Recently there has been a bit of controversy in the NFL regarding minority hiring. Actually there has been a little controversy about Peyton Manning calling his teammate an "idiot kicker", while the minority hiring thing has caused a bit more of a ruckus.

In case you don't read ESPN as often as I do, here's the rundown: The NFL has a silly policy that teams are supposed to "strongly consider minorities" when hiring head coaches, which is usually interpreted as a team should interview at least one minority coaching candidate when they have a vacancy.

The Dallas Cowboys, however, did not interview anyone when choosing a new coach this offseason. They instead pried notable quitter Bill Parcells away from the television studio without considering a single other applicant, caucasian or non-caucasian, and the NFL said nothing, with the general consensus being that Parcells was the best coach available so the Cowboys shouldn't have to interview anyone else.

A few weeks later, the San Francisco 49ers inexplicably fired Steve Mariucci after he took a team with essentially no defense and one of the league's biggest loudmoths on offense to the 2nd round of the playoffs. The Detroit Lions, who had previously said they would retain their crappy coaching staff for another year, immediately fired their staff and hired Mariucci. This time everybody went nuts.

Double-standard aside (most likely due to the NFL being afraid of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones), the fact that there is even a controversy about this is ridiculous. Clearly the Lions were not planning on changing coaches unless they were able to get Steve Mariucci, so an interview process would have been a pointless charade. It seems kind of demeaning to the qualified minority candidates for the NFL to impose a rule that they need to be interviewed even if they are not under consideration.

I mean the Lions might as well have interviewed me for the job, since I had as much chance of being named head coach as anyone not named Steve Mariucci would have. Why should they waste the time of qualified coaching candidates who could have used the time to prepare for an interview with a team that was actively performing a search?

Jackie Robinson did not break the color barrier because Major League Baseball required every team to sign one African-American player, and if he had the milestone would have been meaningless. It has much more significance that he earned his place on the Dodgers because of his abilities than if he had been placed their to make a political statement.

Everyone is applauding the 49ers because they interviewed three minority candidates in their own search (before settling on [shudder] Dennis Erickson), but it's not as noble a gesture if the only reason they did so was to "look good" and not because they were actually considering them as viable head coaches.

It's also kind of amusing that while there are minority hiring rules for the head coach position, there is no "you must bring a minority quarterback to training camp every year" stipulation. And before Steve McNair joined the league there were probably just as many minority quarterbacks as there were minority coaches. Are we to believe that the quarterback position is so important to the sport of football that the league would not taint it with such policies, but the job of head coach is one that is so unimportant that the league should be able to legislate who holds it based on the color of their skin?

Anyone who watched the Patriots win the Super Bowl last year knows that in many cases a quality head coach is just as, if not more, important than an individual player. And there are plenty of quality assistant coaches and unemployed head coaches who are minorities, enough so that a team that is conducting an open search without considering them would be at a severe disadvantage.

And it's not as if every minority, player or coach, is inherently better than his caucasian counterpart but hasn't had as many opportunities because of "the system". Just ask the Bengals how the whole Akili Smith thing is working out for them...