The Detroit Lions interviewed Eric Bieniemy for their head-coach opening but instead hired Dan Campbell, who immediately talked of wanting his players to chew kneecaps.
The Philadelphia Eagles also interviewed Bieniemy but instead hired Nick Sirianni, who immediately talked of, well, he talked a lot about having … systems? Systems that will do things? Unclear.
Meanwhile, Bieniemy is interviewed before his second straight Super Bowl as the Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator, which means the second straight Super Bowl where he’s essentially asked why the heck he’s not a head coach somewhere.
And this is what he said:
“No, I did not ask to be the poster boy for this particular situation. The only thing that you want to do is be recognized for all the things that you have accomplished. And for whatever reason that has not happened. And that’s OK. Because the only thing I know is to just go back to work and continue chopping wood because that’s who Fern Handy Gibson raised, OK?”
“If you didn’t know who that was, that’s my mother. She raised me to make sure that I stay focused, and I just continue chopping wood.”
Bieniemy has interviewed 14 times with 13 teams (the Jets twice) over the last three seasons. Most of the jobs Bieniemy interviewed for went to objectively less qualified candidates, including several who had never been coordinators.
The NFL recently added incentives for teams to develop minority candidates, with little if any success in the hiring record changing. Bieniemy has unwittingly become the face of a problem he didn’t create, cause, or contribute to.
NFL history cannot include many men with better resumes (10-year playing career, 13 seasons as an NFL assistant including three as coordinator of league’s best offense), more public advocates (Andy Reid’s coaching tree is one of the most fruitful in league history; Patrick Mahomes constantly credits Bieniemy for his success) and more failed interviews.
Over and over and over, both publicly and privately, the response in football circles to Bieniemy’s continued employment as an assistant is sort of shrugging headshake without real answers, and a frustration that in 2021 we have just four of 32 minority head coaches in a league that’s 70% Black.
This is a particularly relevant topic before this Super Bowl. The Bucs have the most diverse staff in league history, with three Black coordinators and two women assistants.
“Hopefully more people are starting to see that it should be about opportunity,” Bucs offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich said. “It shouldn’t really be about skin color — it should be about if you’re capable of doing the job — or gender. It’s just a blessing to work for someone that has that type of perspective on teaching because that’s what we’re really talking about.”
This is often distilled to race, but it is not that simple. Four of the jobs he interviewed for went to minorities, and four others were with franchises that have had Black coaches.
So we’re left guessing. Is the plan he presents in how he’d run a program thin or sloppy? Does he clam up in interviews? Does he not know who his assistants would be? Are teams hesitant because of a string of arrests for relatively minor offenses, with the most recent and most concerning a DUI 20 years ago?
That last one is particularly strange, as if the NFL hasn’t forgiven much worse and more recent offenses for many. Urban Meyer enabled domestic violence at his last head coaching job at Ohio State, and before that ran a wild program at Florida that included drug problems and 30 arrests in six seasons. The Jaguars recently gave him control of their team and the first overall pick in this year’s draft.
