Howard Journal of Communications ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uhjc20 Covering the Rooney Rule: An Exploratory Study of Print Coverage of NFL Head Coaching Searches Guy Harrison, Charli Kerns & Jason Stamm To cite this article: Guy Harrison, Charli Kerns & Jason Stamm (2021): Covering the Rooney Rule: An Exploratory Study of Print Coverage of NFL Head Coaching Searches, Howard Journal of Communications, DOI: 10.1080/10646175.2021.1999349 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2021.1999349 Published online: 09 Nov 2021. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 486 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=uhjc20 Howard Journal of Communications https://doi.org/10.1080/10646175.2021.1999349 Covering the Rooney Rule: An Exploratory Study of Print Coverage of NFL Head Coaching Searches Guy Harrisona, Charli Kernsb and Jason Stammc Journalism and Electronic Media, The University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Communication and Information, Knoxville, TN, USA; bResearch, Evaluation, Analysis, Knox County School District, Knoxville, TN, USA; cSports Media & Communication, University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications, Lincoln, NE, USA a ABSTRACT This content analysis uses media framing theory to explore and compare the rate at which NFL beat writers discussed race in their coverage of the 2020 and 2021 NFL head coach hiring cycles, a perennial process that has historically maintained the statistical overrepresentation of white men among the league’s head coaches. The study of the articles (N = 374) found significant year over year increases in 2021 in both the percentage of all sampled articles overall that mentioned race and in the percentage of stories that mentioned race after a team’s head coach was hired. This study’s findings suggest that, while NFL beat writers are unsurprisingly likely to avoid using race to frame their coaching search stories, their willingness to include race in their reporting may be increasing. Given increased calls for the NFL to address its lack of Black head coaches, sportswriters’ (un) willingness to include race in their reporting of coaching searches has become increasingly relevant. Given this study’s results, we therefore call for further qualitative and longitudinal quantitative studies to more definitively investigate these results as a sustained (and sustainable) phenomenon. KEYWORDS Media framing; NFL; race; coaching; beat writers In October 2021, Urban Meyer, the head coach of the National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars was seen on an Internet video dancing with and eventually groping a young woman at a sports bar, four weeks into his first season as an NFL coach (DiRocco, 2021). In a rare move, the 57-year-old coach had elected not to fly back to Florida with his team after a loss but to stay in Ohio. It was during his stay in Ohio that the compromising video was recorded and shared across social media. In a press conference two days later, Meyer sheepishly apologized to his family and to his club (DiRocco, 2021). Then, four days after Meyer’s press conference, it was reported that Jon Gruden, who is white and was the head coach of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, sent an email in 2011 in which he used a racist trope to disparage DeMaurice Smith, who is Black and was the executive director of the NFL players’ union (Beaton, 2021). Gruden, who was ESPN’s television analyst for Monday Night Football when he sent the email, was permitted to coach the Raiders’ next game but resigned after more of his emails were CONTACT Guy Harrison gharri37@utk.edu Journalism and Electronic Media, The University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Communication and Information, Knoxville, TN 37996-0332 USA. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 2 G. HARRISON ET AL. released, revealing that he often used homophobic and misogynistic language with friends working in and adjacent to the NFL (Belson & Rosman, 2021). The actions committed by Meyer, who is also white, reminded some observers that the Jaguars were perceived as having circumvented the league’s initiatives to diversify its head coaches when they hired him (Johnson, 2021; Young, 2021). Similarly, the reporting on Gruden’s emails called to mind the league’s efforts to tweak those same initiatives after the Raiders also appeared to skirt them when they hired Gruden in 2018 (Bell, 2018; Hodler, 2021). The NFL’s attempts to increase diversity among its head coaches have mostly been bound up in its Rooney Rule, a quasi-Affirmative Action policy that has been controversial since its inception due to the demeaning lengths teams will go to circumvent it and to questions surrounding its long-term effectiveness. To wit, as of the beginning of the 2021 NFL season, David Culley, hired by the Houston Texans that year, along with the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin and the Miami Dolphins’ Brian Flores (hired in 2007 and 2018, respectively), represented the only three Black head coaches in a 32-team league. That meant fewer than 10% of the NFL’s active head coaches were Black, in a league in which roughly 60% of its players were Black (Lapchick et al., 2019). This inequity remains despite calls from (Black) NFL executives and members of the media for the league to take further steps in its attempts to diversify its head coaches, steps that include avoiding men like Meyer and Gruden when there are numerous qualified Black candidates available (ESPN., 2021). While we argue these efforts are largely in the hands of the NFL’s team executives, as journalism scholars we wonder to what extent the media has attempted to cast a light on this longstanding issue and whether or not their willingness to make such attempts may or may not be increasing. Through the lens of media framing theory (Entman, 1993), this study therefore explores the rate at which print sports journalists broadly include race in their written coverage of NFL head coaching searches. More specifically, the research team statistically compared articles written by NFL beat writers in both the 2020 and 2021 hiring cycles (N = 374) to establish a baseline rate at which beat writers are willing to employ frames that include race in their coverage, and to explore a possible year over year increase in doing so. The sports media industry’s well-documented racial bias (Crowe, 2021; Douglas, 2012; Lewis et al., 2020) makes it fair to question the industry’s willingness to discuss racism in its news coverage, even when such glaring inequities persist. However, given the ostensible increase in the corporate and individual consciousness of systemic racism across the US during the summer of 2020 (de Oca et al., 2020; Friedman, 2020), the proposed time frame offers an opportune “jumping off point” for this and future studies. Literature review Media framing In mass communication scholarship, media framing theory does not have one precise definition as there have been multiple proposed approaches to investigating framing. However, one such approach that has been used quite extensively in sports media Howard Journal of Communications 3 research is one that Ash and Cranmer call “sociological” (2020, p. 392), born out of a tradition of framing based on research conducted by Goffman (1974), who examined how people interpreted and made sense of the