Tampa Bay Buccaneers assistant Harold Goodwin reacts to Eugene Chung claim — ‘Process has been pretty hard’ for minority coaches

TAMPA, Fla. — Tampa Bay Buccaneers assistant head coach/run sport coordinator Harold Goodwin provided his assist to former NFL offensive lineman and assistant coach Eugene Chung after Chung’s revelation that he was referred to as “not the best sort of minority” throughout an NFL teaching interview.

“Being a minority on this league, there’s ups and downs, and we all know the method has been fairly onerous for us at occasions,” Goodwin stated Thursday. “However we’ve received to maintain preventing the great battle. Hopefully the NFL will examine and unravel it and simply transfer on and make the entire state of affairs higher so we are able to put this difficulty to mattress for one time within the close to future.”

Chung, who’s Korean American, stated throughout a webinar final month that he was informed he was “actually not a minority” throughout the interview. He has declined to call the staff concerned publicly, however the NFL has stated it’s investigating the incident.

Goodwin, who’s Black, has been publicly outspoken on the league’s hiring practices towards minority candidates previously. It may be uncommon for coaches to talk out, as some concern it might curtail future job alternatives.

An NFL assistant since 2004 and a coordinator since 2013, Goodwin stated in 2019 that NFL staff homeowners weren’t all the time current for his head-coaching interviews, which signaled to him that groups weren’t taking his candidacy severely and have been merely satisfying the letter of the Rooney Rule.

“One of the best factor for me is simply to talk my fact,” Goodwin stated. “No matter occurs to me as a coach, as a husband, as a father, is as much as God. All I can do is converse from the underside of my coronary heart, and I’ve executed that previously. We as minorities within the NFL have gone by way of this for years on high of years. And it’s persevering with to be a topic.

“… It’s simply as much as us as coaches to maintain placing our faces on the market, to maintain placing our work on tape and to only maintain striving to get to the desk, to have the conversations to presumably be a head coach or a GM or no matter it could be. That’s how we received to stay. We will’t stand up, so far as being too excessive or being too low, so far as the state of affairs. Simply maintain stepping ahead each day and simply attempting to get higher, to place ourselves in positions to have that entry on the higher stage of the membership.”