A rule named for the late Pittsburgh Steelers president Dan Rooney is at the forefront of efforts to diversify coaching and front offices in the National Football League.
It’s also proved controversial, both among those who call it ineffective and those who say it’s unfair to white people, who still hold the vast majority of head coaching jobs in the league.
On Thu., April 17, Dan Rooney’s son Jim Rooney and sport-laws expert N. Jeremi Duru will hold a public conversation on the Rooney Rule at Point Park’s Pittsburgh Playhouse, Downtown. The event, hosted by Andy Conte of the school’s Center for Media Innovation, is part of the Playhouse’s Backstage/Onstage series.
The Rooney Rule was adopted by the NFL in 2003, and named for Rooney, who chaired the league’s Workplace Diversity Committee. While the NFL at that point had had only a handful of Black head coaches, the rule was largely prompted by a study by civil rights attorneys Cyrus Mehri and Johnny Cochran, which showed that Black head coaches had higher winning percentages but were less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired than white coaches.
The rule was subsequently broadened to include some front office positions and other top coaching roles. NFL teams now must interview at least two minority candidates for vacant head coach, GM and coordinator positions.
By many measures, the rule has been a success. As of 2003, the league, which had not a single Black head coach between 1921 and 1989, had hired only seven more. But in the dozen years after the rule’s adoption, it hired 13. And the number of non-white head coaches has reached as high as 10 in any given year in the 32-team league. In the season just past, the number was nine.
“Clubs in applying the rule were finding that there were candidates that they could consider that they really hadn’t thought about before, and a lot of those candidates started to get the jobs,” said Duru, who teaches at American University and wrote the 2011 book “Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL.”
Still, given that about 70% of NFL players are Black, some critics contend that the Rooney Rule has not achieved its aims.
“The NFL’s use of the Rooney Rule has produced more misses than hits in diversifying the NFL’s head coaching ranks,” wrote the Washington Post's Julian Mark in a 2024 article. In January, a columnist for Forbes argued the rule was well intentioned but ineffective and even harmful because teams already often know whom they’ll hire for open positions, and interview minority candidates just to satisfy the rule.
Jim Rooney acknowledged “sham interviews” have been a problem. But he noted that the ranks of NFL scouts and coaches have seen, in any given year, an increase of up to 40% in women and minorities.
The Rooney Rule, he said, isn’t the lone reason for that growth. But, he said, “It certainly was a marker and changed the conversation and created a sort of name and a nomenclature of this is something we want to happen.”
Still, even the Post article acknowledged that the Rooney Rule’s influence has spread. “Hundreds of companies have adopted some form of the Rooney Rule since 2003,” wrote Julian Mark. “Many Fortune 500 companies go further, with some requiring that as many as three-quarters of job contenders come from underrepresented groups, or offering incentives to select them.”
Meanwhile, other critics have called the Rooney Rule discriminatory.
In early 2024, the NFL became one of the corporate entities targeted by America First Legal, a group founded by Stephen Miller, who today is again serving as President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy. The AFL wrote to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requesting an investigation of the NFL over the Rooney Rule.
The EEOC has not acted on that request. Jim Rooney, whose work to extend his father’s legacy includes his 2024 book “A Different Way to Win,” disagrees that the Rooney Rule promotes discrimination.
“Wherever you see the pushback it is driven by political factors,” he said. “I haven’t seen business schools come out in a major way and say this is a poor management process or hiring process.”
Tim Stevens, CEO of Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project (B-PEP), said the group’s long-running Corporate Equity and Inclusion Roundtable, which seeks improved job opportunities for Black people in the region, adopted and expanded the concepts behind the Rooney Rule to bolster its approach to employers.
“We were proud that it was the Pittsburgh Steelers … moving this into action across the nation through the NFL teams,” Stevens said.
Duru, the law professor, said he believes the Rooney Rule would stand up to legal challenges, mostly because it governs the interview process, not who ultimately gets hired.
“It’s an initiative that demands opportunity, it’s an initiative that requires you allow folks in the door to give it their best shot,” he said. “It’s hard to argue that it’s wrong for everybody to be given an opportunity.”
