I’m Roxanna Scott, USA TODAY VP/Editor of Sports, and this is The Backstory, a look at our biggest stories of the week. I’m writing this column this week to have Editor-in-Chief Nicole Carroll explain our NFL coaching project and why the issue of diversity in the coaching ranks has been a priority for us. If you’d like to receive The Backstory in your inbox every week, sign up here.
Mike Freeman has covered 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 by what our data revealed.
A recently published article USA TODAY analysis of NFL coaches found that there are deep racial disparities around the types of jobs that consistently lead to head coaching positions. White assistant coaches typically follow the career path from coach to coordinator to head coach, while their black counterparts often find themselves stuck in positions that carry fewer opportunities for promotion.
Here are some of the key findings from USA TODAY journalists:
- Of the 722 coaches on the NFL field this season, 314 (or 43.5%) identify as non-white, which is considered the largest number, by number, in league history.
- More than 50% of coaches at the lowest levels – quality control, coaching assistants and fellows – are non-white, compared to just 27% at the coordinator level or above.
- Twenty-nine of the league’s 31 running back coaches this season — or 93 percent — are coaches of color. Wide receiver coaches are 70% non-white.
- The offensive line and quarterback coaches are 90% and 81% white, respectively.
- Over the past seven years, only six running backs coaches have been promoted to offensive coordinator. Only one coach with a running back resume has been hired as head coach during that span.
“Anecdotally, when you cover beats and teams, you cover the league, you kind of see it when you go to practices,” Freeman, USA TODAY Sports’ racing and mismatch editor, told about the lack of black coaches as coordinator and head coach. the roles. “When you’re around teams and you talk to coaches, you hear bits and pieces of it. But (the) data puts all of this in a dark place.
The NFL Coaches Draft:“Positional segregation” is rampant in the NFL, leaving black coaches stuck in the pipeline
How we collected data from 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 he does not share this information publicly. Many media outlets have written articles about the lack of black head coaches in the league on a surface level. Few have shown “what’s going on beneath the surface and why the surface problem exists,” said one sports columnist. Nancy Armor.
Our reporters answered their questions about coaches and diversity by compiling an extensive database that helped them analyze what’s happening on the field today and how it differs from previous seasons.
Learn more about NFL coaches:Which teams have the most diverse rosters?
“I didn’t look the part”:Reasons Black Coaches Were Not Hired
Cincinnati Bengals:Once Diversity Leaders in the NFL, They’re Now Part of the Problem
The initial conversation around our NFL Coaches Draft started more than three years ago with the germ of an idea suggested by Armor. By August 2021, Chris Amico, senior developer of our storytelling studios, created a database for our team to collect and analyze coaches’ biographical information. In 13 months, a team of 20 journalists populated the database with all the coaches dating back to 2010, i.e. records for more than 1,500 people.
How did we go about collecting race and ethnicity information for 772 coaches on the field this season? We knew we couldn’t rely on the methods used by some researchers in the past.
“There have been many academic studies done on the same topic, and in the past part of the methodology was basically looking at images and guessing,” the journalist said. Tom Schad, who spent months compiling and verifying the data. “We were a little shocked.”
USA TODAY reporters used a wide variety of sources to verify the race and ethnicity of each coach, including published news articles, public records, league diversity reports and information provided by team employees, agents and coaches.
“We look holistically at white coaches and compare them to all non-white coaches. We wanted to make sure we were identifying race and ethnicity as accurately as possible,” Schad said.
The data collection was “meticulous,” Freeman said, and the process of entering all that information (age, race and ethnicity, gender, employment, career path) for each coach was fraught with potential pitfalls. This is where having a journalist with extensive database experience proved beneficial. Steve Berkowitz is a sports projects reporter and editor who has led our college coaching compensation database projects for years. His expertise was invaluable in refining our methodology and analyzing the data.
“Push the debate”
Beyond our core reporting team, we relied on the expertise and talent of our entire newsroom to bring the first episodes of our series to life. Graphic artists and designers helped us understand how to present the stories – loaded with numbers and charts – so that they were accessible to readers and visually compelling. Artist Todd Pendleton collaborated with Freeman on a stunning graphic novel that provides a brief history on black coaches in the NFL.
So far, we’ve published eight stories as part of the project on USATODAY.com, and we’re just getting started. Our goal is to share data with our NFL journalists across the USA TODAY Network, in cities like Green Bay and Jacksonville, where the NFL team is the biggest news in town.
Why is data so important?
“We have numbers that show precisely where these inherent biases persist,” said Alicia Del Galloeditor in charge of the project, “and I think it’s a good start to really trying to solve the problem.”
For Armour, Schad and Freeman, the reporting was illuminating, grounded in data, not just what they observed while monitoring the sidelines and covering Sunday games. In the past, Freeman has written about the issue interviewing black coaches, who spoke about the prejudice they faced.
“It’s not just coaches telling stories that are important, but it’s facts and figures and things that we didn’t really have a lot of 20 or 10 years ago,” Freeman said. “And that pushes the discussion in a totally different direction.”
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