Commissioner Tagliabue
”Outside the Lines” With Bob Ley - 1/12/03

…One month later, commissioner Paul Tagliabue formed a committee to study the issue of minority hiring. This week, I spoke with the commissioner.

LEY - Give me an assessment of the NFL's performance in this area, of minority hiring of head coaches.

TAGLIABUE- Well, it's not the NFL's performance. It's the performance of 32 teams. It's the performance of 32 organizations. And overall, I think it's been quite good. It's an area where we need to make progress. We need to do better. But ultimately, it comes down to the fact that we're dealing with 32 jobs that are unique and a large pool of well-qualified people searching for those jobs.

LEY- The activists who brought this to public attention in October, Cy Mehri and Johnnie Cochran, had a statistical analysis that, by their numbers, seemed to show that African-American head coaches had greater success in their limited time in the league than white coaches. What did you make of just of their, not their conclusions, but the statistical numbers in that report?

TAGLIABUE- You know, it reminded me of what Mark Twain once said about statistics, "I think that there are lies, damn lies and statistics." The statistics aren't particularly reliable unless you do them in a comprehensive way. And over time, all NFL coaches are going to, you know, half the coaches are going to be winners and half the coaches are going to be losers, because half the games are won and half the games are lost. So the records are going to go to that mid point. So you can say Italian-American coaches or Polish-American coaches or African-American coaches have a better record than the mid point, that's because they're only part of the whole.

It's a statistical anomaly. So I don't attach much weight to statistical anomalies. We certainly have been impressed by Mr. Mehri, who's been the principal spokesman with our staff, in terms of his thoughtfulness and the care that he's brought to the analysis and to the dialogue. And so that certainly has been a positive in terms of who we have reached out to in this process.

LEY- Current policy, head coach, there's a vacancy, there must be at least one minority candidate interviewed. Assistant coaches and front office personnel, chances of them being brought under that policy.

TAGLIABUE- We talked about that within the diversity committee. I think that it's happening already with the assistant coaches.

LEY- Is it required?

TAGLIABUE- It's not required, but it's happening already.

LEY- As far as what happened in Dallas, Jerry Jones, how well did he adhere to the policy of calling Dennis Green on the phone, meeting for five hours with Bill Parcells?

TAGLIABUE- Well, Jerry was kind of caught in the switches, because the Parcells meeting took place shortly before, I think several days before our diversity committee was reporting its recommendations to the owners on a series of conference calls.

He did commit to interview minority candidates. He told me that he was going to talk to Dennis Green. They agreed on the telephonic interview. And I think everyone is satisfied that there was a bona fide interest there, that Jerry acted in good faith in a bona fide way here. For the future, we do not regard telephone interviews as a substitute for personal interviews.

LEY- There are two vacancies as you and I are talking right now. How are you going to judge at the end of the day when these hires are made, whether the policy was adhered to and whether progress was made?

TAGLIABUE- Well, I think we're already in a position to know that both the Bengals and the Jacksonville Jaguars have had serious interviews with minority candidates, that they are evaluating in depth a diverse pool of candidates. It's already clear to me that they've done what they committed to do, and they've done something that clubs increasingly were doing and all clubs have now committed to do.

LEY- To what extent do you believe there may be a reservoir among African-American assistants and people in football, a reservoir out there of anger or despair about this that may not even be on your radar scope?

TAGLIABUE- Well, I'm sure there's some anger, there's some frustration. But anger and frustration is not unique to minorities in the work place. We've had a big increase in assistants and coordinators in the last five or six years, and I think the pipeline for head coaches is there.