stated above.

That sounds honest enough, and it is backed up by certain facts: the vast majority of black coaches who were eventually hired as head coaches had defensive backgrounds, and there are more black defensive coordinators than there are black offensive coordinators (as of right now, there are just three: Cincinnati’s Hue Jackson, Indianapolis’ Pep Hamilton, and Arizona’s Harold Goodwin; I believe there was just one back in 2013, Jim Caldwell).

There was naturally some backlash to the “whitewashing” of 2013.  After all, seeing zero of eight vacancies go to minorities was not something the NFL was proud of, and Roger Goodell went so far as to call it unacceptable. ^[2]On the other hand, make of this what you will: perhaps the situation most often pointed to about the “problems” the NFL had was in Arizona, where well-respected defensive coordinator Ray … Continue reading There is certainly an article to be written about how black coaches are predominantly defensive coaches, but that is not this one. Let’s instead examine the claim that offensive coaches are the ones that get promoted.  Because that one doesn’t look very tenable.

From 1990 to 2013, teams hired offensive coordinators and defensive coordinators as head coaches in almost exactly equal numbers. While 2013 was a very offensive-heady year, in 2014, the pendulum swung back towards the middle: Mike Zimmer, Mike Pettine, and  Lovie Smith were hired and have defensive backgrounds, while four of the vacancies were filled by offensive-oriented coaches (Jay Gruden, Ken Whisenhunt, Bill O’Brien, and Jim Caldwell). With Smith and Caldwell both being minorities, little was written about the Rooney Rule or the racial composition of NFL coaches last year.

Then, this year happened.  There’s a decent chance you didn’t even notice. Yet again, there were seven new head coaches hired, but the composition was a mirror image of what happened just two years ago.  John Fox ^[3]A strong hire bolstered by the fact that he managed to bring highly-respected Adam Gase with him. is now in Chicago, Dan Quinn is in Atlanta, Rex Ryan was fired by the Jets but resurfaced in Buffalo, Todd Bowles is replacing Ryan in New York, Jim Tomsula is the man filling giant shoes in San Francisco, and Jack Del Rio is being given a second chance in Oakland. ^[4]If nothing else, his entire tenure shouldn’t be frustrated by Peyton Manning this time around.  The lone offensive-minded hire: Gary Kubiak in Denver.

When the NFL went 7/8 with offensive coaches in 2013, it was easy to say that that was the reason for the so-called whitewashing.  Teams preferred offense over defense, not white over black. And, the Fritz Pollard Alliance and the NFL seemed to buy into this, as both groups noted that perhaps the attention should really be shifted towards who is hired as offensive coordinators: with the NFL obviously now an offensive league, the focus should be on having more black offensive coordinators to lead to more black head coaches.

But that idea wouldn’t have worked very well this year. There were not many great offensive coordinator candidates — Gase and Kubiak were perhaps the top choices, with men like Kyle Shanahan, Frank Reich, Josh McDaniels, Hue Jackson, and um, Darrell Bevell as other names floated for possible head coaching jobs. As a result, the story of 2015 was a return to the retread model: Ryan, Kubiak, Fox, and Del Rio were all previously fired, but had also taken teams to the playoffs. Quinn fit the obvious mold: the DC for the team with the number one scoring defense the past three years. Bowles was the unanimous choice as the best assistant coach in the NFL. ^[5]He was named the 2014 Assistant Coach of the Year by the Associated Press, the Sporting News, and the Pro Football Writers of America.  That just leaves Tomsula, who was hired because… he was an in-house promotion that wouldn’t drive management crazy.

So what should the reaction be from the Fritz Pollard Alliance and the NFL this time around? It can’t be “get more offensive coordinator jobs” after the 2015 set of musical chairs.  The “go back to 2008 and have more black coaches then” isn’t a viable strategy, either. 

But I think we can learn a few things. For starters, the whole “we were hiring offensive guys, not white guys” line was either a coincidence that was picked up on because it sounded good or pretext for something else. The NFL doesn’t prefer offensive coaches to defensive coaches, and as far as I can tell, it never has.