information they received on a daily basis. The sociological, Goffmanian approach to media framing is therefore concerned with the media’s inherent tendency to “select some aspects of perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text” (Entman, 1993, p. 52). Therefore, as opposed to agenda setting research (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), which is concerned with examining which topics or events are reported by news outlets, media framing scholarship focuses on how chosen topics are reported to make certain aspects of them more “noticeable, meaningful or memorable to audiences” than others (Entman, 1993, p. 53). In this case, the current study explores the extent to which NFL beat writers made race a more (or less) “noticeable, meaningful, or memorable” aspect of the 2021 NFL head coach hiring cycle, relative to 2020. Race, racism and framing in sports media A large body of scholarship explores race and racism concerning both representation within the sports media industry itself and its coverage of sports figures. Despite the prevalence of Black athletes in US sports, white men continue to statistically dominate an industry charged with covering and analyzing those athletes (Lapchick et al., 2021). As of 2021, 76.5% of all sports staff members at print news outlets were white, while nearly 81% of the staff at those same outlets were men (Lapchick et al., 2021). White male predominance has also carried over, to a lesser extent, to on-air sports television positions (Harrison, 2018, 2019, 2021). Extant scholarship also demonstrates that the predominance of white men in the sports media industry has impacted the way athletes of color—and race and systemic racism, in and of themselves—are all covered and portrayed. Previous research has explored the prevalence of racialized descriptors and stereotypes employed by sports television commentators (Billings, 2004; Bruce, 2004; Eastman & Billings, 2001; Lewis et al., 2020; Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005; van Sterkenburg et al., 2019), televised and written coverage of multiracial athletes (Billings, 2003; Deeb & Love, 2018), and race as a marker in the selection of imagery used in print coverage of Olympic athletes (Hardin et al., 2004). The existing research has also explored racial stereotypes and bias in coverage of college football recruits (Love et al., 2021), as well as in news coverage of specific athletes and their behavior on and off the field of play (Crowe, 2021; Douglas, 2012; Lorenz & Murray, 2014; Rugg, 2019). The prevalence of these racial stereotypes and biases have bled into the framing practices of the sports media as well. Ash and Cranmer (2020) found that media framing of college athletes—by emphasizing either their strength and athleticism or their intelligence—impacts the way they are viewed by their non-athlete college student peers. Extensive research has found that these “brawn” vs. “brain” frames have historically been racialized, with the sports media focusing on Black athletes’ athleticism and white athletes’ intelligence and fundamentals, and are part and parcel of racially biased sports media coverage ( Eagleman & Martin, 2013; Cranmer et al., 2014; Deeb & Love, 2018). Perhaps most germane to the current study, scholarship has also found 4 G. HARRISON ET AL. that sports media consumers apply these longstanding racial stereotypes to football quarterbacks (Ferrucci & Tandoc, 2017, 2018 ). This is especially relevant to the current study given the fact that the prototypical NFL head coach is someone who is skilled at coaching quarterbacks. If Black quarterbacks are stereotypically portrayed as possessing less intelligence than white quarterbacks, then it stands to reason that Black coaches may be viewed as lacking the intelligence necessary to coach quarterbacks and football teams, in general. Given the above evidence of anti-Black bias in sports news coverage, it is not surprising that scholarship has also found that the sports media industry has largely ignored systemic racism (Graber et al., 2020) and could therefore stand to “concern [itself] more with issues of race and racism” (Agyemang & Singer, 2014, p. 74). While it might be an overstatement to suggest the sports media have generally ignored the NFL’s lack of Black representation among the league’s head coaches specifically, little research has been done to explore the extent to which that may or may not be true. The proposed study attempts to measure the rate at which NFL beat writers were willing to frame their coverage of the 2020 and 2021 head coach hiring cycles in ways that drew attention to (or ignored) race and racism. The rooney rule and the NFL’s head coaching diversity crisis As of its 2021 season, the NFL has had 21 full-time, non-interim Black head coaches in its entire history, which dates back to 1920 (Gaustad, 2020). Black head coaches are therefore underrepresented in a league in which nearly 60% of its athletes are Black (Lapchick et al., 2019). This disparity is an issue the league has sought to address, through policy changes, for nearly twenty years. In 2003, the NFL instituted the Rooney Rule, named after Dan Rooney, then the league’s diversity committee chairman and owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers (Freedman, 2014). The rule made it mandatory for NFL teams to interview at least one Black candidate any time they had a head coach opening. The rationale for the policy was that, by requiring teams to bring at least one Black candidate into their facility for an interview, those teams may be more likely to hire Black candidates. Since its inception, the Rooney Rule has undergone numerous tweaks. In 2009, the rule was expanded to include senior football operations positions (such as general manager), not just head coaching jobs (NFL, 2018). In 2016, the NFL mandated the inclusion of women for interviews for executive positions in the league’s office and teams (Reid, 2016). As of 2021, the rule requires teams to interview at least two ethnic minority candidates for head coach openings, at least one minority for second-level coaching (coordinator) openings, and gives draft pick compensation to teams that develop ethnic minorities who later leave to fill senior football operation positions in other organizations (Bell, 2020; Patra, 2020). The Rooney Rule has earned praise from scholars and members of the popular press as a policy that takes a “soft” approach to Affirmative Action by not giving men of color preference in hiring but by increasing their inclusion in the applicant pool (DuBois, 2016). Variations of the rule have been adopted by multiple corporations, including Facebook, Intel, and Amazon (Reid, 2016). It has also been argued that the Howard Journal of Communications 5 policy has had a significant impact on the opportunities afforded to minority head coaching candidates (Duru, 2011; Madden & Ruther, 2010, Reid, 2016). One estimate suggests Black men have been 17% to 21% more likely to be hired for NFL head coaching positions after the implementation of the rule (DuBois, 2016). Of course, the Rooney Rule is also not without its detractors. On one hand, there have been arguments made in some circles against the rule’s necessity and fairness, suggesting the policy seeks unnecessary diversity and is dehumanizing to Black coaches as a result (Freind, 2013). On the other hand, the policy’s efficacy has also been called