Super Bowl is a reminder of how family heritage, nepotism still rule the NFL

Shortly after Sunday’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas, CBS television cameras likely will show a familiar postgame celebration with the winning team:

∎ For the ninth time in 19 years, the Lombardi Trophy will be presented to a white team owner who inherited that ownership from family.

∎ For the eighth time in 11 years, the trophy also will be handed to a white head coach who is the father, son or grandson of an NFL family coaching tree. 

Will it go to San Francisco 49ers CEO Jed York, nephew of previous longtime 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr.? Jed York hired 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, son of former Super Bowl-winning head coach Mike Shanahan.

Or will the trophy go to Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, son of team founder Lamar Hunt and heir to the Hunt family oil fortune? Clark Hunt hired Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, whose sons have worked on his coaching staff in recent years.

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The family factions face off at Allegiant Stadium, serving as another reminder of how nepotism and family birthrights are still heavily ingrained in the NFL, where 16 of the league’s 32 owners inherited their teams from family, compared to only six of 30 in the NBA, according to USA TODAY Sports research.

What does that matter?

This is the Super Bowl, the ultimate contest in a merit-based playoff system.

“One of the reasons that these statistics may bother some people is that sports is supposed to be a meritocracy,” said David Grenardo, a law professor and sports law expert at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. “The best players play on the team, and the team that plays the best wins. Meritocracy, however, applies to players, not ownership or coaching.”

Both Kyle Shanahan and Andy Reid also coached against each other in the Super Bowl in 2020 and are considered among the brightest coaching minds in the NFL, regardless of how they traded on their family names to give or get coaching jobs. 

But now it comes against a shifting cultural backdrop in which the term “nepo baby” is used to describe children who follow in the footsteps of their celebrity parents – and while a lawsuit filed in 2022 remains active against the NFL over its alleged pattern of discrimination against hiring Black coaches.

In the case of Shanahan, 44, does this Super Bowl showcase him as the poster boy for nepotism in the NFL? Or does it validate family pedigree as just another valued trait in a league that is rife with it, including for coaches who aren’t white like him?

Succession in the NFL

Privilege by birthright is an old source of tension in America – between capitalistic property rights and the ideal of equal opportunity for all.  In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence said “all men are created equal” and railed against being subject to a king who had inherited his throne in England. Then came the Civil War over slavery.

More recently, pop culture has chewed on the issue, including some entertainers who said they didn’t think it was right to let their children inherit wealth they didn’t earn. In January, the hit HBO show “Succession” won an Emmy for its unflattering portrayal of unqualified offspring vying to inherit control of their father’s global business empire.

In business and sports, all of this comes amid an ongoing push for more equitable access to the levers of power for those who didn’t acquire them by birth, family connections or related racial influences. Only two NFL majority owners are not white – Buffalo’s Kim Pegula and Jacksonville’s Shahid Khan, neither of whom inherited their ownership.

Likewise, team owners are the ones who hire the head coaches but haven’t often given those jobs to those who are Black or not white like them. This year, there are nine head coaches of color out of 32 – a record for the NFL, though still a small fraction in a league where about 60% of the players in recent years have been Black.

At the start of the 2023 season, at least 90 of 752 on-field NFL coaches had a father, son or brother who actively or previously coached in the NFL, according to USA TODAY Sports research. Of those 90 coaches with connections, 76 (84.4%) were white.

High-profile mom-and-pop shops

Yet the NFL is the most lucrative league in America and this year just had its most-watched round of playoffs ever with an average of 38.5 million per postseason game.

Was that because of – or in spite of – the fact that half of NFL teams are mom-and-pop shops passed down as heirlooms?

It’s far easier to understand why so many family owners want to keep the teams in the family and not sell them – because it’s a prestigious license to print money through NFL revenue-sharing, even for the worst teams. Every NFL franchise is worth at least $3.5 billion, according to Forbes.

This showed after Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen died in 2019. A “Succession”-like squabble among his heirs over control of the team ultimately led to the sale of it -- to the family heirs of the Walmart fortune for nearly $5 billion in 2022.

“The situation is a microcosm of society,” said Grenardo, who last year published a peer-reviewed paper on the lack of Black owners in sports. That society includes a wealth disparity built over many generations, long divided along racial lines to the benefit of white property owners.

