No matter how you slice it, the NFL’s record when it comes to minority hires for coaching and general manager positions is shameful. At a time when the league’s population of players wavers around 70% every season, there are just two black general managers and four coaches of color, a 17-year low. By the end of the 2018 season, Cleveland’s Hue Jackson, Cincinnati’s Marvin Lewis, Arizona’s Steve Wilks, Denver’s Vance Joseph, and Todd Bowles of the Jets were all fired, and there’s been precious little movement to keep up the standard.
The Rooney Rule, which states that teams must interview people of color for vacant coaching and general manager positions, has mostly been an epic disaster, as token interviews have ruled the day. Thus, obviously qualified candidates like Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy have had to wait far too long for their deserved opportunities, while relative newcomers of a lighter pigmentation somehow rise up the ladder at an accelerated rate.
As first reported by NFL.com’s Jim Trotter, the NFL is now floating an idea that should both give more weight to an obvious problem, and create all kinds of reactions, both positive and negative. If the vote goes through, teams hiring coaches or general managers of color would be incentivized by more favorable draft positions.
From Trotter’s article:
If a team hires a minority head coach, that team, in the draft preceding the coach’s second season, would move up six spots from where it is slotted to pick in the third round. A team would jump 10 spots under the same scenario for hiring a person of color as its primary football executive, a position more commonly known as general manager.
If a team were to fill both positions with diverse candidates in the same year, that club could jump 16 spots — six for the coach, 10 for the GM — and potentially move from the top of the third round to the middle of the second round. Another incentive: a team’s fourth-round pick would climb five spots in the draft preceding the coach’s or GM’s third year if he is still with the team. That is considered significant because Steve Wilks and Vance Joseph, two of the four African-American head coaches hired since 2017, were fired after one and two seasons, respectively.
The league will also vote to eliminate the anti-tampering rule which currently permits teams to block their assistant coaches from interviewing for coordinator positions with other teams. Any disputes would be handled by Commissioner Roger Goodell.
In addition, any team hiring a person of color as its quarterbacks coach would receive a compensatory pick at the end of the fourth round if it retains that employee beyond one season. This is important because, as Trotter points out, there are only two quarterback coaches of color in the league right now — Pep Hamilton of the Chargers and Marcus Brady of the Colts — and 24 of the last 33 head coaching hires have come from coaches on the offensive side of the staff.
The league is also looking to expand the Rooney Rule by doubling the number of minority candidates that must be interviewed for established positions under that rule, and expanding the rule to include assistant coaches for the first time.
“I think where we are right now, is not where we want to be, not where we need to be,” Steelers owner Art Rooney II told Steve Wyche of the NFL Network in January. “We need to take a step back and look at what’s happening with our hiring processes. The first thing we’ll do as part of our diversity committee is really review this past season’s hiring cycle and make sure we understand what went on and talk to the people involved both on the owners’ side, management’s side as well as the people that were interviewed.
“The thing I think we have to look at is back when the Rooney Rule was passed and put in effect in 2003, there was a period there where we did see an increase in minority hiring at the head coaching position. And I think over a period of time there were 10 or 12 minority coaches hired. Since then that trend seems to reverse itself particularly in the last few years. We need to study what’s going on and understand better what’s going on and really decide how we improve the situation.”
There’s a lot to work out here if the vote goes through. There are elements of the “ready, fire, aim” paradigm that marks most of Goodell’s proposals, and opposition is likely to come from all kinds of sides. But it’s also true that the NFL has allowed itself to become shamefully one-dimensional when it comes to diversity, and the Rooney Rule was never going to be any more than a spackle job. The NFL can’t change the viewpoints of its owners, and it can’t go out and demand more enlightened owners, but perhaps the idea of incentive will be more appealing than low-level punishment.