into question by both scholars and members of the popular press (Jones, 2020; Reid, 2018; Solow et al., 2011; Tynes, 2020; Williams, 2021; Young, 2020). For example, one study has found, when controlling for a coach’s age, experience, and performance, the Rooney Rule has not actually increased the amount of minority head coaches in the NFL (Solow et al., 2011). Critics in the popular press have also noted that team owners and executives have not taken the policy seriously. “[The Rooney Rule has] also … been circumvented and made a mockery of regularly by team owners who show no interest in deviating from their plan at the head coach or general manager positions” (Jones, 2020). The most obvious way for teams to skirt the rule has been to interview the requisite number of minority candidates—until 2020, just one—before hiring the white coach the team’s decision makers had in mind all along. “Unfortunately for the NFL, the public perception is that sham interviews are integral to the league’s culture. Invariably each season, rumors have swirled that some teams interviewed African-American candidates only to comply with the rule,” (Reid, 2018, para. 12). “[Teams] check the box and hire who they wish. Minority coaching hopefuls and executives have been telling reporters on and off the record for years about the sham interviews they did or did not take part in” (Jones, 2020, para. 10). The outcomes of the two NFL head coach hiring cycles included in this study are a microcosm of the lukewarm impact the Rooney Rule has had on the league since its ratification. In 2020, five head coaching openings were filled by four white candidates (Joe Judge, Mike McCarthy, Kevin Stefanski, Matt Rhule) and one Latin-American man (Ron Rivera). In 2021, seven positions were filled by five white men (Arthur Smith, Brandon Staley, Nick Sirianni, Dan Campbell, Urban Meyer), one Lebanese-American man (Robert Saleh), and a mixed-race candidate (David Culley). While much media and scholarly attention has been given to the Rooney Rule and its (in)effectiveness, little research has been conducted on the media’s coverage of this topic. The current study attempts to measure NFL beat writers’ willingness to include racism and the Rooney Rule in its coverage of the league’s coaching searches. Research questions The overarching questions the proposed study asks: how often do sportswriters write about race and/or racism in NFL coaching searches and was there a significant increase in the amount of attention given from 2020 to 2021? To answer these, three research questions were posed: 6 G. HARRISON ET AL. RQ1: What is the relationship between the 2020 and 2021 NFL head coach hiring cycles and mentions of race in their written media coverage? RQ2a: What is the relationship between the two hiring cycles and the rate at which written coverage of NFL head coaching hires discussed race? RQ2b: What is the relationship between the two hiring cycles and the rate at which written coverage of white NFL head coaching hires discussed race? RQ2a and RQ2b are similar to RQ1 but by accounting for the timing of the story (post-hire) and for the race of the coach who was hired, these lines of inquiry are better able to measure NFL beat writers’ attempts to problematize race in coaching search coverage. Specifically, RQ2a and RQ2b explore NFL beat writers’ willingness in both years to point out that the teams they covered may have hired an underqualified white coach and/or did not hire one of the league’s qualified minority candidates. White coaches predominate the NFL and are therefore the default representation of an NFL head coach. Additionally, not every white coach that is hired is underqualified or a “bad” hire. It can therefore be argued that pointing out and problematizing a white hire is riskier for a beat writer than calling attention to the fact that a team is interviewing minority candidates during the search. RQ2b accounts for the possibility, however unlikely, that a race-conscious beat writer might have been hesitant to define the three minority hires included in this study (Ron Rivera, Robert Saleh, and David Culley) by their ethnicities. Therefore, RQ2a and RQ2b both help reduce the potential for “noise” in our data. RQ3a: Of the three groups of articles included in this study—those from ESPN.com, The Athletic, and local metro daily newspapers—which group had the highest percentage of coaching search stories that included race? RQ3b: Of the three groups of articles included in this study, which group had the highest percentage of coaching hire stories that included race? These questions cut across both hiring cycles and, in essence, seek to explore the possibility that there is a type of news outlet that is more likely to disseminate narratives about race and racism in NFL coaching searches. Methodology To answer the questions above, a content analysis was conducted using web articles written during the two hiring cycles (N = 374) by reporters assigned to cover specific NFL teams. Sample To gather the sample of news articles analyzed for this study, each hiring team’s local metro daily newspaper was identified. Each team had one metro daily covering them, except for the New York Giants and Jets, both of which are covered by the New York Post and the New York Daily News. Both newspapers were included in this study. The Howard Journal of Communications 7 New York Times offered scant coverage of both teams and did not have beat writers assigned to either of them. The Times was therefore not included. Despite being national sports news outlets, The Athletic and ESPN.com also have journalists assigned to report news on specific NFL teams. Their articles were therefore included in this analysis as well. Next, the beat writers who were assigned by those news outlets to specifically cover the NFL teams with head coach openings in 2020 and 2021 were identified. Beat writers were the focus of the study not only to narrow the scope of the sample but to also include those sports journalists who are closest to the teams included in this study. A beat writer position is one of the most coveted positions in sports print journalism (Kian et al., 2018) and also requires the consistent cultivation of sources within (and access to) the team. In other words, beat writers have the most riding on what they report about these coaching searches. To determine which journalists were beat writers, the verbiage used on the news outlets’ websites or on the sportswriters’ social media accounts served as a guide. Every team had beat writers from at least two media outlets assigned to them. Most teams had a beat writer assigned to them by a local metro daily, ESPN.com, and The Athletic, though there were a few exceptions. ESPN.com did not have writers specifically assigned to the Atlanta Falcons (due to the untimely death of reporter Vaughn McClure) or the Los Angeles Chargers in 2021. In the same year, The Athletic did not have a beat writer assigned to the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Daily News did not have a reporter assigned specifically to the Jets after the highly-publicized firing of beat reporter Manish Mehta (Strauss, 2020). In these cases, articles were not collected from these news outlets. Additionally, some news outlets had more than one beat writer assigned to cover specific NFL teams. The Athletic had two reporters assigned to the Philadelphia Eagles in 2021, and the Carolina Panthers