The NFL has a serious diversity problem. Here's what our USA TODAY Sports investigation found.
I'm Roxanna Scott, USA TODAY's vice president/executive editor for Sports, and this is The Backstory, insights into our biggest stories of the week. I'm writing this column this week for Editor-in-Chief Nicole Carroll to explain our NFL Coaches Project and why the issue of diversity in the coaching ranks has been a priority for us. If you'd like to get The Backstory in your inbox every week, sign up here.
Mike Freeman has been covering the NFL for more than three decades and has written dozens of stories about the lack of diversity among NFL coaches. But even he was surprised at what our data revealed.
A recently published USA TODAY analysis of NFL coaches found there are deep racial disparities around the types of jobs that routinely lead to head coaching positions. White assistant coaches generally follow the career path of position coach to coordinator to head coach, while their Black counterparts often get stuck in positions that lead to fewer promotion opportunities.
Here were some of the key findings by USA TODAY reporters:
Of the 722 on-field coaches in the NFL this season, 314 (or 43.5%) identify as nonwhite, which is believed to be the largest figure, by count, in league history.
More than 50% of coaches at the lowest levels – quality control, coaching assistants and fellows – are nonwhite, compared to only 27% at the coordinator level or above.
Twenty-nine of the league’s 31 running backs coaches this season – or 93% – are coaches of color. Wide receivers coaches are 70% nonwhite.
Offensive line and quarterbacks coaches are 90% and 81% white, respectively.
In the past seven years, only six running backs coaches have been promoted to offensive coordinator. Just one coach with a running backs resume has been hired as a head coach during that span.
“Anecdotally when you cover beats and you cover teams, you cover the league, you kind of see it when you go to practices,” Freeman, USA TODAY Sports race and inequality editor, said of the dearth of Black coaches in coordinator and head coaching roles. “When you're around teams and you talk to coaches, you hear bits and pieces about it. But (the) data put it all in one stark place.”
The NFL Coaches Project: 'Positional segregation' is rampant in the NFL, leaving Black coaches stuck in the pipeline
How we collected data for hundreds of NFL coaches
The NFL has its own data on diversity in its coaching ranks, breaking it down by each of the 32 teams. But it doesn’t share that information publicly. Many media outlets have written stories about the lack of Black head coaches in the league at the surface level. Few have shown “what's going on beneath the surface and why the surface problem exists,” said sports columnist Nancy Armour.
Our reporters tackled the questions they had around coaches and diversity by compiling an extensive database that helped them analyze what’s happening on the field today and how that differs from previous seasons.
More on NFL coaches: Which teams have the most diverse staffs?
'Didn't look the part': Reasons why Black coaches haven't been hired
Cincinnati Bengals: Once leaders in NFL diversity, now they're part of the problem
The initial conversation around our NFL Coaches Project started more than three years ago with a germ of an idea suggested by Armour. By August 2021, Chris Amico, a senior developer with our Storytelling Studios, had built a database for our team to collect and analyze biographical information for coaches. In 13 months, a team of 20 reporters populated the database with every coach dating to 2010, records for more than 1,500 people.
How did we go about collecting race and ethnicity information for 772 on-field coaches this season? We knew we couldn’t rely on methods that some researchers have used in the past.
“There’s been lots of academic studies done around the same issue and some of the methodology in the past has been basically (they) looked at pictures and guessed,” said reporter Tom Schad, who spent months compiling and checking data. “We were kind of shocked.”
USA TODAY reporters used a wide variety of sources to verify each coach's race and ethnicity, including published news articles, public records, league diversity reports and information provided by team employees, agents and coaches.
“We're looking in broad swaths at white coaches and comparing them to all nonwhite coaches, we wanted to make sure that we are identifying race and ethnicity as specifically as we could," Schad said.
The collection of data was “meticulous,” Freeman said, and the process of inputting all that information (age, race and ethnicity, gender, job, career path) for each coach was riddled with potential pitfalls. That’s where having a reporter with extensive database experience was beneficial. Steve Berkowitz is a sports projects reporter and editor who has led our database projects around college coaches’ compensation for years. His expertise was invaluable when it came to buttoning up our methodology and analyzing the data.
‘Pushing the discussion’
Beyond our core reporting team, we relied on expertise and talent from across our newsroom to bring the first installments of our series to life. Graphic artists and designers helped us figure out how to package stories – heavy with numbers and charts – so they were accessible to readers and visually compelling. Artist Todd Pendleton collaborated with Freeman on a stunning graphic novel that provided a brief history on Black NFL coaches.
So far we’ve published eight stories in the project at USATODAY.com, and we’re just getting started. Our goal is to share data with our NFL reporters throughout the USA TODAY Network, in cities like Green Bay and Jacksonville, where the NFL team is the biggest story in town.
Why is the data so important?
“We have the numbers to show where specifically those inherent biases still live,” said Alicia DelGallo, senior editor leading the project, “and I think that's a good start to really try to fix the problem.”
For Armour, Schad and Freeman, the reporting has been enlightening, built on data, not just what they have observed by watching the sidelines and covering games on Sundays. In the past, Freeman wrote about the issue by interviewing Black coaches, who spoke about the bias they faced.
“It's not just coaches telling the stories which is important, but it's facts and numbers and things that 20 years ago, 10 years ago, we didn't really have that much of,” Freeman said. “And it pushes the discussion in an entirely different direction.”
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Where are Black coaches in NFL? Investigation exposes diversity issue
