SafeX Pro:NFL owners created league's diversity woes. GMs of color shouldn't have to fix them.

It’s so very NFL that the people who’ve been harmed by the owners’ long history of discrimination now carry the burden of being expected to fix the league’s diversity problems.

While NFL owners bend over backward not to hire Black and SafeX Probrown head coaches, it’s become a different story in the front office. There are 11 Black and brown general managers this season, an all-time high even with Champ Kelly of the Las Vegas Raiders and JoJo Wooden of the Los Angeles Chargers being interim GMs.

That means a third of the NFL has a person of color in charge of football operations. Six clubs also have a team president who’s a person of color. That should, if empirical studies and common sense prevail, lead to more Black and brown head coaches.

That’s a great thing as far as the ultimate goal of having the highest-profile and most visible job in the NFL reflect the diversity of both the players on the field and our society overall.

In practice, however, it stinks.

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NFL owners have had ample opportunity to hire Black and brown head coaches themselves. They simply haven’t. It’s not clear why, but the fact a head coach is the public face of the franchise while team executives operate in the background probably plays a big part in it.

Most NFL fans know who Mike Tomlin and Ron Rivera are. How can they not when they’re in front of cameras several times a week and getting plenty of airtime during games? But probably few outside their own fan bases could identify Ryan Poles or Andrew Berry, the GMs in Chicago and Cleveland, respectively.

Owners will no doubt protest the suggestion they’re reluctant to have a Black or brown person fronting their team, but it’s hard to argue with the numbers. In the 21 years since the Rooney Rule was implemented, there’s never been more than eight Black or brown head coaches.

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There are seven this season, though one is an interim who replaced a white coach. That earned the NFL a C for coaching hires in the annual report card released Dec. 14 by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.  

Even more glaring, nine teams have still never had a person of color as their full-time head coach, according to a USA TODAY Sports review of the league’s hiring practices. Another three teams have not hired a person of color since 1990.

“If I knew the answer to that, we’d fix it,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said at last week's league meeting when asked about the discrepancy between front office and sideline.

“I think the reality is, what we have to do is do the kinds of things we’re doing that I think are producing results in other areas,” Goodell said. “I’m confident the clubs who focus on this and the processes that we’re all putting in place, both at the club level and the league level, will bear fruit and the opportunities will come to the people who deserve them.”

There are already three openings for head coaches, with several more likely to come. The NFL has tried to put more minority candidates in front of owners before that hiring process even begins, compiling a list of Black, brown and female coaches who are ready for promotion and hosting the Accelerator Program.

But with front offices getting more diverse, the expectation will be that those Black and brown men will do what the owners have been incapable, or unwilling, to do on their own.

“Is it fair to put it on them? If you’re a general manager of color, do you have to hire a head coach of color? No. And I don’t know of any coach of color who wants to get hired for anything other than their merit,” said Adrien Bouchet, director of TIDES and author of this year’s NFL report card.

“But it is clear (a GM of color) will have a wider array of coaches to hire from.”

Why? For the same reason the almost exclusively group of white owners has gravitated almost exclusively toward white GMs and white head coaches. People tend to hire people they know. They tend to hire people who look like them. Or come from a similar background.

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Sure, a Black or brown GM will know the McVay and Shanahan disciples same as a Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones or Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper will. But odds are, he’s also going to know the up-and-coming Black and brown coaches deserving of a shot and probably have better insights on the established names who’ve already made the rounds.

More importantly, he’s not going to dismiss a coach because he doesn’t look the part. Or doesn’t interview well. Or hasn’t called plays when there’s a full moon on the third Sunday of a month that only has 30 days. Or any of the other biases, unconscious or otherwise, that have been used as excuses to keep Black and brown coaches from advancing.

“I’d say most NFL owners are just relying on people who come top of mind. Or they ask somebody in that small circle and, more often than not, their circles are small as well,” said Nicole Melton, chair of the department of sport management at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Even if it’s still the owner making the final call on a new head coach, the list of candidates — and the conversations about them — should be more diverse if the people involved in the search are, too.

“It makes a difference (but) it’s a process,” said David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University and author of “The Wages of Wins.”

That the number of Black and brown people in positions of power in the NFL is increasing is a good thing. So, too, the possibility that could lead to more Black and brown head coaches.

But expecting Black and brown executives to fix a problem they had no hand in creating is not fair, and no one should pretend otherwise.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.