Ten NFL teams changed head coaches heading into the 2026 season. Not one of them hired a Black coach. Only one of the ten hired a minority coach at all.
The result is a familiar number. Just three of the league's 32 teams will open the 2026 season with a Black head coach: DeMeco Ryans in Houston, chasing a championship; Todd Bowles in Tampa Bay, trying to steady the Buccaneers; and Aaron Glenn, hired to turn around one of the sport's most frustrated franchises. In a league where the majority of players are Black, the sideline still is not.
This is not a one-year outlier. It is a pattern the NFL keeps promising to fix, through the Rooney Rule and its various revisions, and keeps failing to move. Interview requirements can force a conversation. They have not, so far, forced a hire.
“In a league where the majority of players are Black, the sideline still is not.”
The gap matters beyond fairness. Head coach is a pipeline job. It leads to coordinator power, to front-office influence, to the ownership and executive rooms where the real money and the real decisions live. When Black candidates are shut out of the sideline, they are shut out of the ladder that runs from it. On the Record covers the wins in Black sport, the record MLB ownership deals and the billion-dollar agencies. This is the other half of the same beat: where the doors are still closed, and who keeps them that way.
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