The Rooney Rule first came into force ahead of the 2003 regular season after the firing of head coaches Tony Dungy and Dennis Green. Green and Dungy were only the third and fifth Black or African-American coaches hired back then. The black coaches had statistically higher winning percentages than their white NFL counterparts and were still more prone to be fired.
The percentage of African-American or Black head coaches in the league increased from 6% to 22% within three seasons following the implementation of the rule, albeit the consistency didn’t continue as some black coaches still faced discrimination. The rule was questioned over time and the outgoing executive director of the NFL Players Association DeMaurice Smith was the latest one to oppose it.
What is the Rooney Rule?
The 20-year-old Rooney Rule is named after the former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and former chairman of the NFL’s diversity committee Dan Rooney as he first initiated it back in 2002. It requires all NFL teams to interview at least one minority candidate for head coaching positions and it was later expanded to include other positions and more provisions.
The NFL modified the rule to include general manager jobs and equivalent front-office positions in 2009 and again made another change in 2018 to add four more rules to ensure more equitable hiring practices.
The league modified the rule once again in 2020 by changing its anti-tampering policy and some more modifications came later in 2021 to interview at least two external minority candidates for GM/football executive positions and all coordinator positions as well as in 2022 to include women as a part of the rule.
NFLPA director DeMaurice Smith calls for scrapping the rule
DeMaurice, an executive director of the NFLPA for 14 years, didn’t halt back from vouching for his words regarding the controversial rule and recently co-authored an article with Carl Lasker, a third-year student at Yale Law School, highlighting why the league should abandon the current Rooney Rule. It would be published in the Yale Law and Policy Review.
The article suggested replacing the Rooney rule and shared 12 overall recommendations to ensure more diversity in hiring among coaching staff and front offices saying, “should adopt a consistent, fair, transparent, and lawful system by which all NFL teams must comply with respect to hiring and retention.”
In their nearly 100-page paper, Smith and Lasker questioned the NFL’s effectiveness and said to reform the broken situation, the league must abolish the rule to ensure equality, fairness, and diversity in the system,
“The NFL‘s system is broken. To fix it, owners need to abandon the Rooney Rule as a failure and replace their unchecked discretion with comprehensive requirements to eliminate discrimination, ensure fairness, improve diversity, and build an equitable, transparent, and accountable system.”
They also said the league isn’t subject to government oversight or requirements even though it gets many concessions from the government over the period.
Unfortunately, the NFL likely won’t be interested in thinking to change until they face huge pressures from a relevant governmental body or a massive verdict in open court. Still, the effort of Smith and Lasker to compel meaningful change might trigger the authority to have logical thinking regarding the controversial rule.
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