Doug Williams: More Black coaches deserve an NFL shot originally appeared on NBC Sports Washington
Week 2 of the 2020 NFL season was one to remember for various reasons, but it also marked a breakthrough regarding the quarterback position. For the first time in the league's history, there were four separate matchups of a Black quarterback facing another Black passer.
While the QB position has gone from predominately white to now where the league's best are Black, the same can't be said for head coaches in the NFL.
Right now, there are only four head coaches of color and two Black general managers, matching a 17-year low and half the number of where it was in 2018.
Doug Williams, Washington's Senior VP of Player Development, joined the Huddle and Flow podcast and said that Black coaches need more of an opportunity to succeed at the NFL level than they currently have.
"There are a lot of guys out there deserving to be coaching in the National Football League," Williams said. "Unfortunately, the National Football league is a buddy-buddy deal."
For years, NFL teams have been infatuated with trying to find the next young, hot-shot coordinator as the team's next head coach. This idea became even more prevalent in the NFL after the Rams hired Sean McVay, who was just 30 years old at the time, and found immediate success with him.
Since McVay was hired, we've seen two of his assistants -- Zac Taylor and Matt LaFleur -- land head coaching gigs. Both were in their mid-to-late 30s when they were hired, with little on their coaching résumés other than "assistant to Sean McVay."
Both Taylor and LaFleur serve as a perfect example for Williams' point about the NFL being a "buddy-buddy deal."
Last offseason, Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy was passed over by every team that had a head coaching opportunity, despite him orchestrating the league's best offense in 2018 and a Super Bowl-winning unit the year after.
Besides Ron Rivera and *maybe* Mike McCarthy, Bieniemy had a better résumé than the other three coaches that were given head coaching gigs in Kevin Stefanski, Joe Judge and Matt Rhule.
"Some guys who really deserve to an opportunity to be up here don't get it," Williams said. "You know Eric Bieniemy should be up here. People like that should be up here, but it's about an opportunity."
