The Rooney Rule Presentation

On Friday I attended a presentation by Dr. Cho’s graduate class on the Rooney Rule. The Rooney Rule is a regulation by the league that was created to make sure that minority coaches were considered for head coaching positions. Basically, the rule requires teams to interview a minority candidate for any head coaching or GM position vacancy. As they talked about in the presentation, prior to 2006 only 8 minority head coaches were hired in the NFL which is absolutely ridiculous in my opinion. With so few minorities being hired, the candidates started to question more and more about why they weren’t getting jobs. Once they came up with the conclusion that it might have been due to race, the NFL decided to implement what became known as the Rooney Rule in 2006 to avoid class-action suits. Since the Rooney Rule was put in action, the overall percentage of minority coaches jumped to around 22% in 2006. Although it seemed like the Rooney Rule was going to do some good things, more recently, at the end of last year’s football season, no minority coaches or general managers were hired to fill the 15 vacancies that became available. After hearing that, I personally believe that some of the owner’s that hire these head coaches and gm’s are racist. I don’t know how 15 different positions can become available and not one minority coach is qualified enough to fill that role. If I was the gm and my best candidate for the position was I minority, I certainly would choose the minority over the less qualified Caucasian. My beliefs are, no matter what race, religion, gender, etc you are, if you’re the best person available for the job then you will get it. With this being said, I feel like the NFL teams are just interviewing minority coaches in order to just comply with the rule and not get in trouble. I think that is totally wrong and some changes should be made to make the rule better and even more fair for minority coaches. The graduate class proposed 4 different options to try and make the rule better, but the ones that I liked the best were proposal #1 and #4. If #1 was to be enacted then teams would have to explain why the specific minority coach was selected for an interview with the team. Also, after the interview took place, if the minority candidate was not chosen, the team would have to explain why he was not selected. I like this idea because it makes the NFL teams explain why exactly he was chosen for an interview and if he doesn’t end up getting chosen, then teams also have to say why and not just assume it was because of race. This could help eliminate those random interviews with minorities just to meet the requirements of the league and to not really care in hiring a minority coach if that is truly the reason. Lastly, the other proposal I liked was have a consulting group that works alongside the NFL owners to provide them with a list of candidates to interview. I like this idea, because it tells the teams what coaches they have to interview because they would fit their style of play or game plans. This proposal again helps to eliminate random interviews just to fulfill the leagues rules and not get fined or punished.

 

By Josh Gibson