The Rooney Rule Didn’t Solve the NFL’s Hiring Issues

32 NFL teams
31 NFL team owners
1,696 players on starting rosters
1,183 players of color on those starting rosters
2 African American head coaches
0 African American majority team owners

This is the National Football League.

In 2003, the NFL, commonly known as The Shield, instituted a new policy known as the “Rooney Rule.” Created in an attempt to address the league’s lack of diversity in hiring practices, the rule requires that every NFL team must interview at least one candidate of color for any open head coaching position. Since the rule’s implementation, of the 121 open head coaching positions, there have only been a total of 18 African Americans hired as head coaches.

Brian Flores, one of those 18, was head coach of the Miami Dolphins from 2019 until he was unexpectedly fired earlier this year after three seasons for “organizational strife,” as suggested by team owner Stephen Ross. During his time, Flores led the Dolphins to two consecutive winning seasons — a feat no other coach in Miami has been able to accomplish since 2002. A few weeks after his firing, on Feb. 1, Flores sent shockwaves across the world of sports when he filed a class action lawsuit against the NFL and three teams, Miami Dolphins, Denver Broncos, and New York Giants, alleging racial discrimination in their head coach hiring practices, alongside other damning allegations.

Flores, who interviewed with both the Denver Broncos and the New York Giants for head coaching positions, alleges that then-Broncos General Manager John Elway and two other team executives showed up an hour late to the interview, looking “disheveled” and that “it was obvious they had been heavily drinking the night before.” Flores referred to these interviews as a “sham,” meant only to fulfill the league’s quota in interviewing minority candidates for head coaching positions. Further allegations from Flores accuse the owner of the Miami Dolphins, Stephen Ross, of offering to pay him $100,000 per game to purposely lose games, so that the team could receive a higher draft pick.

We’ve seen these types of allegations before. In 2019, former head coach of the Cleveland Browns Hue Jackson alleged that the bonuses he was paid were for losing games and that the team didn't make an effort to develop or acquire players to improve the team. Both team owners Stephen Ross and Jimmy Haslam have denied these accusations. One particular theory to explain the claims of Jackson and Flores, known as the “glass cliff theory” argues that “members of underrepresented groups are most likely to be hired by organizations that have a history of poor performance or that are in crisis.” In other words, both Jackson and Flores were both hired by teams with a history of poor performances, in order to take the fall.

Flores’s situation exemplifies how people of color, and African American coaches in particular, are treated as the most expendable and the most undervalued when it comes to leadership roles. So why is it, in a league with majority African American talent in playing positions (71% in the 2021 season), that African American coaches are routinely overlooked, coerced to fail on purpose, or dismissed? Brian Flores’s lawsuit has exposed the widespread discontent among African American and POC coaches over NFL hiring practices.

But these racist hiring practices are not just limited to the NFL. In a controversial television interview in April 1986, Al Campanais, the then-vice president and director of player personnel of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, infamously said that, “They [Black people] may not have the necessities to be a field manager or perhaps a general manager.” This type of myopic thinking has been passed along for generations throughout various sporting leagues. Similar to the Rooney Rule, Major League Baseball (MLB) instituted the “Selig Rule” in 1999, requiring at least one minority candidate to be interviewed for every managerial or front office opening. The MLB is still a majority white sport, and the rule has made candidates of color feel like a box to check off rather than a real option.

So why is it, in a league with majority African American talent in playing positions… that African American coaches are routinely overlooked, coerced to fail on purpose, or dismissed?

The National Basketball Association (NBA), another majority African American player league at approximately 73 percent, currently has only one African American majority team owner: Michael Jordan. Jordan was preceded as majority team owner by Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, as the first African American majority owner in the NBA. Comparatively, the NFL does not have a single African American majority team owner. And the racial injustices are perpetuated on all levels, not only within the team’s coaching and managerial staffs. Players also face discriminatory treatment. There is unmentioned conventional thinking that athletes of color should just shut up and play the game, or just be happy that they are making large sums of money, and they shouldn’t use their status or voice to advocate for an injustice, preserving the laborer-vs.-owner mentality.

Colin Kaepernick sacrificed his NFL career in order to speak out against injustice, while playing in a league that practiced inequality in its hiring. Not only are current players mistreated, former players also experience continued racism when it comes to medical settlements for injuries sustained during their playing years. In June of 2021, the NFL finally agreed to stop the controversial practice of "race norming," which assumed that African American athletes started with lower cognitive functions than white athletes. The NFL’s use of race norming made headlines last summer when two former players filed a lawsuit against the NFL for its application to concussion settlements for former players. African American players were deliberately paid less for brain diseases developed as a result of prolonged head injuries sustained from the sport because doctors applied “African American normative corrections” to players’ cognitive function tests.

Since his firing and filing his lawsuit, Brian Flores has been hired by the Pittsburgh Steelers as a senior defensive assistant and linebackers coach, joining one of the few Black head coaches in the league, Mike Tomlin. But even with this new role, one that he is surely overqualified for, Flores plans to move forward with the lawsuit “so that real change can be made.”

When will this end? Will Flores’s lawsuit bring about actual change? In sports there are so many instances of a system that keeps allowing white men to dominate all spaces, including predominantly POC spaces. Systemic racism that is perpetuated through societal norms is reflected in our country’s biggest sporting leagues, from the NFL to the NCAA, to the National Hockey League, professional golf, NASCAR, and more.

At its core, the agenda of the league and its owners is clear: a desire for financial gain and to keep an unrelenting grip on power that continuously reinforces and widens the wealth and class gap in this country.

This is the world of sports, this is the NFL, this is The Shield.

The Shield has been tarnished.

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