NFL Should Be Giving Minority Hiring a Push

The latest push for the NFL to increase minority hiring among its coaches shouldn’t have to come from Johnnie Cochran. It really should come from the fans, fans who long ago grew tired of seeing the same old names such as Bruce Coslet, Dan Henning, Kevin Gilbride and Jerry Glanville called on to coach their teams.

A report released this week by civil rights attorneys Cochran and Cyrus Mehri shows that black head coaches have outperformed their white counterparts. If more owners were willing to tap into this underused pool, maybe they wouldn’t get stuck in a perpetual state of being, say, the Cincinnati Bengals.

Two pages among the 68 pages in the report struck me: the first and the last.

It opens with a dedication to the five black coaches hired in the NFL’s modern era. It’s a short paragraph, with only a few names. Something’s wrong when a guy like me, who covers only two or three NFL games a year, has met 80% of the black coaches.

By the time I reached the report’s conclusion, a call for the NFL commissioner’s office to encourage diversity by awarding or revoking draft choices, made sense. A lot more sense than a lawsuit, actually.

Litigation is the proposed action if the NFL doesn’t change its sleepy hiring practices. And it’s what these guys do best. Mehri won settlements of $176 million from Texaco and $192.5 million from Coca-Cola in racial discrimination cases. Among Cochran’s numerous victories are an $8.7-million settlement for police brutality victim Abner Louima in a New York civil case and an acquittal of a former NFL running back in a well-known criminal case.

But if the NFL gets taken to court, the only winners will be the lawyers. There will be plenty of billable hours and maybe the league would have to fork over some money, but would that change anything? Not really.

But start talking draft picks and things change. Now you’re dealing in the NFL’s currency.

The resolution proposed by Cochran and Mehri calls for the commissioner to give draft picks to teams “for diversifying front-office positions through the hiring of qualified minority and female candidates.” Teams would be required to have a racially diverse field, with each candidate interviewed in person, before a head coach, assistant or coordinator is chosen. Note that this pertains to interviews, not hires. Any team can opt out of the diversity-interview requirement by forfeiting a draft pick (a first-rounder for head coaches).

We’ve already seen teams willing to part with draft picks to get coaches.

In February, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers gave up two first-round picks, two second-round picks and $8 million to the Oakland Raiders to get them to release Jon Gruden from the final year of his contract. In 1997, the New York Jets gave the New England Patriots four draft picks, including a No. 1, to get Bill Parcells. Three years later, the Patriots sent three picks (one a first-rounder) to New York for Bill Belichick and two lesser draft choices.

I didn’t blame the Jets; I’d give up a whole draft to get a motivated Parcells. I wondered why the Patriots were so pressed to bring in Belichick, but he coached them to a Super Bowl victory, so I guess they knew what they were doing.

So if some team has its heart set on hiring a white coach without checking all the alternatives that they’re willing to part with a No. 1 pick, step right to it. That way they wouldn’t have to answer to civil-rights attorneys, they’d have their judgment questioned and be held accountable by the people in the seats. If the fans don’t like the team’s direction, they can stop buying tickets.

But the report makes you wonder why NFL owners aren’t more active in finding the next Tony Dungy or Herman Edwards without any inducement or penalties. Cochran and Mehri brought in University of Pennsylvania labor economist Dr. Janice Madden to crunch the numbers. She found that since 1986 black coaches have made the playoffs 67% of the time versus 39% for white coaches and averaged 1.1 more victories per year than white coaches.

Black coaches average 2.7 more wins in their first year than new white coaches, but that brings up an interesting point. Normally a roadblock to success for black college football, baseball and basketball coaches is that they get to take over only teams and programs that are left in the wastebasket. To the NFL’s credit, three of the four most recent African American hires took over teams that had winning or .500 records the season before (Dennis Green in Minnesota, Ray Rhodes in Green Bay and Edwards with the New York Jets).

But they paid the price in higher expectations. Fired black coaches won an average of 1.3 more games than fired white coaches. Ray Rhodes was cut loose by Green Bay after one year and an 8-8 record, when star quarterback Brett Favre was bothered by a thumb injury.

It took three consecutive losing seasons for the Raiders to make Art Shell the first black coach in the league’s modern era in 1989. He was fired by the Raiders after a 9-7 season in 1994. Neither of his next two successors, Mike White and Joe Bugel, won that many games, and it took Gruden until his third year to surpass that total with a 12-4 record in 2000.

The record shows that when teams hire minorities, it benefits the team, not some quota. Baltimore’s Ozzie Newsome is the only black general manager, and the Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2001.

It’s sad that guys such as current Washington Redskin defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis--the architect of Baltimore’s championship defense--can’t get a shot at a head coaching job.

If he gets an opportunity, I like his chances. Under the Cochran/Mehri proposal, a team would at least get an extra draft pick for the attempt.

Let’s see: a chance to improve your team in addition to statistical trends that show the choice would pay off. Sounds like odds that even the conservative NFL owners can’t turn down.

*

J.A. Adande can be reached at: j.a.adande@latimes.com.