‘African Americans Need Not Apply’: NFL Affirmative Action Backfires as ESPN Analyst Discourages Black Coaches

For decades, both the National Football League and sports media have been encouraging — in fact, begging — franchises to hire black coaches.

In fact, for the past 20 years, the league has gone as far as to force teams to interview minority candidates. The so-called Rooney Rule mandates that, if a team is conducting a head-coaching hiring process, at least one minority candidate must be interviewed. It doesn’t matter if the ghost of Vince Lombardi is in the running for the job: Interview a BIPOC candidate and take them seriously, or else.

I don’t know whether to parse it as a positive sign, therefore, when a prominent black sports pundit is begging black coaches not to take a head coaching job — at least with one team.

According to Fox News, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith says black candidates need not apply to lead the Houston Texans after the franchise fired head coach Lovie Smith on Monday.

The franchise’s last three head coaches have all been black — although one of them, Romeo Crennel, was an interim coach after the firing of Bill O’Brien, who is white, in 2020.

Nevertheless, that was enough for Smith to imply the team is unfair to black coaches.

“African Americans need not apply,” he said on Monday’s edition of ESPN’s “First Take.”

“This is not an organization that has been fair to African Americans as far as I’m concerned. And I have these two as an example. You could use Romeo Crennel and the kind of situation they put him in in the past. I don’t like this organization.”

After Crennel finished out the season in 2020, the franchise hired David Culley, an assistant head coach with the Baltimore Ravens.