King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy are the first two black head coaches in Super Bowl history. Shoud we make a big deal of that?

Read more: Sports, Racial Issues, Super Bowl, Race, Football, NFL, King Kaufman, Sports Daily

Jan. 24, 2007 | I'm having trouble figuring out what to make of the biggest story of Super Bowl Hype Week I, the skin color of the two head coaches.

As you may have heard upon sticking your head out of your bunker, Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts and Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears are the first black head coaches in the XLI-annorum history of the Super Bowl.

On the one hand, this is a nice thing. It's always good to see a barrier broken down, a first achieved, a shameful "never" erased. On the other hand, too much hurraying over this feels condescending to me. It feels like we're all saying, "Hey, look! Black guys can coach their team to the Super Bowl too!"

There are going to be more than two hands here.

It's undeniably noteworthy that both head coaching slots in the big game are filled by black men this year, after exactly zero of the previous 80 had been. Smith was quoted last week, when a matchup with his friend and mentor was only a possibility, saying, "I hope for a day when it is unnoticed. But that day isn't here."

Well, of course not. The first time always gets noticed. But that day may never come. There will always be someone around to say, "Hey, look, we're not talking about race!" And then we'll be talking about race. And someone else -- maybe me -- will say, "Well, we should be talking about race."

We should be. There has been significant progress in the NFL in coaching diversity. There were no black head coaches in the modern NFL until the Los Angeles Raiders hired Art Shell in the ridiculously late and recent year 1989, but six teams have black head coaches at the moment.

Still, we're not living in a colorless world. There are only three black general managers, and the New York Giants' new G.M., Jerry Reese, is only the second black nonplayer to ever hold that title. (Two other African-Americans, including nonplayer Rod Graves in Arizona, have similar jobs but are called vice presidents.) Lovie Smith, only in his third year at the helm, had to wait an uncomfortably long time as a highly respected assistant before getting his first crack at age 46.

In just the past few years, we've had cases of teams making hires that looked like "Let's hire the white guy." Mike Tomlin, hired Sunday by the Pittsburgh Steelers, is only the 11th black head coach in NFL history, counting Terry Robiskie, who was only an interim coach.

But were there really any non-wingnuts around who needed the Bears and Colts to win Sunday to prove that black guys really can coach teams to the Super Bowl? Come on.

One of the ways people are approaching this story is to say we should be focusing on Smith and Dungy as good coaches and fine men, not as blacks who crossed some barrier.

That's fine as far as it goes, but I'm not comfortable with that either. Because that sounds like the first step on the road to saying, "Why does everything always have to be about race"? And have you ever noticed that if someone says that, there's an almost 100 percent chance the speaker is white?

Next page: A better sign of racial progress