The Better Letter: You’ve Got to Want It

Diversity is hard but important. Beneficial, too.

Last week’s missive marked a special event: it was TBL issue number 100. I am beyond grateful for the many notes and comments I received, public and private, to mark the occasion.

This week’s TBL focuses on another big moment, at least for the NFL – Brian Flores’ racial discrimination lawsuit and potential class action against the league and its teams. There is a lot of nonsense about with respect to how we should deal with issues of race.

The Flores lawsuit isn’t nonsense.

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You’ve Got to Want It

The National Football League’s showpiece event, the Super Bowl, will be played at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on Sunday between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams. The NFL’s signature threat, a racial discrimination and potential class action lawsuit filed by former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores against the league and its teams over a hiring system “rife with racism,” will play out over the coming months and perhaps years in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan.

Flores was fired last month after three seasons. After winning five games in 2019 with a roster that was bad enough to invite widespread speculation that the Dolphins were tanking, he had winning seasons the next two years, the first coach to do so in Miami since 2003. He accomplished that feat despite a roster never brimming with talent and without the most important weapon a team can have: a “franchise” quarterback.

Despite lots of focus on Black History Month, pro-equality messages painted in end zones, and meeting with Al Sharpton, the NFL and the Dolphins have a lot of terrible facts against them.

History isn’t kind to the NFL’s case, to begin with. For example, the league relied on the backs of Black players to build its fledgling brand before banning them in 1934 once the league became financially viable. More recently,  the NFL tried to minimize payouts to former Black players in the $1 billion concussion/CTE settlement via race-norming, claiming Blacks begin with a lower cognitive function than their white counterpoints.

The baseline numbers are ugly, too. The guys who call the plays don’t look anything like the guys who make the plays.

The NFL’s players are 70 percent Black. Its owners are zero percent Black.

For 20 years now, the “Rooney Rule” has required NFL teams to interview Black candidates for available coaching positions. Despite its stated intention of providing more opportunities for minority candidates, exactly three of the 32 NFL teams has a Black head coach today. That number includes Lovie Smith and Mike McDaniel, who were quickly hired after the Flores litigation news broke. There are only three Black quarterback coaches, four offensive coordinators, and seven general managers (two of whom were recently hired).

The impetus for the Rooney Rule, written into NFL bylaws in 2003, was the threat of a class action lawsuit from O.J. Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran, who had commissioned a report that was striking, if unsurprising. Over the NFL’s first 82 years, more than 400 head coaches had been hired, only six of whom were Black; and of the 22 hires most recent to the report, just two were Black. Ironically, there were more Black head coaches then than there were when Brian Flores filed his Complaint.

The NFL is famous for being a “copycat” league. When something works, other teams copy it. That’s why, for example, Super Bowl coordinators are so often hired as head coaches immediately thereafter. Rams offensive coordinator Kevin O’Connell is said to be the Vikings’ choice to be their new head coach, for example.

Then again, the coordinators of last year’s champions, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (Byron Leftwich and Todd Bowles), and Eric Bieniemy, the offensive coordinator of the previous season’s champion Kansas City Chiefs, remain without head coaching jobs. Perhaps coincidentally, all are Black.

Leftwich, Bowles, and Bieniemy are further hindered in that none is related to another NFL coach (111 of all 792 NFL coaches and 11 of 32 head coaches are related to at least one other NFL coach).

Beyond the raw numbers, Flores outlines a litany of other disturbing events, including a striking text string with Bill Belichick congratulating him on the New York Giants head coaching job even though he had not yet interviewed for it.

Alex Weprin @alexweprin

Here are the texts:

It turns out Belichick thought he was texting a different former Patriots assistant named Brian, white ex-Bills defensive coordinator Brian Daboll, who was named the new Giants coach three days later. In the meantime, Flores suffered through an intensive interview with the Giants, who have not had a Black head coach in their nearly 100-year history, knowing the interview was a sham.

Flores also alleges that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offered him $100,000 for every loss in 2019 so the team could earn a higher draft pick. Flores refused the tanking suggestion and garnered five wins, exceeding expectations, before winning seasons the next two years.

