When Notre Dame took the field against Penn State on Jan. 9, in the College Football Playoff semifinal, the coaching matchup between Marcus Freeman and James Franklin meant that, for the first time in college football history, the FBS championship was guaranteed to feature a Black head coach. It was as meaningful as it was stunning, given that the NFL’s first Black Super Bowl–winning head coach, Tony Dungy, accomplished that feat nearly two decades earlier.
Dungy, to this day, maintains an influential presence in the coaching and football world. Whether it’s as an analyst for NBC, as an informal adviser to countless coaches and players alike, as a parent (Dungy and his wife, Lauren, with three biological kids, adopted eight children and have fostered 100 more, which means a life full of practices at multiple levels) or as a mentor and author of two New York Times best-selling books, the 69-year-old is just as busy now as he was when he was the head coach of the Buccaneers and the Colts.
Sports Illustrated: Because coaching is innate within you, after you retired, when was the last time you considered coming back?
Tony Dungy: I was talking to Martin Mayhew when he was general manager of the Lions, recommending Jim Caldwell [back in 2014]. So we’re going back and forth and he’s listening about Jim and then he says, “Well, I just have to ask you one thing for the Ford family—would you consider this?” I grew up in the Detroit area, the Lions were my dad’s favorite team, and I said, “Martin, if my dad was still alive, you probably would have me.” That’s the closest I got to it. Usually people would call and I’d just even dismiss it without even thinking about it. That one I had to think about a little bit.
SI: Dan Campbell changed everything for that franchise. Is there another Dan Campbell out there?
TD: I think there’s some people. I’ve really been impressed with Brian Flores and what he’s done in Minnesota, and I think he’s a leader. He’s a guy who has head coaching experience, and what he’s done with that defense and the way his players talk about him, he’s a guy I would definitely look at.
SI: You became the first Black head coach to win a Super Bowl back in 2007. We had our first Black coach vying for that chance in the College Football Playoff in 2025. What do you make of that?
TD: It took me back to my buddy Tyrone Willingham. Tyrone was at Stanford and doing very well, and he knew the Stanford way of doing things. He went to Notre Dame and I asked him, “Tyrone, why would you leave a place where you’re so comfortable and you’ve got it going so well?” And he said, “Well, at Notre Dame I would have a chance to win a national championship, and I think we need that.” He took a chance; it didn’t work out, but that was his thought process. That was what, 15, 18 years ago? And it hasn’t really happened. It hasn’t germinated. I remember when James Franklin left Vanderbilt and went to Penn State, and I thought, Same thing. To me, that’s the neat thing about this. When you start seeing guys get opportunities at schools where you have a chance to ring the bell, that’s going to be a whole different perspective now.
SI: What are we getting wrong about hiring coaches now? The Patriots flew through their process, having fired Jerod Mayo after just one season, and hired Mike Vrabel in a matter of days. There were some teams that interviewed more than a dozen candidates.
TD: People are thinking outside the box a little more, but I look at some of these big searches as the wrong way to do it. I grew up in the Pittsburgh system. Dan Rooney had a philosophy. A lot of these owners, they really don’t know what they’re looking for, so they are just searching and trying to turn over every stone. Here’s what Dan Rooney said: “I want a young coach because I don’t want to do this every five or six years, so I want somebody in their 30s that’s going to be here for 20 years. We’re a cold-weather, blue-collar city, so I want defense. That’s what we’re going to hang our hat on. And I want somebody who’s a great teacher and a great communicator.” So he could narrow things down right away. And in 1969, he comes up with unknown Chuck Noll. And then in 1992, he comes up with little-known Bill Cowher, and then in 2007 he comes up with little-known Mike Tomlin. Well, he knew what he was looking for. He didn’t have to interview 500 people.
I think that’s what’s missing with some of these people. They’re not sure what they’re looking for. So they better talk to everybody that’s hot. They better talk to every candidate that is under the rug. Figure out what you want—that’s what I always ask guys when they talk to me, owners, general managers: Do you want young? Do you want experience? Do you want offense? Do you want defense? Tell me what you’re looking for and then I can give you three or four names of who might be good. When you just say, “Well, tell me who’s good, tell me who’s dynamic,” that takes in a lot of territory.
