Strengthening the NFL’s Rooney Rule

There’s no question the Rooney Rule has changed the NFL’s culture. When Mike Tomlin this month led the Pittsburgh Steelers to their second Super Bowl appearance in his first four seasons as a head coach, at least some of the buzz was about his success — not only that he’s African American.

Reaching this point was a long, difficult road, which N. Jeremi Duru explains in his outstanding new book, “Advancing The Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL.” Duru, a Temple University law professor, details the history of the process that resulted in the Rooney Rule, which was named after Steelers owner Dan Rooney.

The rule, in place since 2003 for head coaches and expanded in 2009 to include general manager jobs and equivalent front-office positions, mandates that NFL teams interview at least one minority candidate for job openings. It was aimed at increasing diversity in the management ranks of a league in which the overwhelming majority of players are black.

The rule gave owners the first league-wide tool to potentially make hiring more inclusive. The outcome generally has been favorable; minorities have made strides in filling key positions.

But in light of the questions that were raised about whether the Washington Redskins and Seattle Seahawks adhered to the rule before hiring Mike Shanahan and Pete Carroll, respectively, as head coaches before last season, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell needs to sharpen the tool. At the very least, he should insist teams provide him with complete transcripts to prove that substantive interviews occurred.

“It is a process-oriented rule,” Duru said in a phone interview Thursday. “But of course, we can’t get into the states of mind of the various decision-makers.”

Before officially hiring Shanahan, Redskins owner Daniel Snyder supposedly interviewed the team’s secondary coach, Jerry Gray, who is African American. There was widespread speculation “as to whether Snyder viewed Gray as a genuine candidate or as an employee he could manipulate into sitting for an ostensibly Rooney Rule-satisfying interview,” Duru wrote.

The Seahawks were far down the road with Carroll before they interviewed African American Leslie Frazier, at the time the Minnesota Vikings’ defensive coordinator. Carroll was hired shortly after Frazier, now Minnesota’s head coach, interviewed.

Those situations revealed the Rooney Rule’s underlying flaw: the potential for sham interviews.

Critics of the rule unfairly label it as the NFL’s affirmative action program. But there is “no hiring requirement . . . there is no quota,” Duru said. “There’s no restriction on the number of people who can be interviewed. The only benefit that the interviewee who is of color gets is an opportunity to show that that person can do the job.”