Buffalo Bills Make History by Hiring First Full-Time Female Coach

I think we’re on track to deliver that.

“The fact she has been around for a long time is important”, Carberg said. Do it. Do it, you moron!

That’s high praise for a first-time coach whose only experience to draw on, other than his playing career, is running his annual football camp. Doesn’t matter if the critic has only played the game on Madden NFL.

Bills coach Rex Ryan remembers the first moment he had an inkling of Kathryn Smith’s potential to one day become an assistant coaching candidate. Surely there were some who huffed and puffed when that news broke this week. “Is it an entry-level position in the coaching field?”

Buffalo Bills announced Kathryn Smith as their special teams quality control coach on Wednesday night, making her the first full-time female coach in the NFL’s history. “Within five or six years, he may very well be a head coach in this league”, Ryan told BuffaloBills.com this week. “So I’m looking forward to learning, but at the same time I won’t forget the things I learned as a player”. “When she was a manager, it was her work ethic”.

“She is really all about the team, how she can help and all that, regardless of the job we have asked her to do”.

Is she the first female assistant NFL?

Ryan promoted Smith after consulting with Cardinals coach Bruce Arians. “They start as an assistant in some regard to a coach, and then the next step is to become a quality control coach and go from there”. While there is some actual field work with their assigned position coach, most of a quality control coach’s duties involve opponent-specific game preparation, often weeks in advance.

Haley, like Smith, never played football, but he’s busy these days as offensive coordinator of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The NFL’s history of hiring women, and the league’s history of domestic abuse, mean the move is nearly inconsequential in terms of the work that needs to be done to change attitudes around the sport.

National Basketball Association had their first full-time paid female assistant coach when in August 2014, former WNBA player Becky Hammon was hired by the San Antonio Spurs to join coach Gregg Popovich’s staff. Last month, the Seattle Mariners hired Amanda Hopkins as an area scout.

What makes Smith different is the challenge of dealing with football players directly and at their foulest. You got to be on point because if the input is wrong on what you are breaking down and what you are putting together then the output is wrong and what we get.

It ain’t rocket science, though now that we mention it, women had no major difficulty conquering the final frontier of space, either.