and the Washington Football Team in 2020. Among the local metro dailies, Cleveland’s Plain-Dealer employed two beat writers to cover the Browns during their coaching search in 2020 while the Philadelphia Inquirer had three beat reporters assigned to cover the Eagles during their 2021 search. To gather the data included in this study, articles were collected through MuckRack. com, a website that aggregates web links to every article for which a journalist has a byline. Each beat writer included in this study had a Muck Rack page with an aggregated list of articles. The timeframe of the articles included in this study started with the day after the final game of the previous season, typically a day when coaching searches (and their reporting in the news) begin in earnest. The timeframe ended on the day after each head coaching hire was introduced to the media via a press conference—in-person in 2020 and via video conferencing in 2021. Ending the timeframe one day after introductory press conferences allowed for the inclusion of follow-up coverage of those conferences and final commentary on each coaching search. Any article that discussed the coaching searches in part or in whole during the above timeframe was included in the study. Using these data collection methods, 154 articles were gathered from 2020 and 220 articles from 2021. The disparity in the number of articles collected for each year owes mostly to the fact that seven searches were conducted in 2021 and five were 8 G. HARRISON ET AL. held the previous year. Though both year’s articles feature different writers from different publications, both samples have two important contextual similarities. First, both sets of articles were written at a time when there were very few Black head coaches and during cycles in which Black men had little to no success in the hiring cycle. Going into the 2020 hiring cycle, only three Black head coaches had been retained (Miami’s Brian Flores, the Chargers’ Anthony Lynn, and Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin). No Black coaches were hired during that cycle. Going into the 2021 cycle, Tomlin and Flores were the only Black head coaches who had been retained and David Culley was the only Black head coach hired that year. Secondly, in both cycles, the presumptive top candidate was a Black man who was ultimately not hired, despite interviewing for the majority of openings: Eric Bieniemy, the offensive coordinator of the NFL’s Kansas City franchise. In 2020, Bieniemy was considered a top head coach candidate due to his role in the development of the league’s second-highest scoring offense and of the NFL’s Most Valuable Player in 2019, Patrick Mahomes (Dubow, 2020). In 2021, Bieniemy’s resume was nearly the same, save for the Super Bowl championship he had won with Kansas City after the first hiring cycle. After both hiring cycles, many members of the sports media believed Bieniemy was likely passed over because of his race (Farrar, 2021; Maske, 2021). Data analysis Two members of the research team were trained to code the articles. To answer RQ1, RQ3a and RQ3b for each article included in the study, the codebook asked coders to determine the publication type (The Athletic, ESPN.com, or a local newspaper), the hiring cycle in which the article was written (2020 or 2021), the NFL team about which the article was written, and whether or not there was a mention of race in the story. Since sportswriters generally refrain from writing about race in general and systemic racism specifically (Agyemang & Singer, 2014; Graber et al., 2020) the absence or presence of any mention of race was deemed to be an appropriate variable. A “mention” of race was operationalized broadly; anything from identifying a specific candidate’s race or ethnicity to discussing the Rooney Rule in broad terms was counted. Also, since some articles covered additional topics beyond coaching searches, coders were also instructed to code only the portions of news stories that specifically covered coaching searches. For RQ3a and RQ3b, the entirety of the sample was disaggregated by type of news outlet. 235 of the articles came from local news outlets, 63 came from The Athletic, and 76 were posted on ESPN.com. For RQ2a and RQ2b, the codebook also asked coders if the story was about one or more candidates or about a coach who had been identified as the chosen hire (candidate or hire). If the story was about a hire, coders were asked if the story made mention of the coach’s race and, if so, how that coach’s race was identified by the reporter (white or non-white). It was assumed that, in some instances, journalists would directly identify a hire’s race, especially if the hire was a person of color. Conversely, there might have been instances in which the hire’s race was implied, if the hired coach was white but the article noted minority coaches had been passed over for the job, for example. The Howard Journal of Communications 9 racial identifiers written in each story were used for coding purposes; any attempts by the research team to identify each coach’s race would have been inexact. Lastly, a candidate’s religious identity was not counted for any research question, as religion falls beyond the scope of both this study and the Rooney Rule. This is important given the New York Jets’ 2021 hire of Robert Saleh, the NFL’s first Muslim head coach. Although his hiring is noteworthy on these grounds, and though the two are often conflated, Islam is not a race. There are Muslims of many different races, including white. In Saleh’s case, stories about him were coded as mentioning his race only if a journalist noted his Lebanese ancestry or identified him as Asian but not if he was only identified as Muslim. When training was complete, 13.3% of the dataset was randomly selected and independently coded by both coders to establish the reliability of the actual sample (Riffe et al., 2019). Krippendorff ’s alpha was used to ensure intercoder reliability between the two coders (Krippendorff, 2004). Team and publication type both achieved a score of 1.0, hiring cycle reached .95, mention of the (hired) coach’s race reached .92, mention of race in the story overall reached .88, and candidate or hire reached .84. The hired coach’s race identity variable fell below the accepted Krippendorff ’s alpha minimum of .67 (Krippendorff, 2004) and its operationalization was clarified in the codebook. After further training, the team members independently coded a newly randomized 10% selection of the remaining sample, and Krippendorff ’s alpha of 1.0 was achieved for the coach’s race. Results RQ1 asked about the relationship between the two hiring cycles and the amount of written news stories that mentioned race. A chi-square analysis demonstrated a significant association between the two reporting cycles and mentions of race in beat coverage related to NFL head coaching searches, x2 (1, n = 374) = 4.43, p < .05. During the 2021 cycle, race was mentioned at over double the rate of the 2020 cycle, accounting for approximately 10% of all stories that year. In 2020, fewer than 4% of all stories mentioned race. RQ2a explored the relationship between the two cycles and the amount of news stories about coaching hires that mentioned race. Here, a chi-square analysis also showed a significant relationship between the two cycles and mentions of race in stories about hired coaches, x2 (1, n = 135) = 6.02, p < .05. Race