As his Complaint details, there were no good options for Flores. Had the Dolphins indeed tanked, they would have been the league’s laughingstock and Flores would have been an easy sacrifice. By ignoring the request, Ross was angered and saw Flores as another stereotypical “angry Black man” who refused to do what his boss wanted, ushering in the end of his time in Miami on the least pretext. Not surprisingly, sources told reporters that Ross’ surprising decision to fire Flores was because he’s difficult to work with.

Black coaches seem to be held to a higher standard, too. Tony Dungy (who later won a Super Bowl in Indianapolis) was fired after three straight playoff seasons in Tampa, allowing Jon Gruden to win a Super the next season with what was basically Dungy’s team. Jim Caldwell got iced in Detroit, like Flores, after consecutive winning seasons with a team that hadn’t broken .500 in back-to-back seasons in a very long time. The team has also not had a winning season since, going 17-46-2 over the past four seasons.

On the day general manager Bob Quinn announced Caldwell’s firing, he justified it because the team’s 9–7 record that season allegedly didn’t meet expectations. Given that the Lions have just one playoff win in over half a century, those supposed expectations sound absurd.

“Flores is right. … S--- is not on equal playing field,” one current NFL assistant coach wrote in a text to a reporter, though he declined to elaborate. “I don’t have millions in the bank to fall back on if I don’t have a job!”

As The Athletic reported, “Flores said out loud … the things that minority coaches have spoken about in private for years.”

Flores isn’t the only one with strong stories to tell, of course. Not by a long shot.

When Arizona Cardinals’ defensive coordinator Ray Horton, who had won Super Bowls as a player and an assistant coach, interviewed for a head coaching job in 2013, the franchise’s majority owner didn’t attend. But someone in the room asked a question on the owner’s behalf: Why did Horton, with his passionate sideline demeanor and cornrows, seem “really aggressive” during games?

“Well, how do you want your team to play?” Horton says he replied.

Those in the room loved the answer and gave Horton a rave review but he didn’t get the job. A friend with the team called Horton to say that a white coach had gotten the gig. The general manager later called to inform Horton that the team owner simply felt more comfortable with the other candidate.

“If you ask me is the NFL racist, I would say absolutely not. Now, if you ask me if they have a cognitive bias? Absolutely, 1,000 percent, they do,” Horton says. “Your record says yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, but you come back and you’re disappointed because the cards were stacked against you.”

Naturally, in response to the Flores litigation, the NFL immediately denied everything. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the league claims to be “deeply committed to ensuring equitable employment practices and continue[s] to make progress in providing equitable opportunities throughout our organizations.”

Despite the denial, the NFL does recognize the obvious – it has a real problem. Commissioner Roger Goodell said Wednesday that the NFL "fell short" in terms of increasing the number of minority head coaches this offseason and that he has no solutions for the league's hiring practices.

Four days after Flores filed his lawsuit, Goodell issued a memo to all 32 clubs, stating the league’s lack of diversity in its current hiring cycle has been “unacceptable” and that the NFL will seek outside experts to help “reevaluate and examine” its policies related to diversity and inclusion.

The risks Flores faces are high, as his statement announcing his lawsuit recognizes.

“God has gifted me with a special talent to coach the game of football, but the need for change is bigger than my personal goals. In making the decision to file the class action complaint today, I understand that I may be risking coaching the game that I love and that has done so much for my family and me. My sincere hope is that by standing up against systemic racism in the NFL, others will join me to ensure that positive change is made for generations to come.”

As anybody can see, he has likely committed “career suicide.”

Ultimately, the problem is one of ownership. Owners decide which coaches to hire and which coaches not to hire. And it isn’t like making sure the ticket office or the scouting staff is diverse. Head coaches and general managers are integral to the success of an NFL team. It’s hard to reach out to someone you aren’t totally committed to and comfortable with when the decision may well make or break your team.

I have little doubt that, for NFL owners, green is the color that matters most. But without many exemplars of great Black coaches, it’s not hard to see why owners might not be willing to hire outside their comfort zone.

We are inherently tribal. We too seldom venture from our homogenous “safe spaces.” Americans from different tribes increasingly self-select. We tend to live with, befriend, date, align with, hang-out with, and hire people that look and think like we do.

