Pete Carroll, head coach of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, went off on league owners at a meeting Tuesday night in New York City about how few minorities are being hired to be coaches in the NFL. The comments came just days after Carolina Panthers defensive coordinator Steve Wilks was named as the first minority head coach for this upcoming season.
Pete Carroll “went off” on NFL owners about minority hiring practices during league meetings. Pete Carroll is the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, and he was speaking at a meeting of the NFL’s competition committee. Read more in detail here: pete carroll.
Former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a complaint against the NFL in February, accusing the league of discriminating against minority coaching applicants and treating minority coaches unfairly. The NFL has reacted with a new policy, but at least one current head coach, Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks, believes it is insufficient.
During the league meetings last week, the veteran college and pro head coach “went off.” And some business owners aren’t pleased.
In response to the Brian Flores case, the NFL implemented an offensive requirement.
Patrick Smith/Getty Images/Pete Carroll
It’s practically hard to read the Brian Flores complaint without concluding that the NFL has an issue with minorities being hired as head coaches. How to tackle the issue is less obvious, and reasonable people might differ on the best answers.
The NFL is seeking to address the issue by implementing a new offensive requirement. On defense, black and minority coaches are much more common, whereas head coaches tend to come from the offensive side.
Five of the six minority head coaches in 2022 have a defensive background: Mike Tomlin, Ron Rivera, Robert Saleh, Lovie Smith, and Todd Bowles. Only Mike McDaniel, a multiracial Dolphins coach, comes from the offensive side.
According to ESPN, the NFL is requiring all 23 teams to have at least one minority assistant on the offensive side for the 2022 season, who must be “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority.”
The NFL owners also made efforts to expand the Rooney Rule to include women, established a Diversity Advisory Committee, and “published a goal statement to promote and recruit diverse members of potential ownership groups.”
The owners, on the other hand, stopped short of mandating ownership group diversity.
Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, believes that this isn’t enough.
Some, such as Art Rooney II, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, see these rules and goal statements as encouraging moves in the right direction. Others, on the other hand, are adamantly opposed. Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, is one of them.
Carroll spoke to a group of general managers and coaches a day after the owners unveiled their modified goals, according to ESPN. According to ESPN’s NFL analyst Adam Schefter, that’s where he “went off.”
He just vanished. You can do everything, he said, but it won’t change unless owners get to know these individuals before the interviews and realize that they must employ people who are different from them.
Pete Carroll’s anonymous sources during the NFL league meetings
According to Schefter, the speech lasted roughly ten minutes. But he didn’t specify how the other people in the room reacted. He did say that the NFL owners “weren’t pleased” when they found out what Carroll had said about them.
The Flores case is gathering traction.
2 additional coaches are needed. Brian Flores’ case against the NFL was joined by Steve Wilkes and Ray Horton. I’m pleased to see Black Men taking on the NFL. There have been 24 black head coaches in the NFL’s 500-year history. Approximately 70% of the players in the current league are black.
— C.J. Lawrence (@CJLawrenceEsq) April 7, 2022
The campaign is gathering traction two months after Brian Flores filed his landmark complaint against the NFL. The NFL has reacted, and (some) white supporters, such as Pete Carroll, have spoken out against the league’s tactics.
The action is also gathering plaintiffs, implying that it is gaining strength. Flores’ lawsuit has been joined by two Black NFL coaches. Steve Wilkes, the former head coach of the Arizona Cardinals, is one of these guys. He is now the Carolina Panthers’ defensive passing game coordinator and secondary coach. Ray Horton, a former defensive coach for multiple teams who is now retired, is the other.
Horton’s participation is especially intriguing. It comes after the recent discovery of a 2020 interview with Mike Mularkey, the former Tennessee Titans head coach.
The producers of the Steelers Realm Podcast asked the former head coach what his greatest professional regret was two years ago. Mularkey said that being a part of the Titans’ 2016 recruiting process helped him get the job. According to CBS Sports, he informed the hosts that it was a “false hiring process” in which minority coaches “had no chance of getting the job.”
Horton was present for the interview. When Mularkey was sacked by the Titans in 2018, Wilkes interviewed for the position on the same day as former NFL linebacker Mike Vrabel, who was hired and is still coaching the club in 2022.
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