was mentioned in only 3.3% of stories about hired head coaches during the 2020 NFL coaching hire cycle, whereas race was mentioned in 16.2% of the stories about hired coaches during the 2021 cycle. RQ2b sought to investigate the relationship between the two cycles and the amount of news stories that mentioned race in coverage of white NFL head coaching hires. However, as only five stories about white hires mentioned race, a meaningful statistical analysis could not be conducted. All five of these types of stories were written during the 2021 cycle. RQ3a and RQ3b both explored each publication type’s rate of mentioning race in their written coverage of both the NFL coaching searches overall and hired coaches. For RQ3a, 8.1% of the local metro dailies’ print coverage of NFL coaching searches mentioned race, 10 G. HARRISON ET AL. while ESPN.com mentioned race in 6.6% of its stories. The Athletic mentioned race in 4.8% of its articles. For RQ3b, 9.9% of the local metro dailies’ print coverage of NFL coaching hires mentioned race, while ESPN mentioned race in 11.4% of its stories about hired coaches. The Athletic mentioned race in 10.3% of its stories on hired coaches. Discussion The purpose of this study was to measure NFL beat writers’ willingness to include race and racial inequities in their written coverage of the NFL’s head coach hiring cycles, and to explore any possible changes in the amount of such coverage from 2020 to 2021. In this respect, this study’s results demonstrate that, while the vast majority of written coverage of the 2020 and 2021 NFL coaching searches was not framed to include race, beat writers were more willing to include race in 2021 than they were one year prior. The first research question compared the rate at which written coverage of both the 2021 and 2020 NFL hiring cycles mentioned race. While both rates were arguably small, NFL beat writers did mention race in their stories more than twice as often in 2021 than in 2020. This could have been due to, among other factors, an increase in the number of minority candidates teams interviewed in 2021. Indeed, the Rooney Rule required teams to interview at least two minority candidates in 2021, and more minority candidate interviews would present more opportunities for beat writers to mention the Rooney Rule, especially with most media outlets regularly providing updates on their teams’ searches as every interview was scheduled. Even when an increase in the number of requisite minority candidates is accounted for, as was the case with RQ2a and RQ2b, there was still a significant relationship between the hiring cycles and the number of stories that mentioned race. These two research questions focused solely on stories about NFL coaching hires and yet there was still a statistically significant increase in the rate of stories that mentioned race in 2021. It may seem on the surface that such an increase owes to the fact that two minority coaches (Robert Saleh and David Culley) were hired in 2021 and only one (Ron Rivera) was hired in 2020, presenting sportswriters more opportunities to write about race in coverage of 2021 hires. However, it is important to also note that all of the stories written about white head coaching hires that also mentioned race were written in 2021. These stories about white hires also accounted for the majority (55%) of the 2021 stories that were both written about hires and mentioned race. In other words, the 2021 increase in stories about hired coaches that mentioned race owed mostly to articles about white coaching hires. The analysis yielded no significant results for RQ2b, which investigated the possibility of a year over year increase in the rate of stories specifically about white hires that mentioned race. Nevertheless, there are two reasons why that may actually be this study’s most important result. First, as mentioned above, the five stories about white hires that also mention race (again, all written in 2021) contextualize the increased mentions of race in 2021 stories about hires and in all 2021 stories across the board. That is, sportswriters were not just writing about minority candidates who had scheduled interviews with their teams in 2021, or about the two minority coaches who were Howard Journal of Communications 11 hired that year. Beat writers for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Detroit Free Press, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Athletic (covering the Philadelphia Eagles) all explicitly questioned—or at least called attention to—the fact that their teams passed on qualified minority candidates or hired white candidates with subpar credentials. Bo Wulf, who covered the Eagles for The Athletic wrote, “my first reaction [to the hiring of Nick Sirianni] is about how much lower the barriers to entry are for white coaches in a league predominantly filled with Black players” (Wulf et al., 2021a, para. 12). In an article published after Sirianni’s introductory press conference, Wulf added that, had he been able to attend the news conference in person, he would have wanted to ask Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie “what responsibility does he bear for entering 23-plus seasons [as the team’s owner] without a full-time Black head coach, offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator or general manager?” (Wulf et al., 2021b, para. 23). Others who offered more traditional reporting (as opposed to Wulf ’s commentary) mentioned race as well. Dave Birkett (2021), covering the Lions for the Detroit Free Press wrote, “Others opined that a minority coach with [Dan] Campbell’s resume — he has never been a coordinator at any level — and unpolished public presence never would get the chance to be a head coach in the NFL” (para. 9). D. Orlando Ledbetter (2021) of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote a story solely devoted to the racial inequities of the NFL hiring process on the same day the Falcons introduced new coach Arthur Smith. In sum, NFL beat writers framed some of their coverage of white coaching hires in 2021 to address race and racism – to make racism “more noticeable, meaningful or memorable to audiences” (Entman, 1993, p. 53) – but did no such framing during this study’s timeframe in 2020. The other reason RQ2b is notable, despite its inability to provide any meaningful statistical analysis, is that it shows not only an across-the-board hesitancy to problematize race when white coaches are hired, but also a hesitancy that was far more pronounced in 2020 than in 2021. As written above, not every white hire is “bad” or underqualified but the fact that NFL beat writers only wrote about race in the coverage of three of the nine white coaches hired across both years suggests that sportswriters may have been hesitant—albeit less so in 2021—to call attention to their teams’ complicity in the NFL’s head coaching diversity crisis. Although more sportswriters did this in 2021, there were still untapped opportunities to do so. One such opportunity was that of Jacksonville’s hiring of Urban Meyer, a former collegiate football coach with no NFL experience who ostensibly left his previous two jobs (Ohio State and Florida) for health reasons but also left those jobs amid questions about his integrity and his (in)ability to control his team’s behavior off the field (Hayes, 2012; Russo, 2018). Although Meyer came to the NFL with a history of success at the college level—he won three national collegiate championships—it would have been fair for the media to wonder if a Black coach with Meyer’s history of questionable ethics would have been hired. Such questions concerning Meyer’s character would have been especially fair given Eric Bienemy’s past run-ins with the law, which mostly occurred while he was in college, in the 1980s and 1990s. Bieniemy’s legal issues have been raised by the media as a possible barrier to his being hired for a head coaching job, despite his track record as a championship-winning assistant coach (Farrar, 2021). 