If you never left New England, you might think everyone roots for the Red Sox.

On the other hand, we increasingly loathe people who aren’t like us and find it uncomfortable even talking to them. Every passing day we seem to dislike them more and more. We trust each other less, we fear each other more, and we struggle to understand how they could possibly be so stupid. We think “our side” has been losing and too compromising – thus the “other side” should be doing the giving so we can do the taking. We tend to dehumanize “them,” and it rarely turns out well.

It’s hard to be generous when you’re losing. And NFL teams looking for coaches are almost always losing.

NFL owners will no doubt insist, and may even believe, that they aren’t racist – they simply hired the best candidate irrespective of color. That sort of claim misses the point, as an example from Hollywood demonstrates.

Noted Hollywood diversity advocate Matt Damon sparked controversy during the fourth season of HBO’s “Project Greenlight” after the actor interrupted a (black female) colleague’s concerns about the need for diverse hiring practices only to dismiss them. In the reality show, new and emerging filmmakers were given a chance to direct a feature.

Show producers Damon and Ben Affleck enlisted a group of other Hollywood producers to help them choose their director finalists. The group included a bunch of white guys, just one white woman and no people of color. The finalists were flown to Los Angeles to meet in person with the producers. At these meetings, they introduced Effie Brown, an experienced Hollywood producer and a black woman, to the mix. Watch what happened.

Note the Damon quote (which is not completely captured in the video above).

“I’m glad Effie flagged the issue of diversity for all of us, because filmmaking should throw a broader net and it’s high time for that to change. But ultimately, if you suddenly change the rules of this competition at the eleventh hour, it just seems like you would undermine what the competition was supposed to be about, which is about giving somebody this job based entirely on merit, and leaving all other factors out of it. It’s just strictly a filmmaking competition. I think the whole point of this thing is that you go for the best director, period. This is what we have and this is what we have to choose, and the only thing I can go by is the work that they’ve done.”

Brown later acknowledged that the edited version that aired (and which is shown and quoted above, in part) was more benign that what happened in real time: “That was a more polite version of that exchange.”

It seems clear that Damon was convinced of his own pristine purity as well as his team’s lack of prejudice and, therefore, could see no problem with his simply picking the “best” candidate. Then – surprise! – they picked a white male.

Indeed, Damon and Affleck selected a top four and every single one of them was white and male. Damon never considered the possibility that he – like all of us – is afflicted with a variety of inherent tribal biases and is utterly blind to them. Chris Rock makes the point brilliantly. Hollywood may not be as clearly and aggressively or even intentionally racist as in times past, but it remains “sorority-racist,” as in, “We like you, Rhonda, but you’re not a Kappa.”

The world is almost always more biased than we think. For example, job applicants with seemingly “white” names (like Emily or Greg) need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback while those with apparently African-American names (like Lakisha or Jamal) need to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. And males enrolled in undergraduate biology classes consistently ranked their male classmates as more knowledgeable about course content, even over better-performing female students. Or consider a study on racial discrimination and NBA referees which found that white referees called substantially fewer fouls on white players and black referees called substantially fewer fouls on black players.

All of this is consistent with in-group favoritism, whereby members of a group favor their own over outsiders. It applies to friends, teams, clubs, schools, towns, political parties, ethnic groups, races, and nations. We are inherently tribal.

Like Matt Damon, most of us think we’re unbiased and, as such, in cases like that in “Project Greenlight,” need simply choose the person we think is best to act in an unbiased way. But because bias is so insidious and because it leaves no cognitive trace, it always remains highly likely that bias remains a factor in our decision-making no matter how strongly we believe otherwise.

Damon and Affleck may indeed have chosen the best directors available to them – all of whom just happened to be white. NFL owners may have picked the best head coaches available to them – almost all of whom just happened to be white. They probably believed that they had intended to be and in fact were fair and balanced. But especially because those sorts of decisions are inherently subjective, it’s impossible to know for sure. There’s no clear way to check their work. But with the NFL, at least, the data makes the point clearly.

