White cornerback, Black QB: did the Eagles grab the ultimate DEI Super Bowl win?

Observers have jokingly pointed to Cooper DeJean as a diversity hire for the NFL champions. But they have succeeded by challenging outdated ways of thinking. By now, those who watched Sunday’s Super Bowl have most likely forgotten about the house ads promoting racial and cultural unity. That’s no doubt because a much stronger statement was delivered midway through the second quarter when a pass by the Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes was intercepted and returned for an touchdown by Philadelphia’s Cooper DeJean.

DeJean, the first white player to start at cornerback in a Super Bowl in 24 years, has cheekily been described by media figures such as Bomani Jones as the league’s ultimate DEI hire. But while those comments have been made with tongues firmly planted in cheeks, there is some merit in describing the Eagles’ victory as a win for diversity, equity and inclusion – something that suddenly finds itself under attack in America.

After all, Super Bowl LIX was never going to be just a game, not with the cultural storm brewing around the contest – not least Kendrick Lamar’s politically charged half-time show. But no force carried more momentum than the Chiefs coming into Sunday. They weren’t just playing for a third successive championship. They were carrying the mantle of America’s team in the second era of Donald Trump, who became the first sitting US president to attend a Super Bowl. At the same time, the NFL removed its longstanding antiracism slogans from the field, perhaps fearing Trump – who left the game early – would make it into yet another DEI issue to grandstand about.

There was no question which team the president came to see in New Orleans. Mahomes’s mother and brother took pictures with Trump. In the week before the game, the Chiefs’ star tight end Travis Kelce gushed about playing in front of the president despite Trump once writing in all caps that he hated the player’s girlfriend, Taylor Swift, after she threw her support behind Kamala Harris in the presidential election. Trump picked Kansas City to three-peat, called Mahomes “a winner” and referred to his wife, accurately, as a “Maga fan.” Trump praised Chiefs fans for voting for him “in record numbers,” even though polling data shows Harris received substantially more votes in Kansas City’s more populous Missouri counties. And yet: from their wantonly offensive tomahawk chop cheer to the kicker who is besties with Maga senator Josh Hawley to the fact that the team plays in red, the Chiefs couldn’t appear in more lockstep with a Maga movement that’s hellbent on erasing 60 years of DEI gains. So it’s fitting that the most forceful rejection of this new political normal would come from Philadelphia, a city that hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1932.

Philly sports fans don’t bow down to authority. They buck it. They (allegedly) booed Santa Claus and throw batteries at players they don’t like, whether on the opposite side or on theirs. They’re righteous in their loyalty and committed to their freedom of expression. They flooded downtown streets after the Eagles booked their Super Bowl ticket and climbed light poles that the city greased in advance to deter them. Dressed in their greenest finery on Sunday, Eagles fans descended on downtown New Orleans in the tens of thousands to boo the president, boo Mahomes and bear witness to a football insurrection. That the Eagles happen to be among the most diverse, equitable and inclusive teams in sports just made their upset all the sweeter.

DEI is integral to the Eagles, an equal opportunity destroyer of dynasties. They enjoy doing things differently: seven years ago they stopped the New England Patriots from winning a second successive championship partly thanks to a trick play with a backup quarterback who caught the decisive pass. The team’s owner, Jeffrey Lurie, recently produced a film about an undocumented immigrant artist, a story he said he was “proud” to portray on screen. After lifting the Lombardi Trophy on Sunday, Lurie made a point of shouting out 200-plus members of the Eagles “support staff you’ll never hear about.” Among them is Autumn Lockwood, an Eagles performance guru who joined the team in 2023, becoming the first Black woman ever to be part of a Super Bowl-winning coaching staff.

The DEI – as many joke – cuts both ways. For the better part of two decades no NFL team featured a white cornerback, as white prospects have historically been stereotyped as too slow and clumsy to play a position that requires lightning speed and agility. But then last year the Eagles bucked convention and drafted DeJean out of Iowa, where he ranked among college football’s most outstanding defenders. By midseason DeJean emerged in the Eagles starting lineup along with safety Reed Blankenship, Philadelphia’s other white defensive back. Any time they make a big play fans cheer the Eagles’ “Exciting Whites,” nodding at the meme photograph of a supermarket wine section sign of the same name. DeJean and Blankenship’s suffocating coverage in the Super Bowl was part of a bruising effort that yielded arguably Mahomes’s worst performance as a pro to date. His two garbage-time touchdowns may have raised his final numbers, but they won’t erase the stain.