In addition to having a successful playoff record and winning the Super Bowl, one of the marks of coaching success in the NFL is having a “coaching tree,” or for a coach to have his assistants hired as head coaches around the League. In a post on Sports Illustrated, Don Banks shows the coaching tree of two coaches who worked under Dennis Green, Brian Billick, who formerly coached in Baltimore, and Tony Dungy, head coach of the Indianapolis Colts. The significance is this: Dennis Green was given a shot in the pros after a very successful stint as head coach at Stanford. A major voice in getting him that job was Condoleeza Rice.
Looking particularly at the Dungy branch of the Green tree, I think that’s how Affirmative Action was supposed to work.
Dungy also has four of his former assistants in NFL head coaching jobs, and all of them worked for him during his six-season tenure in Tampa Bay (1996-2001): Kansas City’s Herman Edwards, Chicago’s Lovie Smith, Detroit’s Rod Marinelli and Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin. Coincidentally, all four worked on the defensive side of the ball with the Bucs, but that was Tampa Bay’s strength as well as Dungy’s background too. Whenever Dungy retires, he’ll have a fifth member of that club, because the Colts have already named assistant head coach/quarterbacks coach Jim Caldwell as his successor.
Somebody gave Denny a shot, then Denny gave Tony an opportunity to shine, and so on. This ain’t a question of hiring somebody who’s not qualified just because he’s Black, it’s about giving highly-qualified Black candidates the chance to shine. If we were focused on that, government intervention might not be as necessary.
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