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The Racial Scorecard
Posted: Monday January 11, 1999 06:42 PM
This Week's Awards | Ten Things I Think I Think | Top 10 Teams
Click here to send a question or comment to Peter King's NFL Mailbag. EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- The quite un-magic number is 24. Twenty-four straight white NFL head-coaching hires and counting, culminating in Philadelphia's announcement Monday to make former Packers quarterback coach Andy Reid the Eagles' head coach And while we opine in this football media business about everything from officiating to the new Jets uniforms, I must admit I don't have a great idea about how to energize the hiring of more black head coaches in the league.
For the record, here are the 23 hires since Tampa Bay awarded Tony
Dungy its coaching job on January 22, 1996: This could change if Green Bay's Ron Wolf chooses Ray Rhodes to succeed Holmgren, which I hear could happen as early as Wednesday. I like Rhodes for the job. When you take over a starry team and succeed a tough coach (Holmgren can chew a guy out as well as most coaches), you'd better be able to rip into the Brett Favres when necessary. I know Rhodes can do that, even though he drifted into being a bit of a disorganized guy in his final season in Philadelphia. But even if Rhodes gets the Packers job, the NFL has simply stayed even on the racial scale, unless Art Shell , Emmitt Thomas , Sherm Lewis or Jimmy Raye get more than perfunctory sniffs with the teams talking to them now (Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago and Chicago, respectively). I think if a team called the best minority coaching prospect in college football, Stanford's Tyrone Willingham (who one day will be a great -- not good, but great -- NFL coach), and offered him a job, he'd probably take it. But he just went 3-8 with the Cardinal, so he can't expect such royal treatment; he'll have to go through the lengthy interview process to convince an owner he'll be a good hire. Last week Lewis told me it was a slap in the face when the NFL called and asked him to be part of a new program which will help identify top assistants for head coaching vacancies. The NFL is in the process of interviewing about 25 coaches on videotape, about half of them black, so owners can see who some of the top candidates are. Of course, this program has all the subtlety of a zinged Mark Brunell spiral in the head. The NFL wouldn't do this to raise the profile of white assistants, but since they're launching a program, the league can't just do it for one color. In any case, I understand Lewis' anger that he's probably not going to get a job, and many of his former underlings in Green Bay ( Steve Mariucci, Andy Reid, Marty Mornhinweg ) are getting jobs or solid sniffs. But tell me something: What can the NFL do? Paul Tagliabue can't call up Art Modell and say: Art, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to hire Emmitt Thomas. Well, maybe he can, but I'd be stunned if Modell did anything but say he would give Thomas every consideration, then go ahead and hire whoever the heck he wanted to. The owners are running individual businesses. If Sherm Lewis is going to be angry, he should be angry at the owners, not at their boss, not at some amorphous office in Manhattan. You think Paul Tagliabue enjoys this shameful notoriety? All the league office is trying to do is something, anything, to raise the profile of black coaches instead of just sitting there and letting a crisis go unchallenged. Will these videotaped interviews do any good? I doubt it sincerely. If Jesse Jackson wants to picket someone or something, though, it shouldn't be the NFL offices on Park Avenue. It should be the teams who continue The Shame of the NFL. Now that Kansas City, suddenly, seems as if it will have an opening with the imminent departure of Marty Schottenheimer , will the Chiefs look at minority candidates? Maybe, but my money's on Gunther Cunningham , their current defensive coordinator. Offensive Player of the Week: Denver RB Terrell Davis. Forget the numbers for a moment, as awesome as they were once again (199 yards, two touchdowns) in the 38-3 playoff destruction of Miami. Consider the dominance. The Dolphins gave up six rushing touchdowns in 16 regular season games. Davis had three in the first 26 minutes Saturday. He sucked the wind out of Miami's defensive sails on the first Denver drives of the game, touchdown marches of 92, 66 and 87 yards. Davis is one of the gems of his time, a player who looks to be every bit the force Emmitt Smith has been for eight years in Dallas -- if he can keep it up. Defensive Player of the Week: Atlanta LB Jessie Tuggle. I'm big on early signals telling me which way a game's going. So on San Francisco's first drive, the 49ers had a third-and-two-feet at their 29. They sent Terry Kirby crashing over right guard. In crashed middle linebacker