While about 70 percent of NFL players are Black, the overwhelming majority of head coaches are White.
“[W]e find evidence of profound pro-White bias in even the league’s most recent hiring,” writes Bethany Lacina, an associate professor of political science at the University of Rochester, in an analysis for the Washington Post’s “Monkey Cage” site.
In a data-driven analysis, Lacina examines the racial makeup of college football players, because most NFL head coaches have a background playing NCAA college football.
“College football players are an apt benchmark for the pool of plausible NFL coaches, because college is the last shared step on the path to NFL head coach that is not under the NFL’s control,” she says.
Lacina’s findings show the stark degree to which Black coaches are underrepresented:
- Among NFL head coaches in 2021–22, 14 are young enough to have played in the NCAA since 1999 (when the NCAA started publishing student-athlete demographics).
- 13 out of these 14 coaches are White. Brian Flores, former Miami Dolphins head coach, is the only non-White person in the group.
- These 14 coaches come from the cohort of NCAA football players who played between 1999 and 2007 when the group was 60 percent White and 30 percent Black.
- Division I players in the same years were 49 percent White and 44 percent Black.
Twenty years ago, in response to racial discrimination charges, the NFL established the “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for top positions, such as head coach, or general manager.
Yet, using hiring data from the Rooney Rule era suggests that “these may not have been good-faith efforts,” Lacina concludes. “If NFL hiring had no pro-White bias, the chances that it would have so many new, White NFL head coaches would be slim to none.”
Lacina’s research examines cultural and political controversies concerning migration and diversity across a variety of contexts. She’s the author of Rival Claims: Ethnic Violence and Territorial Autonomy under Indian Federalism (University of Michigan Press, 2017) and Nativism and Economic Integration Across the Developing World: Collision and Accommodation (Cambridge University Press, 2018), coauthored with Rikhil Bhavnani.
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