Bomani Jones and Dominique Foxworth just opened up a can of worms that has social media buzzing.
The ESPN personalities were in the midst of discussing the National Football League, most notably the quarterbacks after the first round of the draft.
They pointed out that the NFL’s highest-paid quarterbacks are Black, in Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, and Jalen Hurts. They then brought up how Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud, and Anthony Richardson were all taken high in the 2023 NFL Draft.
Both of them suggested that rules could be changing in the future to stop this from happening. This conversation went down on the latest episode of “The Right Time with Bomani Jones.”
“Before we get to the Eagles and how scary that is, something just hit me – there’s gonna be some rule changes in the NFL,” Foxworth said. “They ‘gon do something. And you may be looking at me like I’m crazy, but wait ‘til I explain something to you, then you’re gonna be like, ‘yup, they about to fix this.’ “Who’s the best quarterback in football? Patrick Mahomes? Who’s the two highest-paid players in all the league? Lamar Jackson and Jalen Hurts. Who are the first three quarterbacks drafted in this draft? Black dudes. … Oh, we got a rule change coming down the pike.”
Jones said that something has “fundamentally changed” as a player like Will Levis fell out of the first round.
“Guys, as crazy as you think this is. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Harry Edwards speak and he was talking about the quarterback position and when (Michael) Vick, (Daunte) Culpepper, you know that run of dudes started coming, what they did was they started making those punitive roughing the passer penalties where if you just touch the guy on the helmet that you got 15 yards ‘cus they had to slow up those defensive backs … Guys, it’s turning into a problem where can’t nobody even talk themselves into Will Levis, right? Something has fundamentally changed,” Jones said.
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Foxworst took it a step further by saying the league actually believes the fans are racist towards black people.
“So, you might be listening to this and thinking that Dominique is arguing that the NFL is just flat out ‘I hate Black people racist.’ No, it’s a different type of racism. It’s because they think that you are a ‘I hate Black people’ type of racist. They know that the stars of this entertainment property are the quarterbacks. That is who the people who are three degrees removed from you who’s a superfan they don’t know nobody but four or five quarterbacks’ names. And you know what they believe? The same way the NBA is probably concerned about all these international players, they know that the stars that sell consistently, that they have known to sell consistently are tall White dudes.”
Foxworth continued.
“We need to get some more of them in the league because if we get to a situation where it’s a bunch of Lamar Jacksons and Jalen Hurts the face of the league, the NFL is going to be concerned, not because they care who their labor is but because they think it’s y’all who care who the labor is.”
Here’s how social media responded:
Since Mahomes won his first Super Bowl in the 2019 season, he has arguably served as the NFL’s face. According to Forbes, the league still dominates television because it produced 82 of the top 100 telecasts in 2022.
Even though the average viewership declined from 17.1 million in 2021 to 16.7 million in 2022, those two years were among the highest ever since the NFL’s all-time high of 18.1 million in 2015.
