This is a column by Morgan Campbell, who writes opinions for CBC Sports. For more information on CBC Opinion Sectionplease consult the FAQs.
By now, we all know how awful Cincinnati Bengals defensive end Joseph Ossai felt after the last-minute penalty kick that helped propel Kansas City to the Super Bowl.
His out-of-bounds push into the back of Patrick Mahomes helped Kansas City score a game-winning field goal in last Sunday’s AFC Championship game, and then Ossai sat on the bench crying. Later, a teammate named Germaine Pratt, stalking in the Bengals locker room, tore Ossai apart in a fit of frustration for which he allegedly apologize later.
And why, in 2023, with companies spend a lot of money on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiativesand the NFL still painting phrases like “End Racism” on the end zone turf, does a Black-on-Black quarterback game even matter?
Good question if you belong to the generation that grew up with black quarterbacks, a handful of black head coaches and even a black American president. You might think we are living in the post-racial future that Barack Obama’s presidency was supposed to portend.
It’s also fair that CFL fans with long memories wonder why we should be celebrating two black QBs in a title game at this point in professional sports history. I have a vague memory of Condredge Holloway and the Argos facing Roy Dewalt and the BC Lions in the 1983 Gray Cup. I especially remember my parents shouting at the TV and slapping hands when the Argos won. But the first Gray Cup game featuring two black quarterbacks came in 1981, when Warren Moon’s Edmonton Eskimos defeated JC Watts and the Ottawa Rough Riders.
Some of you are old enough to have seen that one, and to point out, correctly, that the NFL doesn’t deserve a medal for crossing that particular finish line 42 years late.
Broader context
But the larger context in which Mahomes vs. Hurts takes place makes the matchup worth noting. In the NFL, black head coaches still face an uphill struggle to get hired and stay on the job. Beyond the league, right-wing media figures and lawmakers have launched a full frontal assault on black history.
Last year, Michele Tafoya quit his job as a sideline reporter on NBC football shows to campaign against the teaching of critical race theory. And last month, Governor Ron DeSantis banned high schools from teaching advanced placement. African American Studies in Florida – a state that produces a disproportionate number of professional football players, many of whom are black.
We should therefore celebrate Mahomes against Hurts because their presence in the same Super Bowl represents progress despite stubborn systemic barriers between black people and leadership positions in the NFL. Or because each new effort to remove racism from the history books reminds us how important it is to commemorate and honor barrier-breakers like Mahomes and Hurts.
And because their couple is the culmination of the exploits of previous generations — of re-entry into the NFL in 1946, to Doug Williams’ victory in the Super Bowl in 1988, to the meeting of Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith in 2006, the only confrontation between all-black Super Bowl coaches. A surprising development given how few black head coaches are hired, but understandable considering how black coaches have to push themselves to stay employed.
Steve Wilks, who is black, is the latest coach to land on the business side what looks like a racial double standard. After the Carolina Panthers fired head coach Matt Rhule, Wilks took over on an interim basis, going 6-6 with a bare roster. When Carolina hired a permanent head coach, they chose Frank Reich, a white coach fresh off a 3-5-1 start and midseason dismissal from the Indianapolis Colts.
Progress in the NFL is both visible and difficult to achieve, so taking Mahomes-Hurts as a given ignores the fascinating lessons about race relations that the history of professional football can teach, and it risks taking all those wins for granted. acquired.
It’s worth remembering how odd a two-Black QB Super Bowl would have seemed in 1981, when Moon and Watts met in the Gray Cup. Moon, of course, was a Rose Bowl MVP quarterback at the University of Washington who started his pro career in Canada because NFL teams wanted to make him a tight end. Watts was a similarly decorated quarterback at the University of Oklahoma who auditioned for multiple positions — none of them — after the New York Jets drafted him.
Nine years ago, Chuck Ealey had a similar story. He went undefeated as a high school quarterback at Portsmouth, Ohio, and at the University of Toledo. Going into the 1972 draft, his agent advised teams to leave him alone if they weren’t planning to play him at quarterback.
They left him alone.
Later that year, he became the first black quarterback to win a Gray Cup.
Does any of these mean that the CFL has always been more socially progressive than the NFL?
Hard to say. The two leagues were integrated in 1946, and as James R. Wallen points out in his book underground gridthe CFL’s first cohort of black players also tackled racism in Canada.
But on the field, CFL teams rolled out early versions of what we now recognize as wide-range offenses and coveted mobile quarterbacks, with arms strong enough to get around the wide side of vast football fields. from Canada. If you found a quarterback with those tools, you tried to sign him, even if he was black and it was in the 1970s or early 80s. The Gray Cup featured two black starters under center each year from 1981 to 1983.
As a young football fan, I saw the CFL as a league that treated black quarterbacks as equals, instead of classifying black athletes as wide receivers and cornerbacks. Now, with history and perspective, we can also see the CFL as the beneficiary of the NFL’s bias against black quarterbacks. Take any black quarterback in the NFL right now — Mahomes, Hurts, Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray, whatever — put him in a time machine and send him back to 1980, and he will likely start his professional career in one of two places: In the background, like Doug Williams and Vince Evansor in Canada, like Moon.
With that story in mind, we can see next Sunday’s game as the end result of the slow, still ongoing erosion of the stereotype that black men can’t lead professional soccer teams. It was never a passive process.
It is the product of a long series of hard-earned achievements.
On both sides of the border.