Lawsuit highlights NFL’s failures to commit to diversity in coaching, executive staffs

It doesn’t matter to me who wins this year’s Super Bowl. It’s not because the Dallas Cowboys, the team I’ve followed since I was a kid, isn’t playing. It’s because the NFL is beginning to represent everything that’s wrong with the United States. Or maybe it long has and I’m only now willing to admit it because of a lawsuit filed against the NFL by Brian Flores, a Black coach recently fired by the Miami Dolphins.

I’ve criticized teams when they’ve looked the other way when star players have been revealed to be batterers, and sometimes worse. But I never stopped watching.

I’ve criticized the NFL when they downplayed the emerging evidence that brain trauma from repeated collisions on the field was real, a condition that may have contributed to former South Carolina State and NFL player Phillip Adams’ killing of six people before committing suicide last year. Given that I played football through college, you’d think that would bother me more. But I never stopped watching.

I expressed my disdain for supposedly progressive team owners who each refused to hire Colin Kaepernick because he had committed the sin of using his platform to highlight racial injustice. But I never stopped watching.

I have even repeatedly pointed out the absurdity of billionaires using billions of taxpayer dollars – instead of their own money – to finance modern-day coliseums by holding cities and counties hostage, threatening to take away jobs if they didn’t give into the blackmail. But I never stopped watching.

And just like millions of other fans, I’ll likely watch the Cincinnati Bengals take on the Los Angeles Rams knowing one of those franchises will experience a high it never has. I’ll likely do so with a bevy of snacks and comfort food, using what has become a de facto American holiday as an excuse to overeat junk food.

But I’m conflicted by it all. I can’t seem to quit the NFL because I grew up on football, played football from my adolescence through my early 20s, have watched and followed it even longer. Because there’s a lot of good. It unifies strangers like little else. It rewards hard work, providing space for those who come from nothing. It is a live display of exceptional talent and skill. Winners often are those who have achieved the right balance of individual excellence and selfless teamwork. It provides jobs, inspires people to think bigger, to stretch beyond their comfort zones because they believe nothing’s really impossible. It’s America at its best, and America at its worst.

Unity among groups of strangers too frequently becomes noxious tribalism. Arrogance is rewarded as much as hard work. And as the Flores lawsuit reminds us, merit still far too often takes a backseat to racism and discrimination. He talked of sham interviews in a league in which the players are overwhelming black (it’s harder to deny talent on the field) and the coaches and front offices remain overwhelmingly white despite proclamations from NFL executives that they want to be better.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the lack of coaching diversity is “unacceptable.” Not too long ago, he made the specious claim that Kaepernick had not been blackballed, even though he clearly had been. That’s an American tradition older than football, saying one thing but doing another.

But like America, I can’t quit the NFL. Because it is me, and I am it.

Issac Bailey is a columnist with The Sun News.