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The accusations against Kelly -- now the coach at UCLA -- prompted my own statistical investigation into how race might matter in NFL roster decisions. My analysis of data collected on each player's racial background from Best Tickets' Unofficial 2014 NFL Player Census2 found that the 10 teams in 2014 who had Black people in the key leadership roles of head coach and/or general manager had significantly more Black players on their rosters than the 22 other NFL teams. No team did more to drive that year's statistically significant negative correlation3 between whiter team leadership and having fewer Black players on NFL rosters than Kelly's Eagles. In fact, the significant differences4 between the percentage of Black players on the Eagles (50.9 percent) and the rest of the NFL (68.3 percent) were beyond the statistical threshold that the courts and federal bureaucracy generally recognize as potential discrimination.

Meanwhile, the team most responsible for driving the positive correlation between African American general managers having more Black players on their rosters in 2014 was none other than the Raiders. Under the leadership of the team's African American general manager, Reggie McKenzie, the Raiders (then playing in Oakland) had a higher share of Black players on their roster (79.2 percent) than any other NFL team in 2014. According to data compiled on the racial composition of each NFL team's roster by ProFootballLogic,5 the Raiders also had the NFL's highest percentage of Black players (82.3 percent) in 2016 -- the year that McKenzie won executive of the year honors after the team's impressive 12-win showing. It's probably not a coincidence, either, that the two teams with the next highest shares of Black players, the Giants and Bills, also had African American GMs. Indeed, the five NFL teams with Black GMs in 2016 had rosters that were, on average, 75.4 percent Black, compared with 67.7 percent for the 27 teams that did not -- a statistically significant difference6 in percent of Black players that we can be confident was not simply due to random variation.   

The Raiders' racial composition was virtually identical in 2017, the year before Gruden began his second stint as the team's head coach. While there's no publicly available data on the racial composition of NFL rosters after 2016, my admittedly crude coding7 of the team's roster once again found that 82.0 percent of the Raiders' players were Black in 2017. But the number of Black players on the Raiders sharply declined soon after Gruden became the Raiders' "de facto football czar." By the end of the 2018 season, McKenzie had been fired, and Gruden assumed even more control over the Raiders' personnel decisions. That included changing the roster's racial composition: My analysis of the team's rosters found that the share of Black players on the Raiders declined from 82.0 percent in 2017 to 69.0 percent in 2019 and 67.1 percent in 2020 and 67.2 percent in 2021.

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