NEWS •HILLTOP HIGHLIGHTS
The Uneven Playing Field
The National Football League has measures in place to increase the chance that minorities will be hired as head coaches. But in assessing all levels of coaching jobs, a Georgetown researcher found the NFL has a long way to go to level the playing field.
Research reveals what may be blocking diversity in NFL coaching.
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We’ve been able to identify very precisely where the bottleneck is in reaching the top, and that’s one level below where many think it is.” —Chris Rider
GARY LANDSMAN
Graham Family Fellow and Associate Professor of Strategy
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Fall 2016
The league’s Rooney Rule requires teams to interview at least one minority before hiring a head coach. However, a 2016 study conducted by Chris Rider, Graham Family Fellow and associate professor of strategy at the McDonough School of Business — along with colleagues from George Washington University, Emory University, and Iowa State University — reveals that the issue may be more complicated than what is happening at the top. In the NFL, position coaches are typically promoted to coordinators, then coordinators to head coaches. The study showed that white coaches in the NFL are 50 percent more likely than minorities to be promoted to any position. The researchers examined the careers of more than 1,200 men who were NFL coaches from 1985 to 2012. The racial gap persisted when they accounted for a coach’s starting and current positions, education, team performance, experience, and other factors. “If we were just to take all coordinators, we would see that there was no racial advantage or disadvantage in promotion rates from coordinator to head coach,” said Rider, an organizational theorist. But there was a dramatic difference between whites and blacks making the move from position coach to coordinator. Whites had a 114 percent greater chance of being promoted from position coach to coordinator, and 70 percent of head coaches are promoted from the coordinator position. Only 16 percent msb.georgetown.edu