King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Johnnie Cochran was right: Steve Mariucci's hiring and firing prove the NFL's old-boy network survives -- and fails.

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Nov. 30, 2005 | After the Detroit Lions hired Steve Mariucci as head coach in 2003, they were fined $200,000 by the NFL for violating a rule that requires teams to interview minority candidates for coaching positions.

I was among many who defended team president Matt Millen at the time, arguing that Mariucci, who was fired Monday after going 15-28 in a little over two and a half years, was such an obvious choice that putting minority "candidates" through an interview process would have been a charade.

In fact, the Lions said they contacted five black coaches, all of whom declined to be interviewed, feeling the process would be a waste of their time.

Mariucci had been successful with the San Francisco 49ers, who fired him after the 2002 season even though the 49ers made the playoffs and won a game that year. His firing had more to do with the 49ers' organizational chaos than with the job he'd done -- a 57-39 regular-season record, four playoff appearances in six years and a 3-4 postseason record.

Plus, he was a Michigan native and an old friend of Millen's. It was a natural hire, not just for Millen and the Lions but for any NFL team in their situation. Millen, I and many others said, was being punished for being honest, for not stringing anyone along before making the hire everybody knew he was going to make.

I was wrong. And I'm surprised that in the aftermath of Mariucci's firing nobody else is talking about this. We were all wrong when we defended Millen.

The problem wasn't that Millen had been too honest. The problem was that he'd already made up his mind that Mariucci was the right guy. As we've learned, Mariucci wasn't the right guy. He failed.

Maybe anybody would have failed under Millen's incompetent administration, which has been highlighted by a puzzling, to put it kindly, draft strategy that favors wide receivers over much more valuable defenders or offensive linemen year after year.

Maybe anybody would have failed, but I sure have been hearing and reading a lot over the last few days about how Mooch was the wrong guy for the Lions' situation.

All of a sudden it's crystal clear that his laid-back, player-friendly style was fine for San Francisco, where he inherited a team that had made the playoffs five years in a row and 14 out of the last 15 non-strike years, but not for Detroit, where the team needed to start over after going 5-27 the previous two seasons.

Why couldn't anybody see that in 2003? It's not like Mariucci had been coaching in some outpost. At the time he was fired the 49ers had been one of the highest profile teams in the league for two decades. We all knew Mariucci wasn't a kick-'em-into-shape kind of fellow. Why is it only obvious now that that's what the Lions needed?

Next page: Millen was incompetent, not racist, but the result was the same: The white guy got the job