12 G. HARRISON ET AL. However, with respect to Meyer, no such points were raised by the selected NFL beat writers during this study’s timeframe. RQ3a and RQ3b, which focused on the three types of publications included in this study, showed that local newspapers mentioned race more often in their overall coaching search coverage than did ESPN.com or even The Athletic. In coverage of white hires, ESPN.com mentioned race most often. On one hand, that local newspapers did more of the heavy lifting in the overall coverage of coaching searches is mildly surprising, given that their reporters are professionally closer to the teams they cover and therefore may have more to lose by including race in their written coverage. On the other hand, this finding is not completely surprising since local beat writers are tasked with producing more written content than their peers at ESPN.com and The Athletic. This means journalists at local papers need to find more to report, which provides more opportunities to report and write about race. ESPN.com mentioning race most often in coverage of hired coaches is arguably most surprising, given its broadcast partnership with the NFL. Such a relationship would presumably make a media outlet hesitant to paint its partner, and any of its franchises, in an unfavorable light. Then again, ESPN.com has been a leader in hiring diverse editorial staff (Lapchick et al., 2021), so its writers were likely more cognizant of racial inequities while reporting coaching searches. Although this study found an increase in NFL beat writers’ willingness to discuss race in 2021, it is important to read these results within its limitations. For example, this study’s time frame did not include all relevant articles. The Charlotte Observer’s Alaina Getzenberg (2020), for example, wrote a story about the Rooney Rule five days after the Panthers’ Matt Rhule was introduced to the public—and thus falling beyond this study’s timeframe. In addition, NFL beat writers devote a great deal of attention to social media and often provide commentary on Twitter that they may not incorporate into their publications. Researchers may therefore want to examine these journalists’ social media posts in future studies. Other factors this study could not account for include each city’s demographics. For example, it is well-known that Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta have large Black populations. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that their teams’ beat writers were willing to write about race when reporting about white head coaching hires in 2021. This limitation is mitigated, however, by the fact that Cleveland, New York City, and Los Angeles all have large Black or BIPOC populations and none of their beat writers mentioned race when reporting about their white hires in 2020 and 2021. Additionally, this study does not account for each publication’s political leanings. While The Athletic and ESPN.com are largely viewed as apolitical, the New York Post is widely known as a conservative publication; it is therefore not surprising that the Post did not mention race even once while covering the Jets’ hiring of Robert Saleh. Conclusion If media frames make certain aspects of news events “more noticeable, meaningful or memorable to audiences” (Entman, 1993, p. 53), then this study’s findings demonstrate that NFL beat writers covering head coaching searches are statistically unlikely to Howard Journal of Communications 13 attempt to make race and racism noticeable, meaningful and memorable to readers. The relatively small number of articles written in both years that mentioned race or racism is not surprising, given Agyemang and Singer (2014) finding that the US sports media could stand to “concern [itself] more with issues of race and racism” (p. 74). In addition, it bears mentioning that sports are a capitalistic entertainment enterprise largely run by our culture’s most powerful group, wealthy white men. Thus, the sports media are not inherently primed to include potential racial injustices in their reporting. To both of these points, only 3.9% of all NFL coaching search articles written by beat writers in 2020 mentioned race, despite the fact that no Black head coaches were hired that year, and 9.6% of such articles were written in 2021. Then again, 2020 saw many individuals, corporations, and media outlets express commitments to fighting systemic racial injustice months after the NFL’s hiring cycle that year. Within that context, this study’s findings, that such articles more than doubled in 2021, may not be all that surprising, either. If, after the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, media outlets and individual members of the sports media have placed the onus on themselves to combat systemic racism, then it is reasonably incumbent upon NFL beat writers to intentionally deploy frames that shed light on racial inequities. NFL sportswriters did this more often in 2021. However, it remains to be seen if 2021’s bump in race-based framing was a coincidence or will become a sustained approach. It also remains to be seen if such framing leads to an increase in Black NFL head coaches. This study therefore offers a baseline of data and ample opportunities for future studies. Future quantitative research could take a longitudinal approach to analyzing written beat coverage of NFL hiring cycles and whether or not there is a long-term correlation with the number of Black NFL head coaches. Such a study could not only extend into the future, beyond 2021, but could also look further back than 2020 to see if the amount of coverage that mentioned race was relatively flat through 2020 or has long been volatile. Qualitative researchers could also interview NFL beat writers to better glean the extent to which such a shift may be intentional and what may have motivated it. References Agyemang, K. J. A., & Singer, J. N. (2014). Race in the present day: NBA employees sound off on race and racism. Journal of African American Studies, 18(1), 11–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s12111-013-9249-2 Ash, E., & Cranmer, G. A. (2020). Transcontextual effects of racialized sports media framing: Students’ off the field perceptions of student-athletes. Communication & Sport, 8(3), 389–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167479519830621 Beaton, A. (2021). Jon Gruden used racial trope to describe NFLPA Chief DeMaurice Smith in 2011 Email. 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(2019). “We want to see you sex it up and be slutty:” Post-feminism and sports media’s appearance double standard. