Biden condemns NFL for lack of Black head coaches during Super Bowl interview

President Biden criticized the NFL for its lack of Black head coaches during an interview that aired Sunday before the Super Bowl. 

Mr. Biden told NBC’s Lester Holt that having diverse coaches and executives is about “generic decency.”

“They haven’t lived up to what they committed to and lived up to being open about hiring more minorities to run teams,” Mr. Biden said. 

“The whole idea that a league that is made up of so many athletes of color as well as so diverse, that there’s not enough African American qualified coaches ‘to manage these NFL teams,’ it just seems to me that it’s a standard that they’d want to live up to,” he said. “It’s not a requirement of law, but it’s a requirement I think of just some generic decency.”

The comments are similar to what Mr. Biden said last year in his interview with Westwood One that aired during halftime of the Super Bowl. 

“You’ve got to go out and look — there’s numerous, incredibly qualified African American coaches out there,” Mr. Biden said last year.

Coaching diversity in the NFL has been a topic of conversation for the last several offseasons, with the NFL also making changes to the Rooney Rule. Earlier this month, former Dolphins coach Brian Flores took the discussion to another level, suing the NFL as well as the Dolphins, Giants and Broncos. He alleges in his lawsuit that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offered him $100,000 for each loss during the 2019 season. He also claims that the Giants already decided to hire Brian Daboll before bringing Mr. Flores in for an interview that he later called a “sham.”

In 2021, 71% of NFL players were racial minorities, but following the most recent hiring cycle, five of the NFL’s 32 head coaches are minorities: Ron Rivera (Commanders), Mike Tomlin (Steelers), Robert Saleh (Jets), Lovie Smith (Texans) and Mike McDaniel (Dolphins).