It seems Jen Welter's history-making hire by the Arizona Cardinals as a coaching intern for the team's 2015 training camp has not only been met with an "overwhelmingly positive" reaction from the rest of the NFL's 31 other franchises, but it may actually induce a new era of female-forward football.
"In talking to three general managers around the league, all of them said that this is a great thing for the NFL and they were interested to see how it works out," Jason Cole of Bleacher Report said Tuesday. "Their issue is; they just haven't had a lot of candidates apply. In fact, none of the three GMs have ever seen a woman apply for a coaching job before this, so they're interested to know how many qualified women there are out there."
It seems, per Cole, that the success of Welter's football forebears like Dot Murphy at Hinds Community College in Mississippi, Carol Frost, a high school coach and offensive coordinator and mother of Oregon offensive coordinator Scott Frost, former Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson's daughter, Linda Bogdan, who, at the time of her death in April 2009 was the vice president and assistant director of college and pro scouting for the Bills and the only active female scout in the NFL, and Welter's own achievements as a linebackers and special team coach with the professional indoor league team, the Texas Revolution, have some NFL personnel executives intrigued with the potential for women to take on integral coaching roles with the league moving forward.
"However, there's just been no one to apply for these jobs before that for those three teams in particular," said Cole. "And what all of those teams want to know is; how many women are out there who have the qualifications and understand what needs to be done to be a coach at the NFL level and is this place where you can develop coaches?"
Welter's six-week assignment with the Cardinals and Sarah Thomas' hiring as the league's first full-time female official will likely go a long way towards showing the collective NFL world that women are just as capable of roaming a sideline and directing players as any of their male counterparts.
Things seem to be changing for the better in an NFL where domestic violence and issues of an abusive nature have become more the rule than the exception in recent years. It's not an answer and there's work to be done, but it's a step. Let's hope it continues.