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 36(2), 140–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2019.1566628 Harrison, G. (2021). On the sidelines: Gendered neoliberalism and the American female sportscaster. University of Nebraska Press. Hayes, M. (2012). From champs to chomped: How Urban Meyer broke Florida football. Sporting News. https://www.al.com/sports/2012/04/from_champs_to_chomped_how_urb.html. Hodler, M. [@MHodler]. (2021, October 11). In light of recent news, it is worth remembering that the NFL tweaked the Rooney Rule after "the spirit of [Tweet; thumbnail link to article]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/MHodler/status/1447735737693130756. Johnson, M. (2021). NFL insider casts doubt on Urban Meyer heading to USC. Yardbarker.com. https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/nfl_insider_casts_doubt_on_urban_meyer_heading_to_ usc/s1_12680_35903435. Jones, J. (2020). NFL’s Rooney Rule additions are a positive step forward, but more teeth needed - CBSSports.com. CBSSports.Com. https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfls-roone y-rule-additions-are-a-positive-step-forward-but-more-teeth-needed/ Kian, E., Schultz, B., Clavio, G., & Sheffer, M. L. (2018). Multimedia Sports Journalism. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/pro duct/multimedia-sp or t s-journalism-9780190635633?cc=us&lang=en& Krippendorff, K. (2004). Reliability in content analysis: Some common misconceptions and recommendations. Human Communication Research, 30(3), 411–433. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2004.tb00738.x 16 G. HARRISON ET AL. Lapchick, R. E., Bowman, D., Ewing, S., Forbes, A. J., Green, A., Jackson, B., Johnson-Schmeltzer, B., Middleton, T., & Richardson, K. (2021). 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The Athletic. https://theathletic.com/2354804/2021/01/29/nick-siriann i-philadelphia-eagles-head-coach-introductory-press-conference/. Young, J. (2020). The NFL has a new proposal to fix the Rooney Rule but it already faces challenges. CNBC.Com. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/18/nfl-minority-coach-hirin g-proposal-faces-challenges.html Young, S. M. (2021). Jaguars turned a blind eye toward the Rooney Rule and the ugly side of Urban Meyer’s coaching history. Yahoo! Sports. https://www.yahoo.com/now/what-roone y-rule-the-jaguars-found-the-right-white-guy-in-urban-meyer-who-has-famously-won-titles-whil e-condoning-violence-143003363.html. Racial Integration of Coaching Evidence From the NFL Journal of Sports Economics Volume 10 Number 2 April 2009 127-140 Ó 2009 Sage Publications 10.1177/1527002508324271 http://jse.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Brian L. Goff Western Kentucky University Robert D. Tollison Clemson University Using National Football League (NFL) data from 1987 to 2007, we examine the hiring of African American head coaches. Our results partly support an innovation explanation in that integration proceeded more rapidly in larger population centers. In contrast, we find only mixed and weak evidence that winning organizations proceeded first in hiring Black managers as in the case of using Black players. This difference in the hiring process of management versus labor may reflect a difference in the relative importance of endowment versus training. Our evidence also indicates that individual owner preferences matter along with changes in social pressures over time. As with player integration, it appears that a full generation is needed for the process to work itself out. Keywords: racial integration; innovation; discrimination I n the study of race-related issues using the concepts and tools of economics, investigators have focused most of their efforts on such issues as the theory of discrimination (Becker, 1957), the impact of civil rights laws on minority income (Heckman & Payner, 1989), discrimination in professional sports (Kahn, 1991), and related areas. The actual process by which individuals, firms, and other entities shifted from a segregated to an integrated state of operation has received far less attention from an economic perspective. One exception is Goff, McCormick, and Tollison (2002), who examined the process of racial integration in major league baseball (MLB) and college basketball, treating it much like other kinds of technical and nontechnical innovations. Just as in society at large, the integration of professional sports at the level of labor (players) took place well before integration at managerial (coaching) levels. For example, the integration of players in MLB dates from 1947 when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The first Black manager did not Authors’ Note: The authors thank Dennis Wilson, David Zimmer, two anonymous referees, and Leo Kahane for useful comments. The usual caveat applies. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robert D. Tollison, Department of Economics, Clemson University, Sirrine Hall, Clemson, SC 29634; e-mail: rtollis@clemson.edu. 127 128 Journal of Sports Economics Figure 1 Percentage of Black Coaches in NFL, 1987-2007 .24 .20 .16 .12 .08 .04 .00 88 90 92 94 96 98 00 02 04 06 Note: NFL = National Football League. appear in MLB until the Baltimore Orioles hired Frank Robinson in 1974. Professional football mirrors this history. The National Football League (NFL) integrated at the player level in 1946, but the first Black coach for NFL was not appointed until Art Shell signed with the Los Angeles Raiders in 1989.1 In this article, we explore several aspects of the relationship between race and coaching in the NFL. The Process of Managerial Integration Where does the process of manager integration in the NFL stand in a purely descriptive sense? Art Shell’s hiring by the Raiders in 1989 did not precipitate a landslide of hiring of Black coaches in the NFL. As Figure 1 shows, the expansion of African Americans into NFL coaching positions proceeded much like the integration of players in MLB, or, more generally, the diffusion of innovations of most any type. Through 1994, Shell and Dennis Green with the Minnesota Vikings were the only Black coaches to lead teams.2 Even through the 2000 season, only five different teams had used four different Black coaches for complete seasons. From 1989 to 1998, the percentage of teams with Black coaches ranged from 3% to 10%. Since the 2000 season, these percentages have increased above 10% reaching 22% starting in the 2006 season. Goff, Tollison / Racial Integration of Coaching 129 Beyond a basic empirical description of the integration process is the question of what drives the process? At a general level, the study of the process of racial integration draws from economic models of innovation and discrimination.3 The theoretical and empirical literature on innovation has identified market density (numbers of buyers and sellers), proximity to other innovators, local economic and demographic conditions (variables such as population, income, wealth, and education) along with personal characteristics of innovators as important influences.4 In addition to these factors, in a study of the integration of players in MLB, organizational or managerial competence, as measured by recent performance, positively influenced the likelihood of adopting the innovative use of personnel. According to the baseball data, better teams were more likely to innovate before poorerperforming teams (Goff et al., 2002). The thickness of markets as a driver of innovation deserves some special mention in sports markets. Labor (players) and management markets differ dramatically in sports in terms of quantity demanded and supplied. For example, the number