Tuggle. Collision. Gain of zero inches. Niners punt. Five minutes later, Jamal Anderson rushed in with the opening score of the game, and the Falcons never trailed. On the afternoon Tuggle had eight tackles and lots of intimidation. Coach of the Week: Atlanta coach Dan Reeves. An hour before the Falcons' Saturday playoff game, I saw Reeves on the field. The best way I could describe him was beaming and focused. Reeves told me: "I just have to make sure I stay out of the way on those sideline pileups." He was serious. And the man who had triple-bypass surgery a month ago coached a classic Reeves game. Get the lead, play powerful clockball and stifling defense with a swarming bunch of defenders. Atlanta 20, San Francisco 18, and Reeves is in another conference title game. Goat of the Week: Jacksonville DB Chris Hudson. You saw it, the stupidest lateral in expansion history, or something like that. Instead of setting his team up to trail just 10-7 to New York Sunday afternoon, his absurd sideways pass after a long fumble return handed the ball back to the Jets, who methodically went the length of the field again to take a 17-0 lead. It is no exaggeration to say that this one play took the Jaguars out of this game. Quote of the Week: From Jacksonville linebacker Kevin Hardy , last week's MMQB Defensive Player of the Week, to me in the Jaguars' locker room Friday: "Hey, thanks a lot for that award last week." Now for my 10 Things I Think I Think: 1. I think when Falcons fan extraordinare Evander Holyfield walked into the Georgia Dome press box wearing his Dirty Birds jacket Saturday morning, about five heads turned and said, "What's Lee Woodall doing up here?" The boxer is a dead ringer for the 49ers linebacker. 2. I think Jimmy Johnson must make two important decisions early in this offseason. One, he must come to the hard realization that Karim Abdul-Jabbar is as pedestrian a starting back as there is in the league and replace him. Abdul-Jabbar has Tyrone Wheatley disease: He's too slow to beat the linebackers to the corner and not to strong enough to make the tough inside yards. And don't give me the baloney about the fact that he's a 1,000-yard back. Gary Brown's a 1,000-yard back. Do you want to build your rushing future around Gary Brown? And is there any significance whatsoever to the 1,000-yard figure? There shouldn't be: do the math -- that's a 62.5-yards-per-game average. Two, Johnson must make a bold strike in free agency and spend a lot of money on a franchise receiver. I say he ought to front-load an offer sheet, give up a first- and third-rounder and steal restricted free agent Terrell Owens from the 49ers. 3. I think I must get asked this on every talk show in the Western hemisphere, and some in the Eastern: Are the Falcons a fluke? Here's one key thing personnel chief/right-hand Reeves man Harold Richardson believes in and told me Saturday: When you're ahead in the second half, and you can churn it out behind a good line and hefty Jamal Anderson, there aren't many teams that can play catch-up on you. The Falcons are 21-4 in the last 14 months. That's not fluky. 4. I think I'd like to steal a quote from my buddy Len Pasquarelli , the superb NFL writer for the Atlanta Constitution, to make a point. Now I like Sam Madison, the tough-as-nails Miami corner. Voted for him on my AP All-Pro ballot, along with Ty Law at corner. But Madison tells Lenny: "No malice intended, but I have taken trash-talk to new heights.'' Gee, Sam, your mother must be so proud. 5. I think the 49ers look very old. 6. I think what drives coaches crazy are things like the 77-yard interception return by Falcons safety Eugune Robinson against the Niners. When Steve Mariucci looks at the coaches' tape, he'll be lucky to see two guys who went all-out trying to tackle Robinson. Too often on interception returns, the offensive players-turned-tacklers give lame efforts. Look at the result here: The 49ers were playing terrific defense and their offensive guys just handed the Falcons a field goal. 7. I think if FOX does one more promotion for its new Eddie Murphy clay-mation show, I'm going to throw my Powerbook 520 right through the darn TV. Sometimes, I don't know how you people at home take it. Seems to this untrained eye that these networks try to make you so mad you'll turn the game off. 8. I think I wouldn't want to be playing the Jets right now. But then again, I wouldn't want to be playing Denver or Minnesota either. 9. I think -- and I'm being presumptuous here, because I assume people who go on our website want us to be a full-service website -- that everyone within the sound of my keyboard should see the movie Life is Beautiful. My wife told me I wouldn't like it because it's subtitled. Hey, I'm Mr. Culture. What a fabulous movie, the best I've seen in years.
1. Minnesota
Vikings (16-1) Click here to send a question or comment to Peter King's NFL Mailbag.
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