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Joe Biden’s Super Bowl Pre-Game Interview: President Predicts Rams Will Be “Hard To Beat,” Questions NFL On Lack Of Black Coaches

Ted Johnson
·3 min read

President Joe Biden told Lester Holt that NFL should want to strive to hire more Black coaches, calling it a matter of “generic decency.”

In an excerpt from Holt’s interview that aired during the Super Bowl pre-game, Biden said that “the whole idea that a league that is made up of so many athletes of color as well as so diverse, that there is not enough African American qualified coaches to manage these NFL teams — It just seems to me a standard they would want to live up to. It is not a requirement of law but, it is a requirement of just some generic decency.”

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Biden noted that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had acknowledged that “they haven’t lived up to what they committed to and lived up to being open about hiring more minorities to run teams.”

The diversity of NFL coaches has long been an issue, but it gained new attention recently after Brian Flores, former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, filed a racial discrimination lawsuit. Flores is seeking class action status of his lawsuit.

As for predictions, Biden seemed to give the odds to the Rams.

“Well, my teams are out,” Biden said. “I love this young quarterback from Cincinnati. He’s an Ohio boy, can make everybody happy but … I think Los Angeles is going to be hard to beat.”

Many of the newsiest details from the interview were revealed in the past few days on NBC Nightly News and Today, including Biden’s statement that he was looking at “about four” potential Supreme Court nominees and that Americans should leave Ukraine given the potential for a Russian invasion.

Biden also told Holt that inflation “ought to be able to start to taper off as we go through this year.” But Holt pressed the president on his earlier assertion that it would be temporary.

“I think a lot of Americans are wondering what your definition of temporary is,” Holt said.

Biden responded, “Well, you’re being a wise guy with me a little bit. I understand that your job, but look at the time what happened was the– let’s look at the reasons for the inflation. The reason for inflation is the supply chains were cut off, meaning that the products for example, automobiles, the lack of computer chips to be able to build those automobiles so they could function they need those computer chips. They were not available.

“So what happens? The number of cars were reduced, new cars reduced. It made up at one point, one third, the cost of inflation because the price of automobiles were up. So what I did when I went out and made sure we started to make those domestically. We got intel to come in and provide $20 billion to build a new facility. A number of organizations are doing the same kinds of things.”

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