*White NFL owners are uncomfortable around Black people, and Skip Bayless is unhappy about it.
“I have been dumbfounded by it. It has been inexplicable to me, but then in the end, it’s really pretty explicable,” Bayless said on a recent episode of “Undisputed: Skip and Shannon.”
He explained to his co-host Shannon Sharpe that this discomfort prevents white NFL owners from hiring Black coaches. He cited an article penned by Nancy Armour that addressed the issue of NFL owners’ unwillingness to hire Black and Brown men as their head coaches.
In the article, Armour gave an instance of Eric Bieniemy, the ex-Kansas City Chiefs offensive coordinator (newly hired by the Washington Commanders) who failed to get a position as head coach in the NFL.
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Bayless said he agreed with Armour’s points and was amplifying them on national TV to reach more people with the message.
Said he, “I’m going to boil it down to: These older white owners just aren’t that comfortable with a black head coach because they need to interact, they need to go to dinner with the wives or the significant or whatever. And they’re just not that comfortable. When they do have an interview, it’s gonna be a quicker click with a young white hot candidate.”
But he also understands that it is part of life, so he is not too hard on the whites who make this mistake.
“It’s just culture, it’s just the way life is,” Bayless added. “And I don’t know how to defeat it, because each of these guys is an independent owner in the umbrella of the NFL and it’s hard to legislate ‘you must hire a black coach’ … you can’t unless it’s in the man’s heart to do the right thing — and every once in a while you have [Steelers owner, Art Rooney] the Rooneys in Pittsburgh who did the right thing.”
As things stand now, if our math is correct, NFL has only THREE Black men as head coaches: Mike Tomlin, Todd Bowles, and DeMeco Ryans.
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