Marvin Lewis Is NOT A Fan of The NFL’s Minority Hiring Proposal, Compares It To ‘Jim Crow Laws’

TMZ Sports – While the proposal was tabled during the owners meetings on Tuesday, Lewis went off on the idea of giving teams an incentive to hire minorities in an interview with The Baltimore Sun.

“It was offensive, definitely offensive,” Lewis said. “It was like having Jim Crow laws.”

As for compensating teams with draft picks? Lewis isn’t happy with that, either.

“Draft picks are like gold. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. As a head coach, no one wants to be hired or put in that position.”

Owners DID vote to expand the Rooney Rule to require teams to interview at least 2 minority candidates when hiring new coaches … which Lewis says is a good thing.

“This will be a plus requiring more than one minority to be interviewed because it will cause them to take a deeper dive.”

The NFL’s proposal to change diversity hiring was pulled during the discussion and, for once, I actually have to defend the NFL here. They make a lot of mistakes with arbitrary suspensions. They had a real lack of attentiveness with getting ahead of concussion issues. They are very comfortable with their position as the #1 sports league and have a real aversion to risk.

But after getting skewered for years about the lack of minority representation, the NFL tried to make a drastic change that could yield real results and now they’re being compared to segregation? Listen to this ESPN interview with free agent linebacker Sam Acho:

It took a global pandemic to be able to see what corporate America & the #NFL look like..@FirstTake got my unfiltered truth on the Rooney Rule today. pic.twitter.com/NaPghWwu9t

— Sam Acho (@TheSamAcho) May 19, 2020

Less than a 4% chance you can have two black coaches face off in a Super Bowl. 17 years after the Rooney Rule, we’ve gone from two black coaches to three black coaches in the league. Those are jaw dropping numbers in a league where the majority of players, to the tune of around 80%, are black men. Eric Bieniemy is a former player and has led the Chiefs’ historic offense under an all-time great offensive mind in Andy Reid for two seasons. Byron Leftwich has had more “meh” results but you’re telling me that a guy like Kevin Stefanski or Joe Judge deserves a shot over Bieniemy? Or that Todd Bowles needed to get fired from a young team so that Adam Gase can reenact Steve Buscemi’s glare in press conferences?

I’m still inclined to defer to Marvin Lewis, one of the elder minority men of the NFL who’s had sustained success and mentored multiple others in similar spots over his decades in the league. And I understand the premise of some of the “affirmative action” type of pushback from some world views. But even with the paternalistic pat on the head that draft picks and other sweeteners may appear to be for hiring a minority candidate, it’s a plan that seems likely to create results. Results that haven’t been there in almost two decades of time as nepotism and cronyism dictate many of the hires.

Sometimes obvious inequities need drastic solutions. Preferably ones that don’t involve hiring Adam Gase.