Nepotism is Fine, Actually
Bomani Jones has new show on HBO—a kind of John Oliver for sports—called Game Theory with Bomani Jones. On a recent episode, he addressed the Brian Flores lawsuit with a discussion about nepotism in the NFL. You can watch the whole thing here:
The premise of the piece is that nepotism in the NFL is worse (?) than racism. Or maybe just complementary to it? It’s honestly a little hard to track Jones’ argument, because the show is new and hasn’t quite figured out how to walk that line between comedy and arguments. But the general idea is that white people should be furious about the NFL’s hiring practices too, because they suffer from nepotism as much (?) as Black people suffer from racism.
Anyway, here’s the money quote (emphasis added):
“Pretending that DNA begets coaching talent is hurting every single coach who wasn’t conceived on top of a playbook. Coaching hires should be based on merit. Things like win-loss record, how good your offense or defense are, not whose house you pull up to on Thanksgiving.”
When I see stuff like this, I just want to yell, “No! You’re falling for it!!” The temptation to make hiring decisions “based on merit,” is an understandable one, and one that liberals like Jones fall for again and again, but it is ultimately a trap. “Merit” is bullshit—whenever owners or bosses want to justify a discriminatory hiring process, they always claim they are doing it “based on merit” and that they chose the best person for the job, regardless of race, religion, or gender. The implication is that any check on their ability to hire and fire whoever they want would undermine the quality of the product.
It would be one thing if there were objective criteria to assess merit. In collective bargaining, workers almost always prefer such criteria—whether it’s seniority or some quantifiable measure of productivity—to the whims of bosses. But no such criteria exist to evaluate coaches. Jones mentions “things like win-loss record” and “how good your offense or defense are,” but those things are hard to compare given varying levels of talent on football teams. David Culley went 4-13 last year with the Houston Texans, but considering the state of the team, that was a much more impressive coaching performance than Joe Judge’s, who led the Giants to the exact same record. Plus, these metrics are totally inapplicable to first-time coaches.
In the absence of any easily comparable metrics, decisions “based on merit” will inevitably be decisions based on the vibes of owners and GMs. We saw this in the initial reporting on the Flores lawsuit, with all the hullaballoo about the supposedly magic power of job interviews, but “merit” is just a shield for discriminatory hirers to hide behind.
The problem with any critique of nepotism, then, is that it is premised on the idea that “merit” is a real thing, that there is someone out there who is objectively “the best person for the job.” This is an idea that liberals have committed themselves to, trying desperately to refine sorting mechanisms like education and hiring so that everyone will get the job they “deserve.”
But this is nonsense. As I’ve written before, a job is not a reward you get because you’ve proven yourself worthy of it—it’s just a role you take on because you are capable of doing it and it needs to be done. For the vast majority of jobs, including NFL coaches, there are many people who are qualified and deciding who is “better” would only be a matter of opinion or taste. There is, in reality, no such thing as “the best person for the job,” and all the energy devoted to finding such a thing just reinforces the boss’ ability to hire and fire whoever they want based on some supposedly merit-based standard that nobody can ever agree on or consistently apply.
Once you give up the idea that hiring should be based on merit, nepotism becomes a lot less troubling. After all, if any number of people could be your Offensive Coordinator, then why not hire your nephew? You already know him, presumably like him and get along well with him, and have a sense of how he’ll fit into the culture.
The downside, obviously, is that nepotism tends to reproduce pre-existing inequalities. In this case, white coaches benefit way more from nepotism than Black coaches. But the solution there is to fix the inequality directly. The Flores lawsuit includes a few potential fixes for that, the most encouraging of which limit the power of owners and GMs.
But simply attacking nepotism and assuming that a natural meritocracy will take hold and solve systemic inequality is a terrible idea. It’s not just that it won’t work, but that the experience of meritocracy is a terrible one for workers. There is nothing wrong with using personal connections to get or fill a job—it’s totally reasonable behavior that is usually preferable to the alternatives. Do people really want a world with more job interviews, more reference letters, more resume-reading software… all in some hopeless quest to find the most deserving candidate for every position? I certainly don’t, and it definitely doesn’t seem like it would be good for most workers.
The pursuit of more merit-based hiring always produces two things: First, arbitrary standards and credentials for workers who now must prove they are worthy of a job in ways that typically have nothing to do with the job itself. Hence seeing listings for jobs like nanny or personal assistant that now require college degrees, or elaborate hiring processes that require tremendous amounts of time and even unpaid work from applicants. And second, you get a complex hiring process you can endlessly tinker with in response to any criticisms.
When the NFL first faced criticism for its lack of Black head coaches, it adopted the Rooney Rule, which forced teams to interview Black coaching candidates. Now, after little progress over 20 years, many want to respond by tweaking the rule slightly or enforcing it more strictly. If that doesn’t work, then after a couple decades of not fixing the problem, people will suggest new ways to change it… all in the hope that there is some pure, “merit-based” system out there that will naturally eliminate racial biases.
But meritocracy is a myth, and the pursuit of that myth is just an excuse to kick the can down the road. If you want teams to hire Black or Latino coaches, you have to make them hire Black or Latino coaches. If you’re not going to do that, then who really cares if they hire their kids?