SI: Speaking of Tomlin, does it make you laugh that this guy makes the playoffs every year and everyone is in a rush to get rid of him?
TD: I just shake my head at that. And then I’m upset at some of these other teams. I think the New England Patriots made a great hire with Mike Vrabel, but the process is so messed up. To hire Jerod Mayo and only give him one year and then say, “Well, I didn’t like the way it was going.” And then for the Raiders to do that with Antonio Pierce. That speaks to me of people that don’t know the process, don’t know what they’re doing, don’t learn from history. I played for Chuck Noll, who won four Super Bowls. He was 1–13 his first year. I played for Bill Walsh in his first year in San Francisco. Joe Montana was our rookie backup quarterback. We won two games. O.K., that’s three more Super Bowls. Tom Landry won [zero] games his first year, so that’s nine Super Bowls with guys that won two games or less their first year. And so to say, “Well, we need more progress” or “I expected us to be better right away,” it doesn’t always go that way. I was 0–5 in my first year [with Tampa Bay] and the owners took me to lunch. I thought they were going to fire me. And they said, “No, we just want you to know this is the long-term process. We’re in it for the long haul. Don’t panic.” We ended up going 1–8 before we turned it around. But that thought process seems to be gone now.
SI: I talk to a lot of veteran head coaches who view this kind of impatience with inexperienced coaches as a symptom of the epidemic we’re seeing with clock mismanagement, timeout misuse, all of that. What about you?
TD: Yeah. And people learn and they grow and they get better, and that’s part of it. I was in the system for 15 years [before becoming a head coach] and I thought I knew everything. I’d worked for Dennis Green, for Marty [Schottenheimer], for Chuck Noll. I’m going to be ready to go. There’s nothing I need to know.
Well, the first day on the job, things start coming up. I’m in my office trying to hire my staff, I’m calling guys and the director of operations comes in and says, “Hey, coach, welcome. It’s good to have you here. I need to know today what hotels we want to stay at on the road and what airline we want to use as our commuter airline.” I don’t know. I don’t care. I never thought about that. “Well, we need to know.” Those are the kind of things that hit you that you’re not prepared for. And then, “Hey, I’ve got Player So-and-So, and he’s got this issue and he needs to come talk to you.” Well, I never had that before. I never talked to the offensive players, and now I’ve got to do all that. And so there’s a growing cycle of what has to happen, and there’s things that you can’t be prepared for because you haven’t dealt with them [before]. You’re going to learn how to deal with them and you’re going to get better at that, but it’s a process. And to think that in two games or six weeks, you can be perfect at it—you’re not going to be, and I think we have really bad expectations in that regard.
SI: Was the airline issue the weirdest first-time head coaching problem you faced?
TD: We’d had 13 straight losing seasons at Tampa before I took the job. One of the things I did, I called every veteran on the roster, introduced myself over the phone and said, “I want you to come in and see me, and I want to hear from you why we haven’t won since you’ve been here.” Well, there were a lot of things. “Hey, they took the Coke machine out of the locker room. We used to have free Cokes and now we don’t.” Or, “Yeah, we’re staying at these different hotels that are off the beaten path.” Well, I found out [former Bucs head coach Sam Wyche] didn’t want to be downtown with the distractions. It wasn’t that the owners were cheap and it wasn’t that they didn’t know what they’re doing. That’s what the coach wanted. So hey, that’s easy to fix. I went to the owners, they said, “You can stay wherever you want.” That was one thing that helped the players, but [while] learning those things, I’m thinking, “Hey, we just got to get the quarterback squared away.”
Culture and changing the culture and figuring out what the culture is—it was different. We had a building that was built in the 1970s for the original Bucs. It had 40 lockers for the players and nine lockers for the coaches. Well, now we had 53 guys on the team, and so we got 13 guys sharing lockers. We’ve got coaches sharing lockers. You don’t think you’re going to have to deal with that as the head coach. That’s not even on your radar. Well, how am I going to handle that? What’s going to happen? Herm Edwards is my assistant head coach. He took a closet for his office.
SI: Juxtapose that with what you’re seeing in college and NIL now. Millions of dollars. Constant transfers.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Tony Dungy and the State of the Black Head Coach.
