There’s something that happened at Super Bowl 59 that you might have missed. It’s understandable. There was a lot going on. You know, like the game. Some kind of halftime show. A president showed up. It was busy.
That supersized kinetic energy of the Super Bowl might have understandably scattered your attention. But this is important and you should pay attention. A member of the Philadelphia Eagles’ coaching staff made history. It was actually the second time. It was quiet history, but it was history nonetheless.
The Eagles’ Autumn Lockwood became the first Black woman coach to win a Super Bowl, the NFL confirmed to USA TODAY Sports.
Autumn also made history in Super Bowl 57 when she became the first Black woman to coach in a Super Bowl.
Autumn is the team’s associate sports performance coach and one of only a handful of women to coach in the championship game.
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What does all of this mean? It continues an evolution in NFL coaching. A slow one, to be sure. A really slow one. The NFL has progressed in what has been a long trek to bringing front office and coaching diversity to the league. This is another step in that process.
Lockwood’s background shows a steady climb through the strength and conditioning universe. She worked at the University of Houston and East Tennessee State. Her introduction to the NFL came through the Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship as an intern for the Atlanta Falcons in 2019.
Over the past 20 years or so, I’ve asked various team and league officials when they believed we’d have a woman head coach in the NFL. The answers have ranged from never to soon to the NFL will have a woman head coach before the country has a woman president. (That last one is proving prescient.)
It could be decades before that happens because there aren’t that many women in the coaching pipeline. An NFL owner would need to think completely outside of the box. Or a head coach would have to hire a woman as a coordinator and prep her to become head coach. This is what men do in the league all the time. In fact, they hire their sons to do this.
The main barrier, again, is that pipeline. For example, last year the Chicago Bears hired Jennifer King as their assistant running backs coach. She became the first woman coach in the franchise’s more than 100-year history.
Last February, according to the Bears, there were 12 women in full-time coaching roles on nine NFL teams. Those numbers need to increase dramatically.
Yes, there was something remarkable that happened at the Super Bowl. You might have missed it. But it was vital. Lockwood changed NFL history.
What moments like this one do is send the message to girls and women, especially girls and women of color, that they can make it to the highest of sports stages. They belong there.
We’ve seen a lot of attacks on diversity in recent months and days, and we will see a lot more to come. Despite so many of those ugly moments, diversity remains our greatest strength. Both as a country and in the NFL.
What matters most is that Lockwood is good at her job. So good she’s part of the team that’s Super Bowl champions.
