Keywords: football, NFL, sexism, gender diversity, racist, bigot, Giants, Redskins, Richard Lapchick, ESPN, Latinos, Asians, Blacks

The National Football League (NFL) is finally "getting it," right? In the past few weeks, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers fired Jon Gruden and promoted Raheem Morris--a Black man. Legendary coach Tony Dungy retired and was replaced by Jim Caldwell, another Black man. Mike Tomlin, the young and promising coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, is the third Black head coach in the Super Bowl.

Well, not quite.

The NFL has done an exceptional job of recruiting and retaining a high number of Black players. And thanks to the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one person from a traditionally underrepresented group for each coaching vacancy, the number of Black coaches has steadily increased. But despite such diversity efforts, the ranks of management still are held predominantly by white men.

"Football has historically always been thought of as a white Southern sport; many people still look at it that way," says Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida. 

According to The 2008 Racial and Gender Report Card, an annual study conducted by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, of the 32 teams in the NFL, six are headed by Black coaches. And despite having an overwhelmingly large number of Black players (66 percent compared to 31 percent for whites, 2 percent for Asians and 1 percent for Latinos), only five teams have a general manager who is Black. No team is coached by or has a general manager who is Latino or Asian.

"The NBA has deliberately tried to recruit Latinos and Asians--in general, people of color," says Lapchick. "The NFL hasn't done the same type of active outreach; this is why there are so few Latino and Asian coaches."

The league has taken steps to recruit more Latino and Asian players. In 2007, the number of Latino players jumped to 30 from eight, and the number of Asian players nearly doubled to 44 from 25.

But for all the league is doing to increase racial diversity, gender diversity still remains a major problem. Currently, there are no women serving as head coaches, assistant coaches or general managers. Such is also the case in Major League Baseball, in the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League. And for the fourth year in a row, the league did not receive a grade for gender diversity because it refuses to share its league-office data.

"We prefer to focus on our own initiatives to enhance diversity and inclusiveness in our workplace," NFL spokesperson Greg Aiello told ESPN, in response to why the league refuses to share this data.

The last time the league shared its gender data was in 2004, and it received a D+ for gender-hiring practices. Currently, Amy Trask of the Oakland Raiders remains the only female president/CEO of an NFL team.

So how did the NFL earn a B+ for race despite having no Latino or Asian coaches or general managers?

Information is gathered from the NFL media guides. That information, divided by teams, is put into spreadsheets and is then broken down by race and gender. The data is then compared to previous years.

Here are more highlights from the study:

• The number of Black head coaches increased 200 percent, to six in 2008 from two in 1999.
• Of the 456 assistant coaches, only five are Latino and five are Asian.
• Twenty-five of the 30 general managers or directors of player personnel are white. Five are Black.
• Whites account for 92 percent of vice presidents in the NFL, while only 8 percent are Black.
• There are six women physicians.
• Seventy-six percent of NFL quarterbacks are white, compared to 19 percent for Blacks. In 1993, 93 percent of quarterbacks were white and only 7 percent were Black.
• Eighty-nine percent of wide receivers are Black, while only 10 percent are white.

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