If you want to know one of the reasons why six of the eight Black NFL head coaches were fired this year, you can consult with ESPN reporter and NFL apologist Chris Mortenson, who always has the league’s back in his “reporting” on the issue. Or you could ask yourself why there was never any groundswell among the professional sports punditry class about finding the next Ozzie Newsome to be your team’s general manager?
After 16 years at the helm of the Baltimore Ravens, the Hall of Fame Tight End will be retiring.
His resume includes the following:
- 200 wins for a 54% winning percentage
- 10 playoff appearances
- 6 division titles
- 2 Super Bowl wins
- 4 of his draft picks are either current or surefire future Hall of Famers in Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, Jonathan Ogden, and Terrell Suggs
This is impressive in and of itself. It is even more impressive when one considers that the Ravens have never had an upper-echelon quarterback. Joe Flacco had an upper-echelon season in 2012 and much to the chagrin of Raven fans, parlayed it into a huge and crippling contract extension. However, no one has, nor ever will, mistake him for Johnny Unitas.
Nevertheless, the Newsome-built Ravens have gone toe-to-toe with one of the most stable and consistent franchises in all of sports: MY PITTSBURGH STEELERS. Not only have they more than held their own, but also, in the process, they have created the best rivalry in the NFL, and one of the best in all of sports.
So why hasn’t there been any groundswell to find the next Ozzie Newsome to be the GM of an NFL team? This is where the answers get complicated. Yes, the same ole racial bias is at play on some level or another. However, I suspect that the debt proof model of the NFL is at least as much at play here. In just about any other business, if you show the persistent incompetence that Detroit, Oakland, Washington, Cleveland etc. have shown over the past 20 years, you would either go bankrupt and/or out of business. At the very least, you would leave no stone unturned to fix the problem…even if that means hire Black folks to run the show.
Not in the NFL. Incompetence is no obstacle to profitability and as a result, teams keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. In fact, a case can be made that the uninterrupted profits actually undermine innovative, out of the box thinking, and embolden outdated bigoted attitudes. After all, what price is there to pay? One need go no further than to look at the well-intended but largely ineffective protesting of the league over its treatment of Colin Kaepernick.
The other factor that I believe gets far too little attention is the notion that merely putting Black faces in what have traditionally been White places will in of itself improve the situation. I believe that there is enough evidence both inside and outside of sports to argue that, at best, such is an incomplete solution. It places too much emphasis on individual character (which obviously is important) and too little on the need for systemic and structural changes. It is akin to putting clean wine into a dirty bottle or lipstick on a pig, or whatever analogy one wants to use. The bottom line is that such cosmetics do not fundamentally change the situation. They merely mask the problem. If we are sincere in our diversity efforts, be they within sports, politics, business, etc., we must ask ourselves these two fundamental questions: 1) is the issue individual or systemic? If one’s conclusion is that the issues are individual, then question 2 is not necessary. One simply gets better people. However, if the answer to question 1 is systemic, then that brings about question 2, which is: do we really want to change the system or simply improve our own individual place within the system?
As good as Ozzie Newsome has been with the Ravens, there would even be a limit to how much 32 of him as NFL GM’s could change the system. Why? Because they would need the support of owners. It is at this point when some will say that the answer is more Black owners. Pump the breaks on that as well. Of the few Black folks who have acquired the capital to buy an NFL team, do you really think that their mindsets are dramatically different from the current status quo NFL owners? If it were, could he/she have gotten in a position to buy a team?
Capitalism is predatory and therefore most of those who have amassed a significant amount of capital are predators. Short of vulgar opportunism, such mindsets have little interests in social justice in general and particularly how many Black coaches are hired and fired.
So bid a fond farewell and richly deserved retirement to Ozzie Newsome. He has been the single most underappreciated General Manager in all of sports for the better part of the last 15 years. But if you think that more Ozzie Newsomes would have automatically stopped what happened on “Black Monday” you have grossly underestimated what this game is all about.
