Biden gives advice to NFL on hiring more minority head coaches, talks US plan for Olympics

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Phil Keating reports from outside Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla.

President Biden said Sunday he would like to see NFL teams hire more Black coaches in future hiring cycles amid an outcry over the lack of diversity among the league’s 32 franchises.

The Houston Texans were the only team to hire a Black coach in David Culley. The New York Jets made Robert Saleh the first-ever Muslim head coach in league history. There are five minority head coaches as it stands heading into 2021.

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Jim Gray, a Fox News Contributor and legendary sportscaster, asked the president on his Westwood One radio show at halftime of Super Bowl LV if he had any advice for the league going forward.

"They’ve got to go out and look, there’s numerous incredible qualified African-American coaches out there," Biden said. "For my administration, I made a commitment that I would have the most diverse administration in American history. I’ve kept that commitment. And what it does, it encourages and it emboldens and gives confidence to so many people who have been left out, so many people, and it is really really important.

"And look at the league, look at the incredible, incredible Black athletes playing in the NFL and throughout college and high school. It should give the people confidence that they can do anything. When I picked a Black woman to be vice president, I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of little girls just said I can do that. … It matters, It matters. And I don’t understand why they cannot find, because they exist. So many African-American coaches that are qualified that should be in the pros in my view."

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Biden told Gray before the game that he would "love" to have players back at the White House and the only thing that stood in the way is the coronavirus.

BIDEN TALKS OLYMPICS

FILE - In this June 3, 2020, photo, the Olympic rings float in the water at sunset in the Odaiba section in Tokyo. The year of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics has arrived. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)

The president was asked about the U.S. participating in the upcoming Summer Olympics. The Games were postponed to this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, the Winter Olympics in Beijing are also about a year away as well.

Biden told Gray he had been in talks with Japanese officials and that whether or not the Games go on as planned will have to be "based on science."

The president said he was thinking about how tough it would be for the athletes to be unable to play in the Games.

"I can't imagine what it would have been like when I was fighting like hell, I did not win it, fighting like hell to win the state scoring championship if the last two games have been canceled and I couldn't play. Imagine, imagine all those Olympians who work for four years, four years for one shot and all of a sudden that opportunity gets lost," he said. "They are the people that I feel such pain for, but we have to do it based on the science. We are a science-driven administration, I think the rest of the world's there too, I hope we can play, I hope it's possible, but it remains to be seen."