By Tom Joyce
Article Source
The NFL thinks it isn’t diverse enough.
And so, the league has created a new rule for the 2022 season that it says will help combat its diversity deficit. The league will require each team to have at least one offensive assistant coach who is either nonwhite or a woman.
This discriminatory proposal is absurd and will hurt the league’s overall product. When it comes to filling out coaching staffs, NFL teams should hire the best person for the job regardless of their race. It shouldn’t matter which of the two genders they are. Teams have incentives in place to hire the best people available: winning and making money.
A mandate from the NFL that will force some teams to hire coaches that they don’t want over better coaches is stupid. If a team wants an all-black woman coaching staff, good for them. If they think the best coaches for the job are all white men, that’s great too. But it’s wrong to exclude people based on their race or sex.
It’s interesting that the league only decided to do this with offensive coaches. It’s because they think this will result in more black head coaches and possibly a woman head coach someday. Notice they didn’t do this on defense or special teams.
It’s also fascinating that they didn’t do this kind of affirmative action on the field. The players are about 70% black. This means other racial groups, like whites, are underrepresented in the NFL. The last time an NFL team had a white starting cornerback was 2003.
Positions exist in which black players are also underrepresented. They include special teams spots like kickers, punters, and long snappers. Perhaps the league should mandate that at least one of those specialists has to be a minority as well. And maybe they could require that every team has a transgender player that plays at least one play each quarter.
Of course, that would be absurd — just as it is absurd for the league to tell teams they must take skin color and genitalia into consideration when hiring a coach.
For the NFL, this is yet another virtue signal. When the league has chances to make society a better place, it typically squanders the opportunity — just like the NBA. Teams fleece taxpayers by using public funding to build stadiums. Teams partner with the lottery, sports betting, and alcohol companies to push addiction onto the masses. And the league kowtows to China.
Instead of fixing real problems, the NFL prefers to be woke. Even, that is, if doing so hurts the quality of its product.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
