On Sunday evening, NFL fans watched the Carolina Panthers, led by head coach Frank Reich, fall to 1-7 after a grinding beat down by the Colts defense.
As the Panthers wilted away, all I could think about was the Panthers’ former interim head coach, Steve Wilks.
in 2022, the Panthers started 1-4 before Rhule was finally fired and Wilks was named interim head coach.
Normally, interim head coaches keep the ship afloat while ownership searches for a new head coach.
But Wilks did more than steady the ship.
Under his guise, the Panthers went 6-6 and finished the season 7-10, almost winning the NFC South and a playoff birth. It was an incredible feat by Wilks, who deserved better after the way Arizona treated him after only one season in 2018, a season in which the team was essentially talentless after horrible draft and roster decisions.
Arizona’s mistreatment of Wilks exemplified the trend of Black coaches being passed over or being hired as “clean-up” men by teams, where excuses such as “didn’t interview well” haunted Black coaches like “poor Wondelich test scores” hampered Black quarterbacks.
As I wrote in this story on Black NFL coaches last year, in 2006, three years after the Rooney Rule was instituted, “the league seemed to be heading in the right direction. There were seven Black head coaches, four more than three years prior. After a few years of fluctuations, that number reached seven again in 2017. These were hopeful signs of things to come.”
Unfortunately, things soured quickly.
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