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We should listen to Rev. Jackson
Posted: Friday February 04, 2000 02:34 PM
Click here to send your NFL questions to SI's Peter King.
This is my last mailbag of the football season -- I will do them occasionally through the off-season -- and I want to say two things: 1. Thank you, all of you, for your thank-yous to me for doing this Mailbag thing and the Monday Morning Quarterback all season. I truly appreciate all the gratitude. 2. That was one heck of a game Sunday, one of the best ever. But I am compelled for one last time to make a point seen by some, but not many, in the public eye last weekend, a point that needs to be driven home by the last two coaching hires in the NFL this week. There needs to be more outrage and attention paid to the snail's pace of black head-coaching hires in the NFL. Of the last 32 head coaches hired by NFL teams, dating back to February 1996, only one (Ray Rhodes of Green Bay) has been black. In a league that is 70% black, this is scandalous. But I see scant outrage. I see a shrugging acceptance in the fact that there were seven coaching openings this winter, all seven went to whites, and the defensive coordinator of the league's top-ranked unit, Buffalo's Ted Cottrell, a 15-year NFL coaching veteran, didn't get so much as a phone call from any of the seven teams. Cottrell is black. Last Friday night, outside the lobby of the Super Bowl headquarters hotel in Atlanta, the Hyatt Regency, I ran into the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The NFL is sick of Jackson. Most people I know in the league think he's an unwanted opportunist sticking his nose someplace it doesn't belong. (Including one angry general manager who called me this week and asked: "Why do you give this man a forum? He doesn't know our business.'' To which I said: "I understand why some people don't like this guy. But who is going to stick up for these coaches? If they come out and rip the league, they're never going to get another interview.'') Anyway, I waited for Jackson to finish talking on his cell phone, then approached him to ask about the story. He stepped up the pressure on NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue to do something tangible about the league's horrendous track record with black head coaches, telling me that the slow pace of black hires is a result of "a culture driven by white supremacists. In the National Football League, there is one standard for choosing players and another standard for choosing coaches. Tagliabue must say: This does not smell right.'' The league has instituted week-long spring seminars for assistant coaches, white and black, to try to prepare them better for coaching interviews. Tagliabue has quietly urged that every team with an opening interview a black candidate. He says he can't force 31 independent owners -- all white, by the way -- to hire anybody. But this has become, as Bruce Smith said last week, "the black eye of the NFL.'' This is not an invention of Jesse Jackson's. This has become a crisis, as I wrote in SI's Scorecard section this week. In times of crises, leaders lead. Tagliabue offers no new initiatives. He gives no hope that he'll do anything even symbolic like rattling owners' cages publicly. "I don't think you can say Ted Cottrell is an unknown,'' he said last week. "He is on a growing number of lists.'' Which lists? David Letterman's top 10 list for reasons not to hire black coaches? "The Ted Cottrells,'' said Jackson, "are in a Catch-22 situation. If they speak out about the injustice, they are called uppity. If they stay silent, they die like lambs in the dark. But either way, they're dying for lack of consideration.'' If last weekend's news coverage is any indication, Cottrell's hopes will die a silent death. Jackson equated NFL ownership and the NFL hierarchy to white supremacists. Heck of a charge, I thought. I put Jackson's comments on our CNNSI.com web site, with a big headline. Our crack publicist, Amy Sasser, called AP and the Atlanta papers to get the news out. AP picked it up. I never saw a word in USA Today. I never saw a word in the New York Times. And all I can think to myself this morning is: Poor Ted Cottrell. He is doomed. Now on to your questions. Thanks for serving as a wonderful tour guide through the season. There are many of us who appreciated the ability to consistently entertain and enlighten, especially in light of the price you paid in missed dinners with your family, lack of sleep, etc. -- Andy Willis, Toronto Andy, thanks. Thanks to you and everyone who sent messages like this. I feel like Vermeil. Humbled. I love doing MMQB, even though sometimes it's disjointed and totally off the top of my head because sometimes I do it at 4 a.m. after finishing my SI magazine duties. It'll be back next year, with a few new twists. (I don't know what they are yet, but they'll come to me.) Peter, enjoyed reading you all season long. Great job. I'm sending you a copy of our annual show on players and coaches wired for sound. I think you'll get a kick out of it. I look forward to our annual interview at the owners meetings. See you in Florida in March. -- Chris Barlow, NFL Flilms, Cherry Hill, N.J. Chris, thanks. I ran into Steve Sabol at the Super Bowl and told him some of open mikes on the old coaches -- Eddie LeBaron was a classic -- were the best things I'd seen NFL Films do in a long time. Great stuff. See you at the meetings. O.K., we had a full season to evaluate the replay system. Overall, I believe it helped more than it hurt the games in which it was a factor. The vote last year to approve the use of replay was pretty close -- will replay survive