Two years ago, under cloudless skies in north-central Louisiana, Doug Williams and Michael Vick met on the football field at Grambling University’s Eddie G Robinson Memorial Stadium to reflect on the journey of the NFL that they helped chart. In 1988, Williams led Washington past Denver in Super Bowl XXII, breaking new ground: He was the first black quarterback to start in a Super Bowl and finished the game as MVP. In 2001, Vick was the first overall pick in the NFL draft. All were historic firsts for black quarterbacks – and they didn’t stop there.
“Look around this league now,” Williams told Vick in his stubborn Louisiana tone. “I could be wrong, but in the next five to seven years? Half the quarterbacks in this league will be black. In his day, Williams was famous for his deep shots – but he might end up going three years with that mark.
When the NFL regular season began in September, black quarterbacks made up a record 15 of the league’s 32 starters; including three – Carolina’s Bryce Young, Houston’s CJ Stroud and Indianapolis’ Anthony Richardson – who were taken with the first three picks in the 2023 draft. These historic milestones marked the dawn of the era of black quarterbacks – a heady period that officially began when Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes met with Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts in the 2023 Super Bowl. Now, Mahomes, 29, vying for a third straight Super Bowl title, stands as the greatest QB of all time in the eyes of many – even though he’s only started for seven seasons. Dak Prescott, the highest paid player in the league, is the face of the Dallas Cowboys, the American team. Last year, Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson won his second league MVP. The black quarterback is the leading man in professional football.
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News of a black quarterback being named a starter no longer raises questions about whether the fan base — or beyond that, America – is ready. He just takes the field. The game wasn’t always this simple; This is clear from two recent projects examining the Black QB’s landing in the mainstream.
In The Great Black Hopehistorian Louis Moore looks back at the 1979 regular-season matchup between Chicago and Tampa Bay — the first to feature two opposing black starting quarterbacks, Williams, the history-maker, and Chicago’s Vince Evans, who s is ultimately denied a fair chance to realize his potential. Moore, a professor at Black Grand Valley State University, steps back from the Chicago-Tampa game to examine the actors and processes that gave rise to this contest for change; CBS billed it as the Battle of the Bombers. Moore calls it “one of the most monumental contests in NFL history, a promissory note that one day things would change in the game and in society.”
Meanwhile, in a three-part Prime Video docuseries, Evolution of the black quarterbackVick travels across the United States to examine this entire long arc of progress — from Willie Thrower, the NFL’s first Black QB, to the 2023 first-round pick, Young. It’s a story filtered through Vick’s lived experience, which stands out from consequential to controversial and vice versa. In 2007, Vick saw his career cut short after pleading guilty to his role in a dog fighting ring. After serving 21 months in federal prison and subjecting himself to a lengthy apology tour guided by the Humane Society, Vick reemerged in Philadelphia as a more refined passer on his way to being named the team’s returning player. year in 2010.
Vick’s impact, right up to his turn on the Madden NFL video game cover as a one man cheat codenever escapes the diversity of quarterbacks he interviews for the series. “I was an oddity, I was a strange cat,” says Steve Young, the white Mormon left-handed jammer who carved out a Hall of Fame career in San Francisco. “But watching you play, it was like, ‘This is my tribe.’ These are my guys.
Since the forward pass has been an essential part of football strategy, questions have arisen about whether a black man could throw it. Black quarterbacks were considered mentally inferior and, more often than not, redeployed as defensive backs. In Evolution, Deion Sanders – the Hall of Fame cornerback turned college football head coach – reveals he played high school quarterback before being forced into a defensive conversion at Florida State. For most of the NFL’s history, the league’s football pundits betrayed little imagination, outright dismissing the dominant talent of black passers as throwers and jammers – “a loaded term,” writes Moore. They were given a small margin for error compared to white pocket passers who executed the plays as they were written, for better or worse. While white policymakers, media, and fans easily overlooked professional football’s intractable racial bias, black fans could not see beyond it.
