RES IPSA LOQUITUR

 

               I’m not a lawyer, and I’ve never played one on TV, but along the way I’ve picked up some lawyer lingo, and one such phrase seems apt to describe a couple of current sports issues. It’s res ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for “the thing speaks for itself.”

               What that means is that, sometimes, the evidence supporting something is so obvious that no further proof of cause is necessary; for example, if an air-conditioner falls from a window and beans someone below, the fact itself proves negligence or bad intent on someone’s part. Ditto if a surgeon leaves a sponge in a patient.

The conclusion that’s obvious from any skim of the facts is that the National Football League has a dismal record when it comes to hiring black coaches. In a league in which about two thirds of the players are black, its 32 teams had exactly one black head coach—the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin-- in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s Super Bowl. A couple of recent hires—Lovie Smith by the Houston Texans and Michael McDaniel by the Miami Dolphins—increased that total to three (or to two and a half depending on how you’re counting, because McDaniel is biracial), but a deep deficit remains. That’s despite the pious rhetoric the league churns out over its minority-hiring policies.

 The issue was brought to the forefront by a lawsuit against the league and three of its teams by Brian Flores, a black man who was fired by the Dolphins at the end of last season despite having a respectable 24-25 won-lost record in his three years with the team, and 19-14 the last two. Flores further alleged that a couple of his interviews for a new job, with the New York Giants and Denver Broncos, were charades designed to put a good face on processes with foregone conclusions—the hiring of white head coaches.  

               The suit was especially notable because Flores filed it while still in the job market; not surprisingly, he remains unemployed. It stood out further for his assertion that during his first season with the Dolphins Stephen Ross, the team’s owner, offered him a $100,000 bonus for every game the team lost, with the aim of securing a better position in the NFL’s worst-is-first annual draft. That NFL (and other leagues’) teams sometimes “tank”—intentionally lose—is another res ipsa loquitur proposition, but the bribery angle was novel.

                 All of our Big Three major professional sports leagues give lip service to being color (and sex) blind in their hiring, but results vary widely. For example, the 30 teams of the National Basketball Association, about three-fourths of whose players are black, currently have 13 black head coaches, but number was in single digits a couple of years ago, while in Major League Baseball the current count is two (Dave Roberts and Dusty Baker), but it’s been higher.

 In none of those leagues, though, is the player-head coach ratio more out of whack than in the NFL. The league moved to remedy that in 2003 with the adoption of the so-called Rooney Rule, named for Steelers’ owner Dan Rooney, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for important posts, but by one published count only 15 of its 129 head-coaching vacancies since then have been filled by blacks. It’s probably also worth noting that the Texans’ recent promotion of the 63-year-old Smith is widely regarded as a stopgap until that woebegone organization can get the rest of its house in order.   

 Pro sports’ hiring practices are, no doubt, a complex matter, but one important part of it usually escapes notice despite lying on the surface: the dual nature of the leagues. They often are regarded as single entities, and they are for things like negotiating television and labor contracts, but in their day-to-day affairs they are many: 32 in the NFL. Further, each team save the community-owned Green Bay Packers is a fief run by a single person or family, a privately held corporation that doesn’t have to follow the disclosure and other rules publicly owned companies do.

             Owners typically are men who have made a lot of money elsewhere but yearn for the celebrity big-time sports ownership can bring. They’re in it for the money, of course, but they also treasure the locker room info and cred that comes with their unique positions. They may run their primary businesses like, uh, businesses, but for many their teams are personal playthings, to do with as they please. If their hires are based on man-to-man chemistry there’s no one, including NFL commish Roger Goodell, to say nay. As Carroll Rosenbloom, the former Los Angeles Rams’ owner once said, “I’ve given my children a great many things, but I kept the football team for myself.”  

                Flores’s charge of money for losses has been loudly denied by owner Ross, but the fact of tanking in sports is as beyond dispute as a surgeon’s misplaced sponge. It can be a tricky matter, because athletes are loath to take the field to lose, so teams get around that by stripping their rosters of saleable (i.e., competent) players and letting nature take its course. In baseball, the Washington Nationals’ management team of Stan Kasten and Mike Rizzo called that practice “The Plan” when they dumped the 2008, ’09 and ’10 seasons to man up for a later string of playoffs finishes and the 2019 World Series title. Theo Epstein repeated it in Chicago enroute to the Cubs’ drought-ending 2016 triumph. The Cincinnati Bengals dragged in at 2-14 in 2019, picked Joe Burrow No. 1 in the next draft, and wound up in the Super Bowl this season. 

                The race to the bottom became so obvious in the NBA that in 1985 the league introduced a draft-lottery system that makes it chancy for terrible teams to get plum draft choices; the latest of many versions makes the 14 teams that fail to make the playoffs eligible for one of the top-four picks. Establishing such a system in baseball is a topic in current labor-contract talks. In sports, the “what” often is nose-on-your-face apparent, but fixing it takes more doing than you might think.