of player positions demanded by the NFL is quite large with around 3,000 players starting the preseason, 1,600 players holding active roster positions at the outset of each season, and more players joining clubs throughout the season to fill in for injured players. Furthermore, 10%-20% of these player positions turn over from year to year. As for player supply, NFL teams draw from a pool of thousands of collegiate athletes. On the coaching side, the markets are quite thin with only 32 head coaching positions available in any NFL season with turnover in 10%-30% range from year to year. Before the 2006 season, 10 positions turned over. With coaching supply, most NFL head coaches come from the existing pool of 64 offensive and defensive coordinators. Of the current 32 head coaches in the NFL, 25 were coordinators before becoming head coaches. Of the remainder, three switched from collegiate head coaching positions and three from other assistant coaching levels in the NFL. Given these kinds of market differences, it is not surprising that player integration occurred before coaching integration in sports. It also makes the hiring of coaches subject to the more individualistic characteristics of the pool of available candidates as well as of those making hiring decisions, in particular, owners. Drawing on the literature cited above, we adapt these theoretical models and empirical findings to the coaching choice problem for a team. In our simple model, firms seek to maximize the utility of owners (i) driven by revenues for team j (Rj ) and owner characteristics/preferences (Oi ):5   Ui = Rj ; Oi : ð1Þ We assume a team’s revenue to be a function of winning (W) with the winning production function dependent on the skills of players (L) and coaches–managers (M) reflected in their marginal productivities, f L and f M . A simple parameterization of such a production relationship appears in equation (2): 130 Journal of Sports Economics Wj = W 0 + f L L + f M M: ð2Þ We include three potential sources of discrimination in the model. First, we specify aj as the degree of customer bias against Black managers in the market for team j. For simplicity, we treat this bias as reducing revenue and utility on a onefor-one basis. Second, the term, di , or Becker’s coefficient of discrimination, takes account of owner bias against Black coaches, and when owners prefer White coaches, it is di > 0. In contrast, if owners, either based on their own preferences or because of league pressure, actually favor Black coaches, then, di < 0: Third, if players for team j are biased against Black managers, then the marginal productivity of labor becomes f L − gj . This would be analogous to coworker discrimination. Alternatively, if players like having a Black manager, marginal productivity is increased by gj . If Black managers, because of underutilization, possess higher human capital, on average, than White managers, the marginal productivity of coaching will be increased by f M + k when a Black manager is hired. With these definitions, the choice problem for owners is to select Mj from the pool of candidates, {ak , bk }, indicating the choice between a White coach (a) and Black coach (b), to maximize

Ui = W 0 + f L  gj L + f M + k M − aj − di : ð4Þ The difference in first-order conditions by selecting (b) rather than (a) leads to equilibrium at k = gj + aj + di : ð5Þ In the presence of bias against Blacks by coworkers, customers, and owners, the right-hand side of equation (5) represents the marginal cost of hiring a Black manager and the left-hand side the marginal benefit. With a discrete choice the condition implies that hiring a Black manager would be optimal if the marginal contribution to winning (k) is greater than the sum of the biases. Anecdotal evidence from MLB as well as systematic evidence for players from MLB and college basketball in Goff et al. (2002) showed this kind of productivity advantage from using Black players during the period of diffusion of the innovation.6 This simple model lays out the basis for an empirical investigation of the influences on the hiring of Black head coaches. It indicates that variables that measure customer characteristics in a given market or owner–player characteristics for a given team that may be related to bias should be included in a model. One key question in the sports economics literature is the effect of past performance on the likelihood of racial integration and on whether bad teams or good teams are more likely to integrate first. In our model, the improvement in winning from hiring a Black coach is treated identically across all teams (k). With uncertainty this can be treated as the expected value for the pool of Black coaches. By itself it does not indicate why one team would hire a Black coach before another if all teams estimate the same value. Goff, Tollison / Racial Integration of Coaching 131 Team differences in estimates of k may rise, however, if customer bias (aj ) is lower when teams are losing. This connection between E[k] and aj provides a rationale for bad teams integrating earlier. In contrast, if past winning is a signal of better ownership and general manager decision making, owners of such teams may recognize the value of k before owners of other teams. Using player data, Goff et al. (2002) found evidence of this latter effect. It is not clear whether the same effect will hold or be as strong for coaches as for players. Empirical Models and Results Race Model Converting these theoretical concepts into an empirical model requires finding suitable variables to proxy for these influences. We begin with an empirical model for coach selection. In the following section, we estimate a performance model, treating race of coach as an endogenous variable. Our empirical specification for estimating the race of coach is summarized in equation (6) with descriptive statistics appearing in the appendix: RACEjt = a0 + a∗1 POPj + a∗2 INCOMEj + a∗3 PCT COLLEGEj + a∗4 PCTBLACKj + a∗5 OWNER TENUREjt + a∗7 WPCTjðt − 1Þ + ejt , ð6Þ where RACEjt = 1 if coach of team (j) at the start of the season is African American in year (t) and 0 otherwise, POPk = 2000 Census population for MSA of city in which team (j) plays, INCOMEk = 2000 per capita income for MSA of city in which team (j) plays, PCT COLLEGEk = 2000 percent of population with college degrees in city in which team (j) plays, PCT BLACKk = 2000 Census figure for percent of population that is African American in the city in which team (j) plays, OWNER TENUREjt = number of seasons in year (t) for the current owner of team (j), WPCTj(t − 1) = winning percentage for team j in year (t − 1).7 The RACE equation uses the market’s population, income, and race of area residents to account for customer characteristics. Owner characteristics are modeled by using owner tenure. The effects of past performance are accounted for by prior year winning percentage.8 In addition to specification, the modeling of RACE raises estimation issues. The typical way that such a binary choice is modeled in economic statistics is with a 132 Journal of Sports Economics Table 1 Logistic and Hazard Regressions for Likelihood of Black Head Coach, 1987-2007 Pop Income per cap Pct college Pct Black WPCT (t−1) Owner tenure Owner tenure2 Year Constant Pseudo R2 Log likelihood AIC % Correct Race = 0 Race = 1 Overall Logistic Regression Hazard Regression 0.23 (
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