The first episode of Evolution includes a sketch from Richard Pryor’s 1977 television variety show in which he played the American president. At the time, the idea of a black commander in chief was as far-fetched as a black QB getting the keys to an NFL franchise. So we figured Pryor would do it. join the dots:
“I want to know what you’re going to do to get more black brothers as quarterbacks in the National Football Honky League,” asks an activist from Ebony magazine in the sketch.
“I plan not only to have a lot of black quarterbacks,” Pryor began, “but we will have black coaches and black team owners. As long as there is football, there will be black somewhere leaves. Because I’m tired of this mess that’s been happening since the Rams got rid of. James Harrismy jaw is tense – do you know what I’m talking about? We will get down on the matter now.
But where black coaches and managers are still fighting for a place in the NFL despite turns out to be no worse than their white peersand black ownership is a small, largely uninfluential club dominated by Magic Johnson, Lewis Hamilton and other wealthy sports figures, black quarterbacks are undeniable. The modern NFL game favors passers who throw and run — and doesn’t discriminate when it comes to the skin color of those QBs. “I remember turning on the PlayStation and seeing the cover athlete on the screen and thinking: I want to be that guy. I want to be (Vick),” says Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, the white dual-threat QB who covers the 2024 edition of the Madden video game. “I wore your cleats in Pop Warner.”
When black quarterbacks were first accepted as starters, teams often had a white quarterback as a backup, just to reassure that certain sections of their fanbase “traditions” were respected. But now the commitment to the post-racial style of play runs so deep that teams are recruiting black QBs to complement black starters and give them enough runway to fly or crash — an approach that was validated when Andy Reid, the dean of NFL coaches. , broke Vick out of prison to support Philadelphia Eagles starter Donovan McNabb. Players like Tyrod Taylor and Tyler Huntley are living a reality their ancestors could only have dreamed of: Black QBs who forged long — and lucrative — careers as veteran backups. During his media tour to promote the docuseries, Vick took pains to credit the modern NFL as a benevolent force for progressive ideals. But his pioneering interview subjects in Evolution never fail to remind the viewer of the enormous individual efforts it took to get there.
Vick’s college reunion with Williams was fraught with meaning, which doesn’t translate as well on screen as it does in Moore’s book. A historically black university, Grambling State University has done more than any institution to make the black quarterback an American staple. In Great Black Hope, Moore recalls how coach Eddie Robinson committed himself to developing a quarterback for the NFL, abandoning his run-option schemes for a more pro-style passing attack based on timed routes that forced QBs to read the extent of the field. He recruited former pros to his coaching staff to delve into the basics and nuances of the position – and succeeded. Before Williams, a classic pocket passer, Grambling produced Harris — the Pryor favorite who guided the Rams to the 1974 NFC championship en route to becoming the first Black QB ever named Pro Bowl MVP. The game wouldn’t get to where it is today without Robinson, who died in 2007.
But even as black quarterbacks were accepted into the most symbolic leadership position in American sports, some things had to give in the marketplace. Black quarterbacks are backtracking from becoming LeBron James and using their noble platform to speak out against institutional racism in and around their sport, for fear of offending their billionaire white bosses, turning off fans and ending up being banned from the league alongside Colin Kaepernick. (“It’s hard when you can’t go out on your own terms,” Kaepernick tells Vick.) University of Nebraska quarterback Dylan Raiola, of Italian and Polynesian descent, is pushing the taste ‘extreme with his Mahomes clothing cosplay.
Even Vick seems to be shrinking from his legacy as a black NFL quarterback, not least because there are animal lovers who haven’t forgiven him for throwing Bad Newz Kennels. While Vick continues to be vilified through a racial lens, Brett Favre maintains his hero status despite its many controversies. It turns out that QB privilege doesn’t work both ways.
During his interview with Vick, Williams is proud of the fact that the word “Black” is no longer used as a modifier for black quarterbacks. “Now you just get to watch them play,” Williams says. The black quarterback is no longer a lone revolutionary. He is the face of the league born of a decades-long struggle toward conformity — for better or, perhaps, for worse.
