Mike Vrabel’s deputizing his defensive line coach, Terrell Williams, as head coach for the preseason opener Friday isn’t going to change the startling inequality in the coaching business when it comes to opportunities for coaches of color, but it’s not insignificant, either.
Vrabel didn’t seem like someone who wanted to turn this into a Made By Goodell moment to garner attention (which is why, I suspect, he didn’t respond to a request to talk about it further). But the gesture is worth more than just a few lines at a press conference.
Williams will deal with the training staff, craft a message to the team and be the actual nerve center of the organization for a little more than 48 hours. But most importantly, he’ll be able to get in front of a camera. He’ll get talked about on a broadcast. During the dead air space that often fills the ungodly final minutes of a preseason game, announcers can tick off his résumé, which is impressive. Williams started coaching at a community college in Fort Scott, Kans. He grinded through outposts at North Carolina A&T, Youngstown State and Akron. Wherever he went, he coached talented future NFL players, such as Kawann Short, Mike Neal, Cliff Avril and Ryan Kerrigan. Here’s hoping that the announcers treat his rise to this moment with the same reverence that [insert rising offensive coordinator A] gets on every rendition of Monday Night Football.
George Walker IV/Tennessean.com/USA TODAY Network
The sad truth about the NFL’s coaching fraternity is that so many coaches at the top would prefer a kind of militaristic silo in which credit is bottlenecked into some theoretical greater good (indeed, the paranoia experienced by coaches voicing their credentials to reporters in fear of the Boss Man getting wind of it is real). This system then demonstrates to the players the values of a team above all else. The problem with a lack of pointing out individual talents and contributions among the coaching staff is that the coaches and, by association, the top coordinators, always end up getting the credit. A head coach doesn’t (regularly) point out that his wide receivers coach also handles the third-and-short installation segment on offense and that, maybe, his team is among the best in the league at that particular metric. He maybe doesn’t point out that his safeties coach is pulling a double shift accounting for all the contingencies ignored by a checked-out superior and that this person is the reason their unit is hanging on by a thread.
And so—as I’ve complained about before—we get a continuation of this clearly broken system in which the best positioned candidates get opportunities before the best overall candidates, leaving some coaches with great ideas and incredible skill sets to rot in one position room for the better part of three decades.
Coaches have handed over play-calling responsibilities during the preseason before, but Vrabel’s decision to pass off the entirety of head coaching duties for one week in the preseason (before a talked-about game that should heavily feature second-round draft pick Will Levis) should be something adopted by the league as a whole. Any coach who has made it to a second contract should, via that contract, be required to deputize and promote the coaches who put in all the hours but rarely get any of the credit (and who get a fraction of the media time given to coordinators who can use their weekly press sessions as a kind of brand and network-building opportunity). Imagine if we got a dozen or so people publicly blessed by the league’s best head coaches each year, and, perhaps, one or two more made their way into the pipeline as a result.
If the NFL is not going to fix the coaching inequality problem at its root cause (owners plucking from a safe and homogenous circle of brand archetypes they can brag about to their helicopter dealers) at least put more people on the stage. Again, this is not a solution, but it is an attempt at recognizing the weighted ceiling placed on certain coaches.
The Titans, whose own general manager, Ran Carthon, said that the team was deliberate and authentic about the way it used the league’s accelerator program to hire him, seem like they are approaching this the right way. Had it come from somewhere else, as some kind of public relations ploy or desperate effort to stave off some optics disaster, we would be rightfully suspicious. But this seems like it’s coming from a good place. The league and its coaches could use a little more of that now and again.
