Just Scrap the Rooney Rule

No one follows it anyway.

By Shalise Manza Young

Dear Roger Goodell,

I know you’re busy this week, what with the festivities around the NFL’s annual bacchanal of capitalism disguised as a football game — known as the Super Bowl — but give me a couple of minutes of your time, if you will.

Don’t look scared, Roger. I think I’m actually going to do you a favor here.

Photo by Paolo Aldrighetti on Unsplash

Get rid of the Rooney Rule. Just get rid of it. Its stated aim is to increase the number of Black and ethnic minority head coaches, but it has become functionally useless, kind of like the U.S. Constitution is these days.

It’s been obvious to some of us for a long time, but after the current hiring cycle, which saw 10 teams — nearly a third of the league — bring aboard new head coaches and not a single one was Black (Robert Saleh, hired by Tennessee, is Lebanese), a cynic like me can only come to one conclusion:

It’s intentional.

The 2003 rule was created (during the tenure of your predecessor, the late Paul Tagliabue) only because lawyers Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran threatened to sue the NFL for racial discrimination. After Fritz Pollard was let go as player-coach of the Akron Pros in 1926, 60 years passed before another Black man — Art Shell, with the Raiders — got a head coaching job. In the 16 years between Shell’s hire and Mehri and Cochran approaching the league in 2002, only four more Black men got a chance.

The initial iteration of the rule required teams hiring a new head coach to interview at least one Black or minority candidate. Out of the gate, Tagliabue fined the Detroit Lions $200,000 for not interviewing an African American before hiring Steve Mariucci in 2003.

The Rooney Rule has undergone multiple amendments since, including teams being rewarded with a mid-round draft pick for developing a Black or minority coach or front-office executive who gets hired as a head coach or general manager elsewhere. I’d argue that it’s in every team’s interest to invest in all of its employees because their improvement can lead directly to more wins. But some of the owners to whom you answer thought a fix could be found in dangling a trinket, like a Bluey sticker for a toddler if she doesn’t have a meltdown at the dentist.

Unsurprisingly, none of the changes mattered. Numerous members of your owner class flout the rule to hire another retread, mediocre, white head coach or a had-success-as-a-coordinator-for-two-years upstart white coach who has a not-small chance of becoming mediocre.

And, Roger, you’ve played a role here. Remember at the end of the 2017 season when Raiders owner Mark Davis reached a contract agreement with Jon Gruden before he’d even fired Jack Del Rio — and admitted as much to reporters? Davis did “interviews” with two Black coaches who never would have been considered for head positions after making a deal with Gruden. You “investigated” and then — nothing. You did nothing to discipline Davis or the team.

That’s when you signaled to owners and execs that the rule was there but didn’t have to be followed.

So it’s probably not a coincidence that since that hiring cycle, teams have made 67 head coaching hires; 14, or 21%, were non-white, and that includes Saleh being hired twice, by Tennessee this year and the New York Jets in 2021. Eleven were Black.

As of today, in a league where around 55% of players are Black, only three of 32 teams have head coaches that look like the majority of their rosters. Two years ago, there were seven Black head coaches; not great, but better than three.

Right on cue, when asked about the results of the most recent hiring cycle at your usual Super Bowl week media conference, you offered, “We can do better.”

“Better” would mean there aren’t still 11 teams that have played a combined 643 seasons that have never had a Black head coach in their history. That includes the Giants, who played their centennial season in 2025. Since parting ways with Tom Coughlin at the end of the 2015 season, New York is on its seventh head coach, with John Harbaugh suiting up last month.

Seventh, Roger. Are we actually to believe that the Giants could not have found a Black man with the capability of leading the team to a 10-23 record over two seasons like Joe Judge did? Or a 9-23 mark like his predecessor, Pat Shurmur? Or maybe — this is going to blow your mind — they could have tried a Black man, and he might have gotten the team over .500! Crazy, right?

But we’ll never know, because New York seems to believe white is right when it comes to head coaching. It also took the Giants 92 years to start a Black quarterback, but I’m sure those two things are totally unrelated.

(A quick aside, Roger: did you know Giants co-owner Steve Tisch is in the latest tranche of Epstein files well over 400 times, with the convicted sex offender connecting Tisch with multiple women? And that Tisch asked Epstein if women were “pro or civilian” or a “working girl”? I know, I know you and your bosses, of whom Tisch is one, don’t really care. But it provides another glaring example of how you hold the players to a far higher standard than you do the members of your billionaire boys club. Just last month you fined a member of the Texans for wearing eyeblack that said “Stop the genocide.”)

But back to the Rooney Rule.

As James Baldwin said, “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”

So let’s stop with the pretense, Roger. Nearly every year you say the league can do better, and nearly every year we see there’s no change, and now we’re even starting to see regression.

So just get rid of the useless Rooney Rule.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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