And when a family owns such an asset as this, it’s always been their right to do what they want with it, within the rules. They can even put family initials on players’ uniforms, as the Chiefs do with patches on their jerseys that honor Clark’s deceased father, Lamar Hunt (“LH”), and mother, Norma K. Hunt (“NKH”).

They also can hire who they want – relatives they trust to run the team, coaches who look like them or even the 37-year-old son of a prominent former NFL coach.

The Shanahan family hiring loop

Kyle Shanahan was hired by York at that age in 2017 and faced questions about this before his last Super Bowl against the Chiefs in 2020. Now back at the Super Bowl again, he arguably serves as an example of why family pedigree is valued for a reason, especially in a league whose ownership is defined by it.

He learned at the knee of a father who won two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos and said he has developed a “chip” on his shoulder to overcome the perception he got a free pass.

His first coaching job in the NFL came with Tampa Bay under head coach Jon Gruden as quality control assistant.

“I would never say it’s difficult, in terms of it gave me a real good life and gave me a lot of advantages,” Kyle Shanahan said in January 2020. “I didn’t know Jon Gruden personally. So it helped that I think that my dad knew him a little bit to give me an opportunity as a QC to start. But I think with anyone, when people know your last name, there’s always human nature, whether I made the basketball team in high school, it was always because of my dad, according to the guys who didn’t make it.”

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His “advantages” also helped form a family loop of sorts. After Tampa, Shanahan got hired as an assistant coach at Houston in 2006 under head coach Gary Kubiak, who was the backup quarterback in Denver when Mike Shanahan was the offensive coordinator there in the 1980s. After Mike Shanahan became head coach of the Washington football team in 2010, he hired son Kyle as offensive coordinator.

Kyle then gave Gary Kubiak’s son Klay his first NFL job in 2021 after Kyle was named head coach of the 49ers. Klay Kubiak and his brother Klint both served as assistants on Kyle’s staff in San Francisco this season. After the Super Bowl, Klint Kubiak, 36, is expected to move up the career ladder as the new offensive coordinator with the New Orleans Saints.

Andy Reid and sons

Similarly, Chiefs coach Andy Reid last year hired his youngest son, Spencer, as the team’s assistant strength coach. Another one of his sons, Britt, was on his Chiefs staff as a linebackers coach until he got in a car crash in Kansas City that left a 5-year-old girl with brain injuries two days before the Super Bowl in 2021. In 2022, Britt Reid was sentenced to three years in prison for driving drunk and is currently incarcerated at the Maryville Treatment Center, according to state records.

The Reids, Shanahans and Kubiaks all are white coaches hired by white owners. Last year, NFL executive vice president Troy Vincent even said, “nepotism and cronyism must be eliminated” in a statement that was included in the league’s annual diversity and inclusion report, co-authored by researchers C. Keith Harrison and Scott Bukstein from the University of Central Florida.

“Nepotism creates an overwhelming bias and inequity that has yet to be properly addressed throughout the league,” Harrison and Bukstein recently said in a statement provided to USA TODAY Sports.

‘Maybe this isn't a meritocracy’

But there have been signs of change. A record four men of color were hired as head coaches in the recent hiring cycle, bringing the number of head coaches of color to a record nine, according to data collected for USA TODAY Sports' NFL Coaches Project.

More Black coaches over time could mean more younger Black coaches getting jobs the way many white coaches have for decades. Chiefs wide receivers coach Connor Embree is the biracial son of former 49ers assistant and current Miami Dolphins assistant head coach Jon Embree, who is Black. Niners assistant head coach Anthony Lynn, who is Black, helped his son D’Anton break into the NFL and hired him on his staff when he was head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers. The younger Lynn is now a head-coaching prospect to watch as a defensive coordinator at the college level, with Southern California.

In the meantime, awareness of these issues has increased as society has become more racially diverse, said Dave Berri, a sports economist at Southern Utah.

“White males like me are now 29% of adults, when before we were a much bigger percentage,” he said. “So 70% of society is looking at how jobs are being allocated, and saying, 'OK, well, it seems like we have hired the same group of people over and over again. Maybe this isn’t a meritocracy.' "

Contributing: Tom Schad

Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: [email protected]