Sports media cry racism over NFL head coach hirings, again
Zachary Faria
The cries of racism over NFL head coach hiring season have begun again. And again, they are wildly unfounded.
This time, the target is the Carolina Panthers. They decided not to hire interim head coach Steve Wilks, who is black. The Panthers instead chose Frank Reich, the former Indianapolis Colts coach who posted a 40-33-1 record with two playoff appearances in five years. Reich had to deal with a revolving door of quarterbacks and an increasingly erratic owner in Indianapolis. He was considered a solid, veteran option during this year’s coaching cycle.
NO, THE NFL ISN’T RACIST BECAUSE BLACK MEN GET TACKLED MORE OFTEN IN THE NFL
Not good enough for some, though. At the Athletic, Mike Jones wrote an entire screed claiming that the Panthers and every other team require black coaches to be perfect if they want a head coaching job. ESPN personalities predictably joined in on the racial narrative. And Wilks’s lawyers did as well, claiming there is a “legitimate race problem in the NFL.”
Wilks joined Brian Flores’s lawsuit against the NFL because he was fired from the Arizona Cardinals after only one season as their head coach. Ignored in this cry of racism is that several coaches have been fired after just one season, regardless of skin color, including Rod Chudzinski in Cleveland and Mike Mularkey in Jacksonville.
The same applies to Wilks now. Yes, Wilks helped turn around the Panthers’ season and finished with a respectable 6-6 record. The Panthers still missed the playoffs in an extremely weak division. If you want a comparable situation to Wilks’s, you need only look back as far as last year. Las Vegas Raiders head coach Rich Bisaccia led the team to a 7-5 record as the interim head coach. The Raiders even made the playoffs, unlike Wilks’s Panthers. The Raiders moved on from Bisaccia anyway.
Bisaccia, in a tougher division and dealing with far more straining circumstances, accomplished more than Wilks did. He was still replaced, and there were no tears from sports media. “The NFL is racist against Italians” apparently doesn’t sell as well.
Sports media want to pretend that Wilks’s situation is unique so they can play up the racism angle, just as they did when Wilks was fired by the Cardinals.
This isn’t the first time sports media have tried to fabricate a racism controversy with the NFL, and it won’t be the last. Increasingly, sports media figures think it is an outrage any time a black coach isn’t hired or retained in any head coaching position.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
It is backfiring, though. Think about it: Would you hire a black coach if you knew you could never fire him? This faux outrage is turning black coaches into little more than tokens, numbers on a spreadsheet that they want to see increase for no reason other than skin color. It is a shame, but that is the current state of sports media, and it is only getting worse.