ESPN's Stephen A. Smith Attempts to Make NFL Coach's Firing About Race
On Monday, ESPN host Stephen A. Smith accused the New England Patriots of considering race when firing head coach Jerod Mayo after just one season with the team.
The sports journalist said that the firing of Mayo, who led the Patriots to finish 4-13 this season, was “about Mike Vrabel,” who recently worked as a coaching and personnel consultant for the Cleveland Browns but who is now on the market for a new position.
But Smith added a racial component into the equation, given that Mayo is black and Vrabel is white.
“I don’t like this. They call it Black Monday for a reason. This certainly typifies it. I don’t know why it’s not called White Monday,” Smith contended, as highlighted by the social media account Awful Announcing.
Stephen A. Smith on the Patriots firing Jerod Mayo: “This is about Mike Vrabel. That’s who they wanted… I don’t like this. They call it Black Monday for a reason. This certainly typifies it. I don’t know why it’s not called White Monday. Doug Pederson got fired from… pic.twitter.com/PsZFD7CrWR
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) January 6, 2025
“Doug Pederson got fired from Jacksonville. He deserved that firing,” Smith continued. “Jerod Mayo clearly was not given a lengthy enough opportunity considering what Bill Belichick left him with from a talent perspective.”
Mayo indeed took over for Belichick as head coach of the Patriots after serving as an assistant coach since 2019.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft announced in a Monday statement that Mayo was axed because “the trajectory of our team’s performances throughout the season did not ascend as I had hoped.”
On several fronts, one can only conclude that this was a merit-driven firing, not a race-driven firing, no matter how much Smith tries to import racial grievance into the situation.
For one, Kraft was joining forces with other team owners, players, and commissioners across several sports leagues just a few months ago for a campaign called “#TimeOut Against Hate,” an effort to expose purported anti-black sentiment in American society and other forms of “intolerance,” as reported by Today.
In other words, we would expect an owner who signals toward woke ideology to fight as hard as possible to keep a black coach, not to look for an excuse to fire a black coach.
Meanwhile, there are rather clear counterexamples that exist in the NFL.
As Daily Wire host Matt Walsh noted on social media, the Pittsburgh Steelers have kept black head coach Mike Tomlin employed for 18 years, even though he has not won a single playoff game in almost a decade.
“He’s 0-5 in the post season since 2016. He’s also black,” Walsh noted. “This narrative that teams are quick to fire black coaches is the exact opposite of reality.”
Even in a culture awash with racial grievances and ideologies to support those grievances, sports remains a meritocracy, at least to some extent.
Whether a coach is white, black, brown, or purple, he must bring home wins, or else he can have no guarantees about his job security.
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