So you should be skeptical of what you read in the media, and that you goes for the Fritz Pollard Alliance and the NFL. We also could wonder what’s going in with NFL hiring. I don’t think there’s a simple math problem to be deciphered, where 0 out of 8 is bad, 2 out of 7 is good, and 1 out of 7 is maybe okay. But there are a few takeaways from this year’s class:

• The Del Rio choice was particularly uninspiring, but it’s the Raiders, so you both expected the disappointing and recognize that few franchises have been as forward thinking with regards to race relations as Oakland. ^[6]Well, at least Oakland under Al Davis. The Raiders interviewed Hamilton to satisfy the Rooney Rule requirements. On the surface, Hamilton seems like a better hire, and I don’t even particularly like Hamilton. But serve one up for going with the known over the unknown.

• The Bears interviewed two excellent minority candidates: Bowles and Teryl Austin, who did a wonderful job as the Detroit defensive coordinator. Fox is a home run hire for NFL media types who love Fox, a group of which there is no shortage. But you can’t blame Chicago for going with a head coach who has won 38 games the past three years, even if he isn’t bringing a certain quarterback with him to Chicago.

• The Falcons interviewed Austin twice, along with Bowles and special teams coordinator Keith Armstrong; the Quinn-Atlanta deal was obvious for weeks, and objectively, one could argue that Quinn had the strongest “resume” of any coordinator this year.

• Buffalo interviewed Hamilton, Austin, and Hue Jackson. Ryan is the biggest name of the group and perhaps the “safe” choice, given his six years of experience as a head coach.

• If you are looking for a target to throw eggs at, I give you, the Denver Broncos! The team interviewed Vance Joseph to comply with the Rooney Rule, which means either (1) Denver didn’t care about optics or (2) Hamilton, Austin, and Jackson didn’t even think it was worth their time to interview for Denver with Kubiak obviously getting the job. Say what you will about the Rooney Rule, but it was put in place to avoid situations where cronyism defined coaching hires. Denver’s GM hiring his former backup to be the team’s new head coach is the perfect example of why the Rooney Rule was originally instituted: teams are often comfortable hiring who they know, and that often works against black coaches.

• The Tomsula hire is such an odd one that I don’t quite know what to do with it. San Francisco did interview Bowles and Austin, but would any of the other 31 teams have Tomsula higher on their list than those two?

For the most part, teams did seem to comply with the spirit of the rule, with Denver being a glaring exception, and both Bay Area teams making decisions that are more curious than devious. But perhaps the most interesting case this year came with the Jets. Shortly after the season, New York interviewed Anthony Lynn for the head coach job.  What’s that, you don’t know who Anthony Lynn is? He was the Jets running backs coach and assistant head coach under Ryan. I’ll give the Jets the benefit of the doubt and assume they interviewed Lynn as a courtesy and to arguably do him a favor: it could give him valuable interviewing experience and/or get his name in the news, something that couldn’t hurt. ^[7]The Jets had other black coaches on staff, of course, so picking Lynn at least said something about him.

Lynn, of course, is black. And, of course, he was not a serious candidate for the job. He wound up following Ryan to Buffalo, where he is also the running backs/assistant head coach. Perhaps the Jets did do him a favor, as Lynn did get interviews afterwards for the offensive coordinator job in Cleveland and Jacksonville.

The more nefarious explanation, though, would be that the Jets wanted to hire Quinn or Doug Marrone or some other white coach, and interviewed Lynn quickly to get that whole compliance thing out of the way early. Had that been the hire, New York wouldn’t have looked any better than Denver.

But a funny thing happened on the way to hiring Dan Quinn: the Jets found Todd Bowles. New York didn’t need to interview him to satisfy any requirements: they chose to interview Bowles based on his resume. And then, after being impressed by him during the interview, the Jets made Bowles the only black head coach hired this offseason.

A lot of people don’t like the Rooney Rule. And a lot of folks aren’t happy with the quantity of black coaches in the NFL. But if nothing else, the Jets example works as one that all sides should be able to appreciate. New York, which now has its second black head coach in four regimes, didn’t need the Rooney Rule, but they decided that Bowles was the best man for the job.

Given the scope and breadth of this point, I’ll end this one by opening it up to you in the comments, confident that you will, as always, be civil.