The NFL has played 105 seasons, and 531 different men have served at least one game as a head coach. Before last year merely four — or 0.75% — were Latino.
The Carolina Panthers last season hired Dave Canales as the fifth. He’s Mexican-American and has the coveted reputation of quarterback whisperer. His schemes are fluid and multiple, concepts blended from different systems to better suit his players.
The team in 2024 went 5-12, but toward the end of last season you saw some of the Canales effect. Second-year quarterback Bryce Young struggled as a rookie, but in his final three games last season Young completed 65 percent of his passes for 612 yards, 7 touchdowns and no interceptions. That was good for a 111.6 passer rating.
What does this all mean? Canales got the opportunity many Latino coaches in the NFL do not, and he’s making the most of that chance. His path is also something of a contradiction, one that perfectly captures the complicated state of the Latino experience in today’s NFL.
From the moment Carolina hired him, Canales became a symbol of seismic progress. His hiring came just 17 days after the Commanders fired Ron Rivera, the fourth Latino head coach in NFL history. Moreover, Canales rode a path observed almost exclusively in the career arcs of white coaches; before getting the Panthers gig, he had spent just one season as an offensive coordinator.
But from the moment he was hired, Canales also became a more uncomfortable marker, an acknowledgement of acute scarcity. He remains the only Latino head coach in the NFL. His appointment in Carolina came during a record NFL hiring cycle in which four men of color were named head coaches, signaling further progress. But a harsh reality remains: given the extremely low number of Latino coordinators and assistants, it might be several years — perhaps even much longer — before we see the NFL’s sixth Latino head coach.
“My grandfather came from Mexico,” Canales told the Panthers’ official website. “He made a life for himself in the Central Valley in California, joined the military to get citizenship. He and my grandma just breathed life into their children that anything is possible. For me, I found football early on and I was able to chase that dream — it’s that Mexican American in me, that willingness to take a job and just apply yourself to it and take real pride in your work, just show up every day and take advantage of opportunities that come along.”
Those opportunities, by and large, have been atypical for Latino coaches in the NFL. A lack of exposure and lack of institutional support for candidates, racial biases in hiring and a lack of diversity at the ownership and executive level have complicated pathways for Latino assistants to ascend into coordinator roles, jobs that USA TODAY Sports research has shown are springboards for head coaching positions.
Canales is an exception. From 2006-08, he was coaching at El Camino College, which is more or less a straight shot down I-110 from the University of Southern California. At the time Canales was at El Camino, Pete Carroll was coaching the Trojans, and Carroll ran summer camps for high school and elementary school players on USC’s campus. Carroll hired Canales to be a coach at these camps and it was then that Carroll became his mentor. In 2009, Carroll hired Canales to be USC’s assistant strength coach, and when Carroll bolted for the Seattle Seahawks the following year, he once again brought Canales.
Canales spent 13 seasons in Seattle, grinding from offensive quality control assistant all the way to quarterbacks coach and passing game coordinator. Before the 2023 season, he broke away from Carroll’s mentorship when the Buccaneers hired him as offensive coordinator. He starred in the role, resurrecting the career of Baker Mayfield. Then he got the Panthers job.
What the recent history of Latino coaches shows is that Canales is a distinct anomaly.
‘Does it feel good to be a trailblazer?’
There have been few Latino assistants in the NFL with coordinator-level titles. What happened to two of them in Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores and former Commanders run game coordinator Juan Castillo shows how difficult it is for Latino coaches.
Flores, 44, was already a head coach, for the Miami Dolphins, for three seasons. He went 24-25 in Miami before he was fired in 2021. He has an open class-action lawsuit against the NFL and three of its franchises, alleging the league is “rife with racism,” particularly in the hiring and promotion of Black assistants.
Rivera, 63, wasn’t hired as a head coach in the NFL after his last head coaching stint. He’s currently with the University of California as the football program’s general manager.
That leaves Castillo, 65, a veteran assistant with over 30 years in the NFL, and one who has extensive experience on both offense and defense. He has worked under three different NFL head coaches, and some of the game’s brightest minds: Andy Reid (Chiefs), John Harbaugh (Ravens) and Sean McDermott (Bills). Castillo told the Philadelphia Inquirer back in 2011 that he dreamed of becoming a head coach. At the NFL scouting combine later that year, Harbaugh said he was “a supporter of Juan” and that he thought ‘he’ll be a head coach in this league someday.”
Castillo told USA TODAY Sports that he was never asked to do a single head coaching interview. When the Commanders fired Rivera in January 2024, they also released Castillo, and many others, too. After spending last season with UCLA, Castillo is now an offensive analyst for the University of Michigan.
In 2024, the NFL, for the first time since the Rooney Rule was implemented in 2003, did not feature a single non-white offensive coordinator. Currently, there are only two coordinators who identify as Latino or Hispanic. Flores identifies as Latino and Mike Kafka, from the Giants, has previously told USA TODAY Sports through a team spokesman he identifies as Hispanic. While Latino and Hispanic are often colloquially used interchangeably they can have different meanings.
An increasing Latino fan base
In 2023, only 23 of the 844 NFL assistants (2.73%) for which there were data identified specifically as Hispanic or Latino(a). That’s according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES), which publishes annual report cards on racial and gender hiring in the major U.S. sports leagues. (The most recent year for the report is 2023.) That figure was three more than the year prior, a 0.2% increase.
For NFL players, the number is even lower. Only seven of 1,536 (0.5%) for which there were data in 2023 identified specifically as Hispanic or Latino(a), according to TIDES.
“I don’t think the public thinks of Latinos when they think of head coaching jobs,” Dr. Richard Lapchick, the director of TIDES, told USA TODAY Sports. “I don’t even think most people know this topic as a point of discussion in their fandom, whereas they might have a passing knowledge of people pushing for more Black head coaches. It’s just not on the radar.”
Playing is arguably the quickest pathway into coaching, and the consistently low total of Latino players explains in part the lagging number of Latino coaches. But this is where everything becomes further complicated.
Per the SSRS/Luker on Trends Sports Poll, there were 34.6 million Hispanic NFL fans in the U.S. in 2023, the most ever recorded. That was up 13.4% from last year’s total of 30.5 million. In fact, compared with a decade ago, when there were 26.3 million Hispanic fans, today’s figure represents a colossal 31.6% increase.
Chad Menefee, the executive vice president of strategic intelligence at SSRS, told USA TODAY Sports in an email that Hispanic NFL fandom is outperforming all other demographics the company tracks. Since 2014, there were 8.2 million new Hispanic NFL fans recorded, while there were 1.9 million new non-Hispanic Black fans. Non-Hispanic white fandom has remained essentially flat.
These millions of new Hispanic fans are flocking to a league where they increasingly will not see themselves represented on the sideline. For the moment, Hispanic fandom is a booming market for the NFL, one the league has tried to monetize with International Series games, targeted commercials and other initiatives. But there might come a time when these new fans abandon the sport, perhaps in search of something where they are more robustly represented, something with stronger cultural ties to their heritage.
That also might never happen. But as these new Hispanic fans converge in this space, they might encounter something all too familiar, for the obstacles facing Latino assistants in the NFL are precisely the same forces that often keep Latino people in the domestic workforce from also ascending in their chosen industry.
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