This is an opinion column.

I chuckled when word trickled through the cacophony of coverage leading up to Super Bowl LVIII that some NFL owners are irked at the plethora of compensatory draft picks earned last year by the San Francisco 49ers, rewards after losing several members of their diverse executive and coaching staffs to other teams.

You never heard of such foolishness when compensatory picks were awarded for losing players. Just leaving that right there. For now.

Some background: Teams have long received compensatory draft picks—between the third and seventh rounds, designated based on some super-secret formula—after incurring a net loss of compensatory free agents (CFAs) or senior staff members. It was created to soften the blow of losing significant talent.

In 2020, NFL owners approved a tweak to the system, allowing teams to receive compensatory picks if a person of color on their coaching or executive staff is hired by another team. Teams received second-round selections in each of the next two drafts or three drafts if two of the team’s non-white-male employees were hired by other teams. Consider it a further enhancement of the Rooney Rule. Created in 2003 to address long-standing system discrimination in the hiring and promotion of Black coaches, it required teams with a head coaching vacancy to interview at least one “diverse (translation: Black, back then) candidate”. The rule has since been massaged and expanded to include more positions, other people of color, and women.

The 49ers pocketed a whopping seven comp picks in last year’s draft, three of which were awarded after people of color on their staff were hired by other teams. Among them: Washington Commanders General Manager Martin Mayhew, Tennessee Titans Executive VP/General Manager Ran Carthon, New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh (the league’s first Muslim HC), and Houston Titans Head Coach DeMeco Ryans, who came within a single first-place vote of being the 2023 Coach of the Year.

Oh, if you’re counting, three members of the 49ers’ Super Bowl roster—linebacker Dre Greenlaw, All-Pro safety Talanoa Hufanga, and Mr. Irrelevant QB Brock Purdy—were compensatory picks.

No wonder the owners are seething, though, truth is, the 49ers have thrived with diverse staffs for decades, long before non-discriminatory hiring needed to be mandated.

And that success leads back to Bill Walsh.

We first crossed paths, of a sort, when Walsh was Stanford’s head coach in 1977 and 1978 while I was a student there. Twenty-six years later, we were back on campus, where I moderated a Q&A with Walsh, almost exactly 20 years ago, during a historic gathering of more than 700 alumni of color.

It was a fitting venue for Walsh. For while he was by then a Pro Football Hall of Fame coach with three Super Bowl wins, six AFC championships, and a record of 102-63-1—all with the 49ers—he was also the catalyst for change in crushing the NFL’s “old white boy” coaching culture and creating avenues for African American coaches that reverberate today.

Upon leaving Stanford and joining the 49ers as head coach in 1979, Walsh hired two Black assistants—Dennis Green (special teams), who coached with him at Stanford; and Billie Matthews (running backs)—on a staff with just seven full-time coaches. That was unheard of, but it was Walsh. A few seasons later, Ray Rhodes, Milt Jackson, and Sherman Lewis—all African American—were on the 49ers staff in their first NFL jobs.

All five men had prodigious NFL coaching careers; two of them—Green and Rhodes—became NFL head coaches.

Steve Dils, who played quarterback for Walsh at Stanford and a decade in the NFL, is my classmate. “Bill was way ahead of his time,” he told me Friday, “in so many ways.”

Walsh recognized that in the wake of an age when emboldened Black athletes carried the banner of a Black Power movement that gripped the Bay Area in the 1960s, and crushed through color lines at southern colleges, the demographics of the NFL were shifting dramatically. Yet with the influx of African American players, the pipeline that regularly siphoned white former players into coaching remained clogged and closed for Black players seeking opportunities at the highest level of the game.

Of course, I wish my notes or recordings from that day with Walsh two decades ago had survived. I have no direct quotes from him now, though I still see his distinctive white mane and chiseled face as if sat next to me now. I still hear his voice and feel his sincerity.

He shared this with USA Today: “I believe coaching, in a sense, represents the participants. “The racial-ethnic balance in football has turned over very rapidly in recent years, as has the interest and the involvement of so many men in the coaching profession. But we’re not seeing the upward mobility that we should be seeing.”

Walsh didn’t just hire led by his heart he created a camp that brought together Black college coaches and NFL (initially 49er) coaches and allowed them to work alongside each other as coaching peers. To share concepts, schemes, and coaching philosophies. To get to know each other, building comfort, familiarity, and access—three keys to cracking the code never shared with Black coaches. At the end of the camps, Black coaches received letters of recommendation from Walsh that could be utilized at any opportunity.

His unlikely partner in shaping this vision was a tall, bearded, head-shaven Black man whose glare penetrated you from behind the signature shades he always seemed to wear. Dr Harry Edwards was a leading educator and respected guide at the peak of the movement. Walsh was a child of the Depression, the son of a railroad yard laborer in Los Angeles.

They found common ground through San Jose State University where Edwards was teaching and (real life) “coaching” the young Black stars of the “Speed City” track squad, and where Walsh had played and coached years earlier. They forged a kindred path, uniting during Walsh’s early years in San Francisco—helping young Black men navigate the complexities of the times. Of life.

In an article by 49es historian Joe Hession, Edward said: “While talking about a contract, we discussed what we could do for one another. We were both following the same road on social issues. This gave me the opportunity to get inside the organizations I had been critical of and work with them.”

In 1985, Edwards joined the 49ers as a consultant, engaging players, coaches, and staff on social matters and more. A year later, the 49ers launched the cross-cultural coaching camps, from which was born the Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship. Today, all 32 teams are part of a program that invites Black former players or coaches of color from any level of the game to participate in training camps and other areas.

Over nearly four decades, thousands of coaches of color have come through the program. The roots of Walsh’s coaching tree are still fertile, embodied by men like Pittsburgh head coach Mike Tomlin and Raheem Morris, the Atlanta Falcons’ new leader.

Of course, the pipeline has flowed neither freely nor fairly for Black coaches in recent seasons. The 58-page lawsuit bright by former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores against that team (they fired him after back-to-back winning seasons), the Broncos and Giants exposed the league’s still-tainted underbelly of racism in hiring.

The harshest light was thrust upon the NFL by the Washington Post, in a series of articles that, according to the outlet, illuminated the league’s “decades-long failure to equitably promote Black coaches to top jobs despite the multi-billion-dollar league being fueled by Black players.” (Sound familiar? See: Walsh)

Collectively, the series was titled “Black Out.”

Yet another reason to chuckle at the owner’s petulant pouts. Instead of gazing out the window with ire towards the 49ers—who are, by the way, about the play in Sunday’s Super Bowl against the Kansas City Chiefs—they should be looking in the mirror at their own failings.

Indeed, your friend here almost fell off the couch laughing at 49er GM John Lynch’s response to the grumbling, to the whining over the team’s bounty of bonus picks as a reward for offering opportunities to men and women others overlook, who rise and are hired elsewhere.

“Develop your own.”

Just like Bill Walsh.

I’m a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. My column appears on AL.com, as well as the Lede. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj