Super Bowl

Biden on Masks, NFL Hiring, and a Super Bowl Prediction

President Joe Biden, picture, speaks with Lester Holt during a pre-Super Bowl interview set to air on Feb. 13, 2022.
Nightly News With Lester Holt

President Joe Biden thinks the Rams will be tough to beat.

In a snippet of an interview recorded on Thursday, Joe Biden answered questions from NBC Nightly News host Lester Holt on COVID precautions, NFL hiring, and his Super Bowl prediction.

Should fans in the stands at the Super Bowl wear masks?

"I love how people talk about personal freedom," Biden said. "If you’re exercising personal freedom puts someone else in jeopardy, their health in jeopardy, I don’t consider that being very pro-freedom.

"It’s about moving in the direction you know is likely to diminish the prospects that this virus continues to spread. I think people should get the shots - we know the shots work, we know they work for the variants that we are dealing with now, we know we have so many more tools at our disposal to prevent death and to prevent serious illness."

Should the NFL be held to a higher standard in hiring coaches of color?

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"I think it should be held to a reasonable standard," Biden said. "The commissioner pointed out they haven’t lived up to what they committed to, haven’t lived up to being open about hiring more minorities to run teams.

"The whole idea that a league that is made up of so many athletes of color, as well as so diverse, that there’s not enough African American qualified coaches to manage these NFL teams? It just seems to me that would be a standard that they’d want to live up to. I know there’s not a requirement of law, but a requirement of generic decency."

Who will win the big game?

"My teams are out," Biden said. "I love this young quarterback from Cincinnati. He’s an Ohio boy who can make everybody happy. But I think Los Angeles is going to be hard to beat."

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