The maximum number of quarterbacks on a football team is 4. That's the definition of a small sample size, and it's very possible that a minority will be underrepresented simply due to statistical noise.
Besides, it's pretty well known that coaches at lower levels tend to steer black players towards other positions than QB, especially running back, WR, and defensive positions, while white players are generally steered somewhat more towards offensive line, tight end and QB. Don't believe me, check the college rosters and count the number of white running backs and the number of black tight ends. It's pretty striking.
The institutional bias at the NCAA level can be overcome, such as TEs like OJ Howard and QBs like Cam Newton, but that certainly doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
So while there may be an issue I don't think it's an NFL issue, it's an NCAA issue because of the kind of casual typecasting you almost have to do as a college level talent scout with that many players to sort through.
The layers of racial weirdness you have to excavate to be "enlightened" while watching sports like football and basketball amazes me.
We want everything to be nurture and nothing to be nature... otherwise we're Jimmy the GrecoAmerican, right? Steering, that's a good mechanism. Sure. Or look at basketball on playgrounds. (Actually my references are really old by now, but people who took hoops seriously used to be almost color-coded... and even at college level, never mind pros, you mainly are looking at people who take it very seriously.)
Of course, there's much more interest in differences such as intelligence. This does vary by "race," but only in ways that are much less important than individual variation (the Bell Curve fallacy). Since intelligence is much more of a gating mechanism than, for example, jumping ability, racial stereotypes about cognitive ability are more damaging than those about ability to jump.
I wonder, though, about the ultimate implications of these questions. Granted, right now the question is whether a guy can use his platform to protest and expect to get hired. I think the answer has to be, anybody with a legit reason to protest can. That doesn't mean you can take a knee and do a Nazi salute to protest that people of other ethnicities
still haven't been exterminated. Frankly, we do have to judge causes. It's way past time we judge racism and racists to be definitively beyond the pale, because, damn. But I digress.
The "black QBs" question, or the "black coaches" question, is a different one, but here's the weird hitch in the arguments.
They go something like this: In a league that's 70% black, how come we have only X% black coaches (or QBs, or... etc.)?
So... not that it's a social justice project, more out of curiosity... why is the league 70% black?
The ultimate steering experiment would be to remove attitudes and pressures that would predict athletic performance.
So, for example, you might have a group that tends to be shut out of other ways up in society. That's not universal, but it's prevalent, in the black experience. Culturally, coming from the Jewish experience, I have to laugh (self deprecatingly) at the comparison. The message you get is, the odds are bad, you can be anything you want, don't set yourself up in a lottery that 99.999% of people lose. That's why my people are always so covetous of the next Edelmensch out there. We celebrate every Jewish player, because there are so few.
What if the message is "you might as well give it a shot, you don't have a lot of options anyway"?
Now, especially as it relates to the NBA, there are physical differences you'd be stupid to ignore. How tall is the average height? We Chosen people were not chosen for our height, our hops, or, dare I say it, our rhythm, by and large. When the game involves getting the ball into a hoop suspended just high enough that some people have to arc the ball up, and other guys can slam the ball down... welllll, let's just say that Muggsy Bogues (sp?) was an outlier.
That said, what happens to other populations that grow tall people at a decent rate, when the incentives are similar across groups, and the stereotypes are kept to a low roar? Maybe it's just me, but it seems like Eastern European basketball players were a thing recently? I'm really NOT a basketball authority, for reasons just explored.
The reason I ask is that the 70% African American prevalence in football might really be a reflection of a Jimmy-the-Greek world, where African Americans are super-athletes created by the quasi-evolutionary crucible of the middle passage and slavery. Or it might be today's "given," destined to be overtaken by a tomorrow in which the odds present themselves to young people in different ways.
I'm still taking Golden State over Tel Aviv any day of the week and twice on Shabbos.