Even when we don’t think we’re biased, we probably are. And when we are sure that we’re committed to avoiding bias, we probably aren’t. That’s why Damon’s assertion was so misguided and so tone deaf to minorities. We must act aggressively to counter bias even when we’re sure we don’t have any.

That’s what the NFL needs to do.

Scientist Vivienne Ming and her team have analyzed huge amounts of data and calculated the average cost – she calls it a “tax” – that women, people of color, and other minorities pay for the extra education, training, and experience they need to get the same jobs and promotions as straight white men. It’s the cost of being different. For example, women in the U.S. tech industry pay a tax of between $100,000 and $300,000. If you are different, Ming says, “you have to go to better schools for longer and you have to work for better companies to get the same promotions, to get the same quality of work.”

It’s a tax, Ming continues, that doesn’t pay for anything, like roads or schools. In scientific terms, “it’s heat loss in our economy,” she says. Worse still, the tax is superlinear, which means that a black woman pays more than a white woman and a black man combined. In a truly sad summary, Ming adds that, “We are bad at valuing other people and we are worse the more different they are than us.” Accordingly, “Discrimination is not done by villains,” she says. “It’s done by us.”

Crucially, Ming argues, ‘[t]he tax is largely implicit. People needn’t act maliciously for the tax to be levied.” Thus “we are requiring different levels of proof without realizing it. ‘I’ll hire José…when he’s sufficiently proved his value.’ Imagine how many Josés gave up long before that point in the process, disincentivized by the enormous tax they sense ahead of them.” This is precisely Effie Brown’s point to Damon. Ming estimates the economic cost of this unrealized human potential to be nearly $1.5 trillion per year. Indeed, “reams of research” establishes that there is tremendous “bottom line value” to real creative diversity.

No one should be surprised that there is an entirely human, often unconscious tendency to associate with, do business with and hire people who are in our networks and who thus tend to look the same as we do. But such in-group favoritism is a big mistake. If we aren’t prepared aggressively to try to make our lives and our businesses more diverse because it’s the right thing to do or because we have decided that the routine biases to which we are all subject simply don’t apply to us, we might consider doing so to be more profitable and successful.

NFL teams might do it to win more games. Study after study show that firms with diverse leadership perform better.

Flores has a difficult road ahead in terms of winning his lawsuit. Class action certification isn’t likely. Such claims demand a high level of “commonality” among members of the proposed class, which presents a challenge in discrimination cases, because the specifics of every individual discrimination case are generally so different.

Moreover, while the data is clear that NFL owners don’t want Black men coaching their teams generally, that doesn’t necessarily mean Dolphins owner Stephen Ross was wrong about Flores specifically.

He may not win his lawsuit, but Flores is obviously right.

Hiring for diversity is hard. You’ve got to want it. You must be committed to it. Brian Flores probably nuked his career over it.

Flores has gone “all in.” It’s long-past time for handwringing and promises. The only thing the NFL’s owners respond to — have ever responded to — is power and the threat of public embarrassment. The Complaint: “Mr. Flores has determined that the only way to effectuate change is through the courts.”

Over the previous four hiring cycles, three Black head coaches were hired among 27 openings. Two of those three have since been fired, including Flores. Yet after Flores filed his lawsuit, two Black head coaches were hired in a 24-hour period.

The NFL can do the right thing if they want to. Here’s hoping team owners want to.

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Totally Worth It

Feel free to contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome.

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This is the best thing I saw this week; this is the best thing I read. The creepiest. The coolest. The oddest. The weirdest. The funniest. The most gutless. The loveliest. The scariest. The most terrifying. The most incredible. The least surprising (bad guys, who in this instance jointly affirm “democracy” without a hint of irony, tend to find each other – because they crave legitimacy).

Please send me your nominees for this space to rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or via Twitter (@rpseawright).

The Spotify playlist of TBL music has been divided in two. A Christmas music edition has been split off from the regular version so you needn’t listen to Christmas music in February – not that that’s a bad thing. The regular TBL playlist now includes more than 200 songs and about 14 hours of great music. I urge you to listen in, sing along, and turn the volume up.

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Benediction

This week’s benediction features the great Iris DeMent telling the story of the Good Samaritan.

To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.

Thanks for reading.

Issue 101 (February 11, 2022)