another year? -- Scott Hanneman, Elgin, Ill. I did a lot of reporting on replay last week at the meetings. I think it will pass. Eight "no" votes are needed to kill it. I expect Indianapolis, Buffalo and Cincinnati to vote against it. And I expected a new Competition Committee member, Arizona GM Bob Ferguson, to be another "no" vote. But he was surprised last week when I approached him asking him about the fate of replay. "You mean somebody thinks there's some question it might not be back?'' he asked me. "Look, I don't think it belongs in the game because the game belongs on the field. But overall it was a plus this year. I'll be stunned if we don't keep it. Stunned.'' I wouldn't be stunned, but it sounds to me like it'll pass. Peter, in a SI article about two years ago you wrote about Dick Vermeil's first season with the Rams. In that article Vermeil says: "This is going to be the best organization in football." Did you believe that it could be possible? What do you think about the Rams' quick turnaround? -- Petri Taskinen, Tampere, Finland Good memory. I'm sort of relieved that the Rams won the game, because I look back on that story and remember thinking when I turned it in one very late night in Charlotte, where the Rams finished the '97 season: I think this guy's going to win. Lucky for me it happened before he got fired. Let me tell you an interesting story. I interview Vermeil for our CNN NFL Preview show last Saturday, the day before the Super Bowl. And I thought he was getting needlessly wound up about the cancelling of a morning walkthrough practice at the Georgia Dome. He said: "The Highway Patrol was scared to death about putting the bus out. I think they overreacted personally but I accept their advice. Because all I have to do is be the hard-head coach and take them to the Dome for the walkthrough. And all of a sudden we slide off the road, then I'm the idiot. Against my better judgment, I listened to them.'' He also told me he said to the cop when he first told him not to make the drive: "You've got to be kidding me! You're the same guys who've been telling me for four days it's going to snow! It's RAINING outside!'' Do you agree that the coaches should rethink their position with the two-point conversion? In my opinion it should not be used until late in the fourth quarter. I have seen it used in an earlier period and it always has been wrong. If the Titans had kicked the point after instead of missing the two-point try they would have been ahead near the end of the game. It would not have changed the outcome, other than to bettors , but it emphasizes the point that it is used at the wrong time. -- Bob Lobman, Wantagh, N.Y. The general rule, one I believe strongly in, is that teams should never go for two until the fourth quarter. But Jeff Fisher did the right thing in going for two with fewer than 16 minutes left in the game. Two reasons: There's no way he could count on, after scoring once in the first 45 minutes, scoring twice in the final 15. And the way his defense was starting to play, he had to figure there was a chance the Titans could hold the Rams scoreless over the final 15 minutes. My big problem with the Titans in the second half was wasted timeouts, which killed them late, and the fact that they didn't use any kind of hurry-up offense down 16 with 19 minutes to play. Turns out, of course, that they desperately needed the clock they wasted. Peter, the Vikings are letting Jake Reed talk to other teams. The Cowboys need a big, possession-type of receiver. What do you think of the fit? -- Chris Montgomery, Ottawa, Ontario Jake Reed has had weight problems and the dropsies over the past two or three years. I'd much rather see the Cowboys induce Tim Brown to declare himself a free agent by Feb. 10 and use him as the go-to guy for Troy Aikman, fitting him in Michael Irvin's salary slot, then trying to sign Todd Lyght to replace Deion Sanders at corner. You are right-on about some of the topics you've addressed this season: Elian Gonzalez; lack of NFL head coach minority hiring; the stupidity of NFL strutting, taunting and fighting; and, especially, the Patriots' poor choice in hiring Bill Belichick. Why does everyone forget that in Cleveland Belichik totally lost it? He made irrational decisions, become paranoid and combative with the press, and generally couldn't handle the pressure of being a head coach. Why will it be any different this time? -- Bob Oelschlager, Sao Paulo, Brazil Free Elian Gonzalez. Give Belichick a chance. He's smart, and I figure he must be smart enough to learn from his churlish mistakes the last time. I'm not anti-Belichick at all. I'm anti-NFL process. If I were running the Rams I would trade Kurt Warner for two No. 1 draft picks and hope Trent Green makes it as quarterback. Both QBs can't exist together, they both want to start. And there are salary cap implications involved too. As a Vikings fan, I think we should have kept Brad Johnson and let Randall Cunningham go. -- Rod Rabe, Byron, Minn. You just won the lucky lottery of all time with Warner. You want to trade the NFL MVP and Super Bowl MVP for two No. 1 picks? You want to chose two bright prospects even though history says one of two in the first round turns into a bust. So what you want to do, really, is deal Kurt Warner for, let's say, a starting safety. My question: Are you a Rams fan? I understand the Trent Green deal. And I believe Green might function as well in that offense as Warner did. But you cannot under any circumstances deal Warner. Impossible. Thanks. See you in future mailbags. Click here to send your NFL questions to SI's Peter King.
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