On the occasion of Black History Month, ESPN.com takes a look at the state of our games. Each sport has made its own advances in racial equality, but each also has its own challenges still to face. Today, Tom Oates looks at the tension created when the Green Bay Packers fired Ray Rhodes, an African American, after one season.

On the surface, there's a problem.

	Ray Rhodes went 8-8 in his one season in Green Bay.

Below the surface, there's a problem, too.

But the problem, while very real, isn't as simple as saying that the white owners and white general managers who run NFL teams flat-out refuse to hire black men as head coaches in the year 2000.

Granted, the numbers say otherwise. Since Tony Dungy was hired by the Buccaneers on Jan. 22 1996, there have been 32 head coaches hired by NFL teams. Only one -- Ray Rhodes in Green Bay -- was black.

You don't need a Harris poll to see that this represents a trend. It also represents a significant problem.

A league in which 70 percent of the players and one-third of the coaches are black was left with only two black head coaches -- Dungy and the Vikings' Dennis Green -- when the Packers dismissed Rhodes after one season. Black candidates went 0-for-7 on the job openings this year, raising howls of protest when qualified coaches such as Art Shell and Willie Shaw were passed over.

Black coaches consider the NFL's hiring process for head coaches to be biased, because team executives ultimately hire people with whom they are comfortable. Often, that means old coaching buddies or close friends in the business.

Indeed, one look at this year's seven hires shows the good-old-boy network is alive and well in the NFL. Every new coach had worked previously with the man primarily responsible for doing the hiring.

Black coaches are also worried, and rightly so, about a new trend in which teams contractually name a successor before a head coach even quits. It happened this year with the Rams' Mike Martz and the Jets' Bill Belichick (although Belichick ended up with the Patriots). And the Dolphins' job was open for about 5 minutes before Dave Wannstedt was elevated to replace Jimmy Johnson, an indication that it was planned all along.

Teams see this as preserving an asset on their staff. Black coaches, on the other hand, see it as the latest method devised by teams to sidestep the issue of hiring a black coach. When jobs are closed before they become open, it shuts out black candidates from the interview process. And if you can't get interviewed, you can't get hired.

Despite the great success of Green in Minnesota and Dungy at Tampa Bay, the evidence is mounting that there are still people in the NFL afraid to put a black man in a position of authority. However, to paint every team, every executive, every hire with such a broad brush simply doesn't make sense.

This issue is far too complex to be viewed in such terms. There are many factors that go into hiring a head coach, chief among them familiarity, availability, track record and finding the right fit. With the stakes -- i.e. dollars and job security -- so high in the NFL these days, owners and general managers are becoming less inclined to take a risk and more likely to hire someone they know.

Since most new head coaches come from one of two piles -- recycled head coaches or up-and-coming coordinators -- it stands to reason that most of the hires will be white. That's because almost all of the former head coaches and the majority of the coordinators are white.

Evidence suggests that this is changing. In 1994, there were only five black coordinators in the NFL. Last season, there were 12. The NFL would say that's a sign the process is working. Black coaches would say it's working very slowly, if at all.

Their lack of patience, however, might be hindering the process rather than speeding it up.

Take the Packers, for instance. Under general manager Ron Wolf, they compiled an enviable track record of hiring blacks to fill their administrative-level coaching positions during the 1990s.

In 1992, they became the first NFL team with two black coordinators when head coach Mike Holmgren brought Rhodes and Sherm Lewis with him from San Francisco.

In 1998, they became the first NFL team to recycle a black head coach when they hired Rhodes, who had been fired after four seasons with the Eagles, the last one a 3-13 disaster.

A few weeks later, they became the first NFL team to put blacks in all three positions of power when Rhodes retained Lewis and hired Emmitt Thomas to be his defensive coordinator.

Despite this unmatched record of hiring blacks for important positions, the Packers still found themselves on the wrong end of the race card when they fired Rhodes and his entire staff after one season.

Charles Farrell, director of Rainbow Sports, an arm of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH, wondered aloud whether Rhodes was held to a higher standard than a white coach would have been, that a white man wouldn't have been fired after one 8-8 season.

While there were plenty of people in Wisconsin who thought Rhodes should have been given more time, no one who understands the Packers franchise would call it racist. In fact, the Packers have bent over backward since 1992 in an effort to make the organization attractive for black players and coaches.

Of course, it is easy for someone unfamiliar with the Packers' record to jump to conclusions. Farrell admitted his only knowledge of the situation came from perusing newspapers on the Internet, and he clearly misread the facts. Under a microscope, a different story is revealed.

With the Packers, the football decisions are made by one man -- Wolf. He enjoys more autonomy in Green Bay than any general manager in the league. Therefore, anyone who plays the race card on the Packers is, in effect, playing it on Wolf.

By suggesting that Rhodes was held to a different standard because of his race, Farrell ignored Wolf's track record in the 1990s. Does it stand to reason that Wolf would allow race to enter into his decision to fire Rhodes just a year after he ignored race when he hired him? Not likely.

You see, Wolf, like many NFL general managers, operates by feel. He isn't concerned about pushing any social agenda, good or bad. He's only concerned about winning, about keeping the Packers among the league's elite teams. He's consumed by it.

It was Wolf's feeling in 1999 that Rhodes' head-coaching experience made him the right man to provide continuity for a talented, successful, veteran team even though Rhodes had bombed in Philadelphia. And it was his feeling in 2000 that Rhodes had failed to provide that continuity because he was too soft on the players.

Two weeks later, it was Wolf's feeling that the Packers needed a disciplinarian to undo the damage Rhodes had done. Therefore, he made another risky hire in Mike Sherman, an obscure assistant coach under Holmgren in Green Bay and Seattle.

Shortly thereafer, the Rev. Jackson told Sports Illustrated that the slow pace of black coaching hires is a result of "a culture driven by white supremacists." Later, he said "there is one standard for choosing coaches in the National Football League and another standard for choosing players."

It took Tampa Bay's Dungy, level-headed as usual, to inject some sanity into the discussion. Dungy took issue with the Rainbow-PUSH group's inquiries into the firing of Rhodes, saying it is other, less-progressive teams that should be chastised.

"I don't neccesarily think that was the right way to go," Dungy said. "They hired the guy, and, for whatever reason, they decided not to continue with it. I think we need to look at the situations where they don't hire people, as opposed to the Packers' situation."

People like Farrell and Jackson have every right to be concerned, even indignant, about what transpired this winter in the NFL. In fact, it's their job. Moreover, no sane person would argue that the NFL is up to speed when it comes to equal opportunity in coaching. In fact, its track record overall is abominable.

However, critics should know by now that unfounded rhetoric damages real efforts to improve minority hiring in sports. If people make it difficult for teams to fire a minority, they also will make it difficult for minorities to get hired in the first place.

Tom Oates of the Wisconsin State Journal is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.