Affirmative Inaction?

Or, Millen Strikes Another Blow Against Lions Fans

Remember how pessimistic I was when the owners of the Detroit Lions allowed coach Marty Mornhinweg to be fired but allowed his executioner, team president and general manager Matt Millen, to stay in power? I knew Millen would find some way to screw up the hiring process, because Millen, to understate my feelings somewhat, knows how to talk about how he would do things a lot better than he knows about actually doing things. But not even I anticipated that, in the process of hiring Steve Mariucci to be the new head coach of the Lions, Millen could actually get himself castigated by Jesse Jackson!

The issue, of course, is not unique to the continuing mismanagement of the Detroit Lions but has been discussed all over the National Football League this offseason: There aren't enough minority (read: black) coaches in the NFL head coaching ranks. Jackson and others including NFL Players Association Executive Director Gene Upshaw and Jesse "If The Coach Ain't Black, You Must Give Back" Cochrane have demanded that an aggressive affirmative action process govern all new head coaching hires, with any team that doesn't follow the procedures being subject to some penalties, which Cochrane would no doubt like to define in the course of a lawsuit.

The Dan Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching positions, is in place right now, with no specific penalties attached. Five coaches have been hired this offseason. One is black. This makes a total of three black coaches heading up 32 teams. Given that black players make up about half of NFL players, something looks wrong.

Detroit was selected by the interested parties to be the poster child for violation of the affirmative action program, at least until San Francisco passed up previously successful black coach Dennis Green for previously mediocre white coach Dennis Erickson recently. Jackson, as noted in the link above, has called for investigations; Upshaw has similarly laid into the Lions. The Detroit city council even passed a resolution condemning the hiring of Mariucci. But, you say, quotas are illegal in this country; even if there's an affirmative action program, teams should be allowed to hire the person they feel is most qualified for the job. What's the problem?

The problem, essentially, is that everyone in the league knew Millen wanted to hire Mariucci. Millen wanted to hire Mariucci two years ago when he took over the Lions, but Mariucci was still employed with the San Francisco 49ers, so Millen had to sate his Mariucci lust with Mornhinweg, who was Mariucci's quarterbacks coach (and had no head coaching experience, anywhere, on any level. And it showed! Whatta dumbass). According to the Lions, they extended interview offers to five minority candidates, all of whom declined to come in on the grounds that Millen wanted to hire Mariucci and it was pretty pointless for anyone to pretend otherwise. These minority candidates showed a lot of sense.

Now, how this is different from what happened in Dallas earlier in the season when owner Jerry Jones hired Bill Parcells after a long and much-chronicled courtship is beyond me, except that Dallas is still supposedly America's Team and the Lions aren't real popular outside metropolitan Detroit. In any case, though, this is a tricky one.

No one is suggesting that Millen is a racist; if they were, I wouldn't believe them. He's an idiot, but not like that. Essentially, the criticism of Millen is not that he attempted to run a dog-and-pony show that ended up in him hiring the candidate he wanted; it's that he didn't run his dog-and-pony show convincingly. To make any real difference here, you have to tell Millen not to hire Steve Mariucci.

I'm not ready to go there. To tell a team that the one specific man they want to hire is an unacceptable candidate because he's white runs into the realm of unacceptable interference in hiring. To tell a team that they have to do a more convincing job pretending they don't want to hire a specific white guy… I'm not sure how a successful effort to pretend that Millen was thinking of hiring someone besides Steve Mariucci really would have enhanced anyone's dignity.

The Rooney Rule has been in place for one year. It hasn't had much effect, which is regrettable. But this is not the time for vague threats; this is the time, before anything else happens, to think more about what needs to be done. If it's a system that allows teams to hire white coaches if they pay certain penalties, just come out and do that. If it's a quota, just come out and institute it, and have fun defending the counter-lawsuits. The rule needs to be clear before you accuse someone of breaking it; this is a basic principle of the law. Regardless of the other provisions of the Rooney Rule, it's a safe bet that "run a convincing dog-and-pony show" isn't in there. If it is, then let's condemn Dallas first; by all accounts, Jones didn't even try to run the show before hiring Parcells. Besides, as noted earlier, the Dallas Cowboys are the football personification of Satan.

All of this, of course, doesn't address whether hiring Steve Mariucci was a good idea. Because Millen did the hiring, I'm pretty sure it wasn't, and that a candidate like Jets defensive coordinator Ted Cottrell or Bears defensive coordinator Greg Blache would have been better. It's going to be another tough half-century for Lions fans, I'm sure. We have enough problems with our football team without having to worry about whether its management is adequately ensuring that racial justice prevails in the National Football League.

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