Broncos coach Vic Fangio's troubling take on discrimination in the NFL shows he truly doesn't get it
Vic Fangio doesn't believe the NFL has a racism or discrimination problem. So why do coaching demographics suggest otherwise?
If you’re an NFL fan who’s been on Twitter over the past few days, there’s a good chance you’ve already seen the comments made by Broncos coach Vic Fangio, who said the league does not have a “racism” or “discrimination” problem.
Fangio’s comments are either, at best, painfully naive or, even worse, willfully ignorant.
Fangio’s comments about the NFL came after he gave a statement regarding the death of George Floyd, who was killed when former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin applied pressure to his neck for over eight minutes. Fangio’s statement came out strongly against the police officer, almost to a ridiculous extent, saying that Chauvin should be charged for “treason” (?) for what he did.
Also worryingly, Fangio seemed to be limiting his concern to one bad apple, rather than a system that allows (and too often encourages) that kind of behavior. To be fair, he’s not alone in that regard.
Fangio was then asked about the NFL’s own problems with discrimination, which prompted this ridiculous opinion, via ESPN’s Jeff Legwold:
“I think our problems in the NFL along those lines are minimal. We’re a league of meritocracy. You earn what you get, you get what you earn. I don’t see racism at all in the NFL, I don’t see discrimination in the NFL.”
This topic has been widely covered, so I don’t need to take a deep dive into the numbers that show Fangio’s vision of the NFL is pure fantasy. But there are three black head coaches currently employed by teams.
Three. Out of 32.
In a league whose players are 70% black. In a sport whose college athletes are 57% black, according to TIME.
Those numbers are important. Far more important than the demographics of this country, which white privilege truthers cite any time somebody points out the disproportionate number of black head coaches. That’s for an obvious reason: Almost every NFL head coach ever hired has played at the college level, and the demographics of top-level football skew much more diverse than our country does.
NFL teams are not hiring from a traditional pool of candidates, which might reflect the demographics of the U.S. population. They’re hiring from a pool made up mostly by black people, yet the hiring practices have never reflected that. It’s almost as if team are going out of their way to hire white coaches.
If the NFL doesn’t have a discrimination problem, as Fangio suggests, it’s implied that whites have overcome those demographical disadvantages to rise to the top of the profession and have maintained that position throughout the history of the league based not on privilege but merit alone. Whether he means to or not, Fangio is implicitly arguing that whites are just more cut out for the job and overwhelmingly so. Otherwise, NFL head coaching demographics would resemble that of its pool of qualified candidates.
As ESPN’s Bomani Jones argued, it makes sense that Fangio, who had to put in eight years as a top NFL coordinator before getting a head job, doesn’t believe the color of his skin provided him with any short cuts…
That Fangio doesn’t see the issue with his comments isn’t surprising. It falls in line with the useless ‘I don’t see color; we’re all the same’ nonsense we have been farting out of our white mouths for years. That’s not the sign of unity we seem to think it is. It’s important to acknowledge our differences. It’s important to acknowledge that one of those key differences is that black people have it harder than us. Even in the NFL.