There was something else you may recall from 2013: the lack of minority hires. At the end of the 2012 season, there were 15 job openings for general managers and head coaches; none went to a minority candidate. The hiring process for GMs is much more opaque than it is for head coaches, but there was one main explanation given for the fact that all 8 head coaching hires were white: black coaches are disproportionately defensive coaches, and the league was shifting towards offense when it came to coaching hires because of the reasons stated above.
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Then, this year happened. There’s a decent chance you didn’t even notice. Yet again, there were seven new head coaches hired, but the composition was a mirror image of what happened just two years ago. John Fox3 is now in Chicago, Dan Quinn is in Atlanta, Rex Ryan was fired by the Jets but resurfaced in Buffalo, Todd Bowles is replacing Ryan in New York, Jim Tomsula is the man filling giant shoes in San Francisco, and Jack Del Rio is being given a second chance in Oakland.4 The lone offensive-minded hire: Gary Kubiak in Denver.
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When the NFL went 7/8 with offensive coaches in 2013, it was easy to say that that was the reason for the so-called whitewashing. Teams preferred offense over defense, not white over black. And, the Fritz Pollard Alliance and the NFL seemed to buy into this, as both groups noted that perhaps the attention should really be shifted towards who is hired as offensive coordinators: with the NFL obviously now an offensive league, the focus should be on having more black offensive coordinators to lead to more black head coaches.
But that idea wouldn’t have worked very well this year. There were not many great offensive coordinator candidates — Gase and Kubiak were perhaps the top choices, with men like Kyle Shanahan, Frank Reich, Josh McDaniels, Hue Jackson, and um, Darrell Bevell as other names floated for possible head coaching jobs. As a result, the story of 2015 was a return to the retread model: Ryan, Kubiak, Fox, and Del Rio were all previously fired, but had also taken teams to the playoffs. Quinn fit the obvious mold: the DC for the team with the number one scoring defense the past three years. Bowles was the unanimous choice as the best assistant coach in the NFL.5 That just leaves Tomsula, who was hired because… he was an in-house promotion that wouldn’t drive management crazy.