Too Dumb to Throw the Ball?

I'm a pretty big sports fan, and a follower of American Football in particular.

The NFL (National Football League) is celebrating its 100^th season with a lot of looking back, at great games, great plays and great players. And as the current season unfolds, the amazing success of black quarterbacks has me looking back, and observing gratefully that a racial barrier seems to finally have been overcome.

For most of the hundred years, including most of the Superbowl Era, which began in the mid 60’s, there were very few black quarterbacks in the sport. For those of you who aren’t fans, the quarterback is by far the most important member of a football team. He is the general of the offense. He controls the ball on every play, and by running with it, handing it off, or throwing it, manages the other ten players as they march down the field. It’s a complex and multi-faceted job, requiring the ability to quickly ‘read’ a defense, change the play at the last moment, make split-second decisions, and to demonstrate poise, judgement and leadership. And long after many Americans insisted that racism was no longer a part of the America’s character, you still hardly ever saw a black man leading a team from the quarterback position. And the reason – whispered, but known to everyone – was that blacks weren’t thought to be intelligent enough to manage the complexities of the position.

I won’t try to recount the long and varied history of the NFL in terms of racial inclusion. But a small number of blacks played in the league in the early decades, until the league segregated in the 30s. In the 40s it began to reintegrate, and by the time the NFL merged with the more integrated AFL in 1970, about 30% of the players were black. (as compared with about 10% of the nation’s population).

Russell Wilson & Patrick Mahomes

But black players were generally slotted into the speed positions, and only rarely did one make it into the league as QB, and when they did, almost always as a back-up. It’s said that though many black QBs excelled at the college level, they were often persuaded to change positions upon coming into the professional league. And there, even when they had success as QBs, it was usually credited to their athleticism and ‘instincts’ rather than their football knowledge and intelligence.

Warren Moon, who’d established his credentials in the Canadian Football League, was the first black QB to experience huge and sustained success when he came into the NFL in the 80’s as a starting QB and a star. Then Doug Williams led the Washington team to an impressive Superbowl victory in ’88. But despite these successes and the stardom of a few others over the years, like Randall Cunningham, Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick, the stigma persisted.

This state of affairs lasted right up to and through the presidency of Barack Obama. In a league in which more than 65% of the players were black in 2014, there were still only 7 or 8 starting black QBs on 32 teams. And very often, even these starting QBs were not highly regarded, sometimes credited mainly for their running ability, rather than as accomplished passers or capable team leaders.

And suddenly – seemingly, almost overnight – something has shifted. When you take a snapshot of the NFL today, you still find that only about one in three teams is led by a black quarterback. But the big change is in how they are regarded. Last year, began with a quartet of firmly established black QBs: Cam Newton, Dak Prescott, Deshaun Watson, and my favorite, Russell Wilson a sure bet to end up in the Hall of Fame, along with a few others fighting to establish themselves. Then, there was the sudden emergence of 2 more, Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes, both new players leading their teams for the first time, and immediately making them much more competitive. Mahomes went on win the year's Most Valuable Player award, going to a black QB for only the third time, following Newton in 2015 and Steve McNair in 2003.

And this development carried over into the current year. Currently, when you look at the QBR – a rating that takes into account all of the different elements of effectiveness – you find black QBs heading the list. In fact 4 of the top 5 on the list are black, and the one exception is replacing the injured Newton. Sports talk shows these days are for the first time regularly mentioning multiple black QBs - Mahomes, Prescott and Wilson - as leading candidates to win the award this year. 

And, these black QBs, instead of being denigrated for their generally more mobile and elusive styles of play, are now having the styles of their teams adjusted to suit them, rather than being constrained to play the more conservative style of decades past.

It’s a positive step, and one that I celebrate. It reflects a shift in thinking that is long overdue. It’s not the end of racial barriers in the league, by any means. There is still an extreme shortage of blacks in coaching, management and ownership positions, the obvious place for veterans of the sport. As in the society-at-large, there is still a tendency for people to want to say a problem has been dealt with when only the most egregious wrongs have been addressed.

And, if only one of the 32 teams would come to its senses and hire Colin Kaepernick, another very talented black QB who was essentially black-listed because he took a knee when the national anthem was played, in order to call attention to the killing of unarmed black men by police.