Over the last few weeks, the NFL has seen a sea change in the discussions regarding race and civil rights as never before. The same league that unofficially banned Black players from 1934-1945, didn’t have a Black player on every team until the Redskins were forced to integrate in the early 1960s, and found it nearly impossible to accept Black quarterbacks as starters until more recently than it would like to admit has been forced to re-calibrate what it says publicly about these issues. Following George Floyd’s death, and the protests that resulted, views of civil rights have changed and the call for justice has been amplified.
The league has said all the right things, sometimes by force, but what does that really mean? This is still an NFL that blackballed Colin Kaepernick following the 2016 season. This is still a league in which Bill Polian, a former Hall of Fame general manager, said as an ESPN pundit that Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, the second unanimous NFL MVP ever, would be better off switching to receiver when he came out of Louisville. This is still a league in which over 70% of the player population is Black, but only three head coaches (Mike Tomlin, Anthony Lynn, Brian Flores) and two general managers (Chris Grier, Andrew Berry) are Black.
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To change the scenery in a real sense, and make this more than lip service, it behooves the people in charge of decisions that shape the league to see things differently than they have before. There is no more room for casual observance — the idea that “yes, things should change,” without doing anything about it. Not in football, and not in life.
Recently, Robert Klemko of the Washington Post spoke with four NFL general managers — Tom Telesco of the Chargers, Les Snead of the Rams, Rick Spielman of the Vikings, and Thomas Dimitroff of the Falcons — regarding the state of the league in these matters. It should be noted that all four of the GMs Klemko spoke with are white, and all have long (mostly successful) tenures. These aren’t guys who are going away anytime soon, so it’s important to hear their voices.
Klemko asked all four men the same question: How does your background in scouting lend to an understanding of racial inequality in this country, and how do you view those experiences in light of the recent unrest?
Snead, the Rams’ general manager since 2012, saw Kaepernick’s rise and fall from up close — the Rams and 49ers play twice a season in the NFC West, and he told Klemko that in retrospect, the punishment the NFL meted out for Kaepernick’s peaceful protests was wrong.
“You realize that he probably shouldn’t have been villainized,” Snead said. “That’s what we do know. And because of what he did, other people began to follow. And now, years later, we have to ask ourselves if we can work together and actually do it better this time. My hope is that we have learned from that and we can apply the lessons learned from that. We can do better.”
That doesn’t get Kaepernick any closer to an entry back into the league — even now, those people who understand that Kaepernick deserves another chance in the NFL are silent or vague about the particulars — but at least it’s mentioned.
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Spielman, who grew up in predominantly Black parts of Ohio, only really understood what the differences are when he and his wife Michele adopted six Black children.
“When our kids are with me and my wife, they are living in a white-privileged world,” Spielman told Klemko. “But when they’re not with us, they live in a totally different world. One of our kids got pulled over just because of the nice car he was driving, with the assumption that he stole that car. I can’t tell you how much that just breaks my wife’s and my heart.”
Things hit closer to home when they’re happening in your home, to be sure.
Dimitroff talked about how he has managed the specter of unfair prosecution and police brutality when evaluating Black prospects who have run-ins with the law.
“There’s no question I have in the past, and there’s no question I will exponentially more in the future,” he said. “Also, there have been some discussions of police brutality incidents that were incredibly difficult to hear. … I’ve heard a number of accounts that are gut-wrenching, and it stirs emotion because I have not personally had to deal with it. I can only imagine what an African-American man in this country faces.”
Telesco, who has worked with Anthony Lynn since 2017, spoke about the need for Black people who want opportunities in the NFL to see those openings as more than just players.
“Every kid wants to be the next Keenan Allen or Derwin James or Anthony Lynn, but there are a lot [more] opportunities in our league than just that,” Telesco said. “We want to expose these kids to all the opportunities available, give them the resources to learn and then hopefully some mentors to network with.”
Change doesn’t happen overnight, even when it should have happened a lot sooner. Many coaches and executives have had virtual meetings with people of color at every level of their organizations to try and better understand what those people are going through and how their experiences are different.
“It became very emotional because people understood that they never had experienced a lot of what many of our employees go through,” Spielman said of a recent Vikings meeting that was scheduled for half an hour and ran closer to 100 minutes. “We talked about what is uncomfortable, and it became very comfortable and open to talk about. That’s the way that hopefully we can create change.”
It’s a start, and it’s admirable that some of the most powerful people in the league are at least trying to understand what they did not understand before. But for real change to happen, these thoughts and feelings will have to turn into real policies and initiatives, and it’ll all have to go beyond the current American outrage. It’ll all have to last through the start of the 2020 season, when the games are real again. Then, we’ll see if the NFL’s words regarding true equality in the country’s most prominent sport will lead the way in any fashion.