The lions were fined 200 thousand dollars for not interviewing a black candidate for their head coaching job. Whats wrong with that? Are there businesses that only interview black candidates? You bet your ass there are. The Lions probably fired their head coach knowing exactly who they wanted to hire. So whats wrong with that?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,92951,00.html
It’s fine to not interview a white guy so you can interview a black guy, though. wtf
Like the article said, no one wants to be a token interview. Quotas suck.
Exactly, why should the Lions have to interview black coaches if they were looking at only one guy to fill the spot. You’re right Jared, none of the black coaches wanted to be the token interview for a job they knew they weren’t going to get.
Johnny Cochran needs to chill out.
I hope the Lions appeal,
and Barry Sanders comes back, and they change their uniforms, and the form a good defensive line…
Sorry, I’m one of those discruntled fans…
Quotas are crazy,this is a form of pc that has no business in the sports world.
It should always be about best man for the job,not best white/black candidate.
I think it is getting a little ridiculous now days with the lawsuits. Like Zippy said, it should be the best man for the job. You think they would make quotas for the amount of white players in the NFL, hell no. The owners should be allowed to hire who they want. Let Johnny Cochran buy a team than he can hire who he wants.
Zippy, dont say that. You will be accused of being conservative.
No fear, Zippy. I’m pretty liberal and I don’t like quotas either. If they had hired some scrub white college assitant coach just to avoid hiring a more qualified black guy, I’d have a problem. But Millen hired Mooch for chrissakes.
Yeah, it’s a joke. Quotas (much like unions) had their time and place, and nowadays are only useful in a few areas.
This sort of crap has been going on in job markets for some time. I recall at my former job with a large utility company, we had this garbage and it was a big time waste of money. Every time a job slot opened up they were required to “post” it and then had to sort through a big pile of apps and interview a “varied” grouping before they could fill it. Even though about 75% of the time the people doing the hiring already had someone in mind, they still had to do this whole big waste of money process (all ok’d through HR of course who verified the “variety” of the applicants).
The thing that really sucked was in times like the lions had. Some jobs people just KNEW there was already a choice made before it was posted, so people wouldn’t bother applying. Then, the boss couldn’t hire that one person (unless they were a minority of some sort, be it female or non white healthy male) until some other’s actually applied. They had roughly a 3 month wait on this, and the boss would sometimes just ask some of their friends to apply just to fill the HR quota. Total waste.
Antiliberal - I used to work for a utility company as well, and we had the same bullshit there. The funny thing was that I was working for a minority that showed a decided favoritism to other minorities of his background. What can you do, you know? If you point out the racism, then you’ll be the one branded as the racist.
As far as there being few black coaches in the NFL, I agree that that’s an image problem, and that’s all the NFL gives a damn about, so they’ll keep slinging out these ridiculous fines until they’re seen as a PC organization.
no, I am not a niner fan, just for the record. Who of any color race, gender, height, width, volume, hair color, scent, ear size, is more qualified than Mooch?
i agree 100% that it should be about the best man for the job regardless of race.
but you have to admit that the ratio of black coaches to black players in the nfl and especially in college is a joke.
im not a big fan of quaotas or affirmative action, but i do think that we need to have something in place to get minorities a chance at a job that they normally wouldnt get because of a biased business owner.
i dont know if it is really possible to fix such a problem through the law. but everyone here knows, that still in 2003 lots of minorities are not getting a fair shake.
People don’t consider the reasons why there aren’t as many black coaches. You don’t just decide, “Hey, I wanna be an NFL coach” and do it. You generally have to work at it for awhile and make the decision at a younger age. So the guys coaching now were thinking about coaching awhile back, be it 5, 10, or 20 years ago. The climate was different, and more so the farther back you go. I don’t think there were as many black players that thought they had a shot at coaching back then, thus not enough black coaches of NFL head coaching age.
Good explanation, Jared NFS. The only thing is these people making the lawsuits will never think of it this way.
Jared is right. NFL head coaching jobs aren’t something you just walk into off the street. Most likely these are guys who have put in the time to ascend to that role. And then the better ones stay there for years and just move around among the league, and new ones keep coming up from secondary coaching levels and either make it or fail.
Jared: Yes we had a very similar situation at the power company. Since the outside workers tended to be guys, the office jobs were slanted heavily towards females. So about 80% of all mgmnt in office was female, and if you were a minority female you had it in the bag. Essentially any minority female with half a brain could rise up the chain a few levels higher than the initial peon in about 1/4 the time that a normal non quota filling worker could. Then they could stack all their tagalong buddies underneath them in supporting mgmnt roles, and just move about the political structure in groups like that.
I must say though that none of the bosses I had seemed biased towards race, but they were highly preferential towards their friends who tended to be the same race.
The really odd thing was the office had a very very small amount of minority males, and anyone they did have was also used in the token quota roles. Not counting hmong’s though, for some reason they never posted for higher jobs than the first 2 starting levels.
I just recall some rather funny stuff they did with a couple of black guys. They were the only black guys in the office, so when it came time for various pictures of “faces of the power company” and so on for literature, they were always in the pictures. Funniest part about that was one of them was the biggest slacker on earth, his working stats were horrible, yet he looked good so they used him as the main face on newspaper ads and so on.
The other one was pretty smart, and was able to parlay his token status to move himself around into jobs that he would have never gotten without his status. Like the higher end sales jobs, which were known as cakewalks (it’s a captive market for crying out loud).
Anyway, it’s sad. That sort of activity really spoils the workplace and makes it sour for people. I never had intent to stay there forever so it wasn’t that bad for me, but some people were just dreading the thought of sitting in dead end job for 30 years. And others were merely getting by in hope that one of their buds would be promoted and take them along for the ride.