Vance Joseph. (NFL via Getty Images)
It’s time for Cincinnati Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis to step up and be heard on behalf of his defensive backs coach Vance Joseph.
This isn’t about the Broncos. This is about Joseph, the former University of Colorado backup quarterback, getting the promotion he has earned and deserves.
Joseph is in hot demand, and not just by the Broncos. The San Francisco 49ers have offered Joseph not only their defensive coordinator position but also a title as assistant head coach. The 49ers were the team that gave Joseph his first NFL coaching job in 2005.
The Broncos want Joseph to become their defensive coordinator, which would reunite Joseph with head coach Gary Kubiak. Joseph was Kubiak’s secondary coach in Houston from 2011-13.
If the Bengals did the right thing, Joseph would have a tough decision to make. Not surprisingly given their history, the Bengals have denied Joseph to interview with the Broncos and the 49ers. And yet the Bengals are not sending out an announcement that Joseph has been promoted.
This is the wrong stance for a candidate of any color much less a minority. In the week our nation is honoring Martin Luther King and his life’s work for racial equality, the Bengals are denying Joseph, an African American, his right for a career advancement.
Does the NFL, which has proven to be slow to understand the magnitude of social issues, understand the injustice here? Perhaps, the league is simply too preoccupied with that all-important matter of deflated footballs.
The league has instituted a Rooney Rule that demands teams interview minority candidates for head coaching positions, yet it also gives teams the right to deny minority candidates a chance for advancement. It’s a policy that smacks of hypocrisy.
Supposedly it’s Mike Brown, the Bengals’ owner, who is denying Joseph, but I have my doubts. Joseph has only been on the Bengals coaching staff for one year. We’ve all witnessed how Brown has operated the Bengals, who haven’t won a playoff game in 26 years. What can he know about the quality of defensive back coaches?
Lewis, the Bengals’ head coach who is an African American, needs to lend Joseph his support.
The promotion from position coach to coordinator is a huge deal. The way the NFL works, offensive and defensive coordinators become top head coach candidates. Rarely does a position coach make the jump to head coach, although Mike Tomlin did it with the Steelers. And Tomlin, an African American, has proved to be a very good coach.
There’s a reason why they call it the Rooney Rule. Lewis should know better than anybody that the Rooneys and the Steelers are paradigms of doing things right. In 1995, Lewis had finished up his fifth season as the Steelers’ linebackers coach. The Baltimore Ravens — Pittsburgh’s most intense NFL rival — then offered him a promotion to defensive coordinator and the Rooneys and coach Bill Cowher did not stand in his way.
After six years with the Ravens, Lewis became defensive coordinator of the Washington Redskins in 2002 and it was from there that he was hired to become the Bengals’ head coach.
Marvin Lewis was once in the same position Joseph is in now. Unfortunately for Joseph, the Bengals in every way are not the Steelers.
