Via The Washington Post, a report on black quarterbacks in the NFL:

Just a football generation ago, Tony Dungy walked into a job interview with an inspired idea. Okay, he thought it was inspired. He was going to correct one of the most egregious quarterback oversights in NFL history.

If hired as the head coach, he wanted to sign Charlie Ward.

Ward, the 1993 Heisman Trophy winner at Florida State, went undrafted in 1994. Dungy, then the Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator, pitched his plan as a creative and prudent decision for the quarterback-needy franchise (which he declined to name).

“You’re getting a quarterback basically for free,” he remembered saying. “You don’t need to use a draft pick. You don’t have to make a trade. You don’t have to guarantee the starting job. Just sign him as a free agent at an affordable price.”

The reaction: silence.

The team had no tolerance for an aspiring Black coach promoting a disregarded Black quarterback. It took a while longer for Dungy, now a Hall of Famer, to get a job he knew he could do. Ward, a versatile athlete who played 11 NBA seasons, became the first modern-day recipient of college football’s top honor to never play in the NFL.

This isn’t old history. This wound, like so many from football’s prejudiced archives, doesn’t heal. It occurred in the 1990s, the same decade in which Patrick Mahomes, 27, and Jalen Hurts, 24, were born. On Sunday, they will lead the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles in the league’s first Super Bowl matchup featuring two Black starting quarterbacks.

“So many people laid the foundation before us,” Mahomes said. “It’s going to be a special moment.”

End of carousel
Thirty-five years after Doug Williams broke through as the first African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl, this feat of diversity is as corroborative as it is historic. It is not an uplifting accident that necessitated an exceptional talent being in the perfect place at the perfect time to elude the biased guardians of the game. It’s the manifestation of a new reality that has been simmering for nearly a decade.

The Black quarterback is now the standard.

It won’t be readily accepted, and in America, progress is always susceptible to attrition. But athletes have evolved in a way that dictates lasting change at the most celebrated and previously exclusive position in football.

To be specific, the qualities commonly associated with Black quarterbacks — mobility, unscripted playmaking, the gift to see and manipulate the game differently with their arm and legs — are now the most desirable in the sport. There’s greater freedom and more team willingness to tailor offenses to a quarterback’s strengths than ever before. It’s this liberalization, rather than intentional racial equality efforts, that has diversified the game.

Football is America. We shouldn’t be satisfied with either.

“I think this game is going to be special not just because it highlights Black quarterbacks, but the quarterback position in general, and how we have grown,” said former NFL star Michael Vick, who is now a Fox analyst. “There are stereotypes about White quarterbacks as well, but now you’ve got White quarterbacks pulling it down and running. The game is changing, and it’s evolving.”

Defensive players, particularly the ones rushing the passer, have become too fast, too athletic and too difficult to block for teams to eschew quarterback agility. White signal callers still account for about 60 percent of starting NFL quarterbacks, but the statuesque pocket passer may have died with Tom Brady’s retirement. Soon, it will take a future Hall of Fame talent to get noticed playing that style.

This is literally a movement. You have to be able to move now. There’s a bias toward athleticism that both transcends racial ignorance and tilts attention toward Black QBs who once couldn’t find opportunities because of stereotypes about their intelligence and leadership capabilities.

“I’m thinking about not that we have two Black quarterbacks playing in the Super Bowl,” said Williams, who admits getting misty-eyed over the Mahomes-Hurts matchup. “I’m thinking about the guys who were denied an opportunity, before me, to get a chance to play in the National Football League.”

The speed to escape pass rushers is now almost mandatory for NFL quarterbacks like Trevor Lawrence. (Charlie Riedel/AP)
For most of its 103 seasons, the NFL posted an intolerant bouncer in front of the quarterback room. That pain will always be felt; most of the men who experienced it are very much alive. But the game is forcing fairness. It comes not from the goodness of hearts, but the cold business reality that, in a hard-hitting game built around speed, it’s foolish to give $250 million contracts to sitting ducks.

The Black quarterback finally has leverage.

“Do you want to keep taking your franchise quarterback, who makes an eight- or nine-figure salary, to the hospital?” asked Harry Edwards, a sociologist and civil rights activist who has served as a consultant for the San Francisco 49ers since 1985. “Or do you want a franchise quarterback who can avoid some of the big hits, and most importantly, challenge defenses and feel comfortable making plays while 275-pound and 325-pound athletic specimens are chasing him down?”

When asked why it took the league so long to find a more level playing field, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell made a vague admission.

“There are probably a variety of reasons, probably none of them good,” Goodell said.