New Miami Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel is known for his innovative approaches on offense, particularly in the run game and his ability to get success out of players — key attributes for a coach.
But the initial reason he gravitated toward football in the first place was because of a more human element of the game.
“Where you came from didn’t matter,” McDaniel said in a 2021 interview with NBC Sports. “What people thought of you to be, perceived you to be, didn’t matter. It was a melting pot, so to speak, from its core.”
Why that was so important stems from McDaniel’s background.
McDaniel is biracial — his father is Black, his mother white.
He came to the realization, according to the NBC Sports story, one day when he was visiting the grandmother on his father’s side of the family. As he was looking through pictures around the house, he noticed something.
“Hey, I’m the only fair-skinned person in all these picture frames,” McDaniel recollected.
“I can honestly say up to that point, I hadn’t noticed that I was different in two fields,” McDaniel continued. “I was different in that I was multiracial to the world. But even within my own family, I was different from them. I was just kind of a unicorn.”
In the NBC Sports interview, McDaniel said his background comes up on occasion and that he is open to discussing it with his players. He has been in the NFL for 15 years, starting as an intern with the Denver Broncos in 2005 and working his way up to offensive coordinator with the San Francisco 49ers in 2021 after three seasons as San Francisco’s run game coordinator. He had stops along the way with the Houston Texans, Washington, Cleveland Browns and Atlanta Falcons along the way.
“In all actuality,” McDaniel said, “it doesn’t matter what necessarily you are telling players. Whenever you’re ever telling personal stuff about yourself to them, you are invested in them by giving them a piece of yourself.”
But it wasn’t always enough. Twitter attacked the notion of McDaniel’s racial background upon the announcement that he was considered a minority hire and satisfies the NFL’s Rooney Rule. The 49ers receive receive a third-round compensatory pick in each of the next two drafts as a result of the Dolphins hiring McDaniel.
Former NFL wide receiver Andrew Hawkins, who played under McDaniel in 2014, tweeted and deleted a photo from McDaniel’s parents’ wedding as the subject matter intensified on social media.
But minority representation at the head coach and front office levels in the NFL have been severely lacking, to the point where Brian Flores, who the Dolphins fired this offseason, alleged in a lawsuit filed last week that there is widespread racial discrimination in the NFL’s hiring process.
There are only four other minority head coaches in the NFL in addition to McDaniel: The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, the Washington Commanders’ Ron Rivera, the New York Jets’ Robert Saleh and, most recently hired on Monday, the Houston Texans’ Lovie Smith.
There are also only five Black general managers in the league, including the Dolphins’ Chris Grier.
On Saturday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell sent a memo to all 32 NFL teams regarding diversity, equity and inclusion and said that “we must acknowledge that particularly with respect to head coaches the results have been unacceptable.”
