The NFL: 16 ways the game has changed in the Super Bowl era

Forty-seven years after the first Super Bowl was played in Los Angeles before a less-than-capacity crowd, let’s look back at some of the ways the NFL has changed.

11. Influx of black head coaches

Although Fritz Pollard coached the Akron Pros in 1920, the NFL’s inaugural season, there was not another black head coach until Art Shell took the reins of the Oakland Raiders in 2006. The profession has seen another 13 African-Americans land full-time NFL head coaching jobs (not interim assignments) since then. 

In 2007, Tony Dungy of the Colts and Lovie Smith of the Bears made history as the first black coaches in a Super Bowl.  Currently, three blacks are head coaches: Minnesota’s Leslie Frazier, Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin, and Cincinnati’s Marvin Lewis.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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