Why Did it Take Until 2023 for Two Black QB's to Start the Super Bowl?

For the first time in Super Bowl history, two Black starting quarterbacks — Patrick Mahomes for the Kansas City Chiefs and Jalen Hurts for the Philadelphia Eagles — will face off in the most watched annual sporting event worldwide. Last year, over 200 million people tuned in, including two-thirds of all Americans. To add to this historic moment, Hurts’s agent, Nicole Lynn, is the first Black woman to represent a quarterback in the Super Bowl, and Autumn Lockwood, assistant sports performance coach for the Eagles, will be the first Black woman to coach in the big game.

Mahomes and Hurts will become only the eighth and ninth Black quarterbacks to play in the Super Bowl — Doug Williams was the first to win one in 1988.

The matchup between Mahomes and Hurts has been decades in the making, as Black players, including these quarterbacks, have worked to bust century-old myths surrounding Black people, athletes, intellect and leadership that have historically prevented Black players from getting a chance at quarterback in the NFL.

To justify slavery and the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, Europeans — and later Americans — asserted that Black people were built for labor. Proponents of slavery argued that biological differences between Black and White Americans necessitated separation and social control. They also developed ideas about the intellectual superiority of Whites, as well as their supposed greater fitness to lead.

As early as the late 19th century, these ideas began to affect the burgeoning world of sports. Historian Dave Wiggins’s work reveals how fans and coaches, as well as athletes, trainers, cultural anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, physical educators, biologists, medical doctors and, later, sportscasters claimed that Black and White athletes had innate differences that made them better suited for different roles in sports. Many argued that Black people were athletically superior and intellectually inferior.

These beliefs shaped the development of football in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and later the NFL, which formed in 1920. Initially, the league had a few Black players, but by 1933, they were banned, with no Black players allowed in the NFL between 1933 and 1946. While the league began integrating in the 1940s, it was not until 1962 that the last team, what is now the Washington Commanders, desegregated.

Yet, integration did not mean equal opportunity for Black and White players. Instead, the racist ideas about innate differences between the races drove the belief that Black and White players were best suited for different positions — a practice known as “racial stacking.” White owners and coaches pushed Black players away from “down the middle positions” like quarterback, center and inside linebacker because of the belief that such spots were too cerebral for Black men.

This practice meant that as talented Black quarterbacks moved up through the ranks of youth and college football (and into the pros), they got funneled toward playing running back or cornerback, which were perceived as better suited for their presumed “natural athletic abilities.”