The Rooney Rule is supposed to ensure that candidates of color get a fair shot in the hiring process, but it's devolved into a sham.
By SAMER KALAF
January 13, 2020
The Rooney Rule, a policy that requires any team in the National Football League to interview at least one diverse candidate for any open head coach or senior executive position, was introduced in 2003, not due to the NFL’s benevolence (as ESPN personality Bomani Jones has reminded everyone) but because the year before, magniloquent lawyer Johnnie Cochran and attorney Cyrus Mehri threatened to sue the league for discrimination. They had good cause: In 2002, Herm Edwards of the New York Jets and Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts were the only two head coaches of color in the NFL.
Were you to update some of the proper nouns in the latter half of this 18-year-old column by David Teel of the Daily Press, describing the conflict that Cochran and Mehri kick-started, it could serve as a chronicle of the current-day situation. There has been no permanent improvement. It’s not a complicated mystery why the NFL is failing to advance minority candidates into leadership roles, and it has become abundantly clear that the Rooney Rule alone does not generate enough force to solve the problem.
The last two years of hirings and firings are a damning sample. At the beginning of the 2018 season, the 32-team NFL had eight head coaches of color, the most in its history. That December, the league announced it would be introducing four “enhancements” to the Rooney Rule, the most significant being that clubs would be required to interview at least one diverse candidate outside of their organization. By the end of that season’s Black Monday, the informal name for the day when underwhelming teams usually choose to can their underwhelming leaders, three coaches of color remained. Some of those firings made sense; some fell on the sword for their bosses. Five white guys, most of whom were similar in some respect to Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay, another white guy who had captivated the league, took their spots.
Brian Flores of the Miami Dolphins was the only head coach of color hired that off-season, joining Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Ron Rivera of the Carolina Panthers, and Anthony Lynn of the Los Angeles Chargers. Flores works under Chris Grier, currently the only black general manager in the NFL. Those two have a raw deal, as the Dolphins’ plan this past season was to trade as many talented players as possible for future picks and tank their season in pursuit of the best position in the 2020 draft. After a 0-7 start, the resulting roster screwed up this objective by finishing the year with five victories. Flores deserves credit for taking a team with practically no talent and getting it to topple two playoff-bound teams in the regular season, even though he was intentionally set up to fail.
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