Alliance 'Disappointed' Despite Shell Hiring

The Oakland Raiders turn to Art Shell to fill the NFL's final head coaching vacancy. (Noah Berger - AP)

The NFL was spared further angst over the lack of diversity among the head coaches hired this year when the Oakland Raiders rehired their former coach, Art Shell, over the weekend. Shell was only the second minority coach hired among the 10 new head coaches appointed league-wide since the regular season ended.

Shell's hiring will give the league an all-time-high seven black head coaches next season, and the leaders of the group formed to promote minority hiring at all levels of the NFL said over the weekend they were delighted to see him get another chance to coach. But the leaders of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, named for the first black coach in NFL history, said that Shell's hiring by the Raiders did not greatly reduce their disappointment with hiring results this year.

They said they will make a renewed push to try to get the NFL to extend its minority interviewing rule to include key front-office positions as well as head-coaching jobs.

"We're ecstatic that Art Shell gets another chance that he deserved," John Wooten, the chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, said in a telephone interview over the weekend. "But overall, we're still disappointed. We thought we'd have better results in the hiring cycle as a whole."

Before Shell was hired, the only minority coach to land a job this offseason was Herman Edwards, who was released from his contract with the New York Jets and was hired as the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. The eight other coaches hired are white.

Shell was hired after a series of other Raiders candidates rebuffed the team. Shell coached the Raiders between 1989 and '94. With a 54-38 regular season record, he led the club to the playoffs three times in five full seasons and reached an AFC title game.

"It corrects one of the longer-standing injustices," Washington-based attorney Cyrus Mehri, who serves as counsel to the Fritz Pollard Alliance, said yesterday. "Here's a guy who went to the playoffs 60 percent of the time, had a very good record and never got another chance. But the bookends of this year's hiring cycle, with Herman Edwards and Art Shell, were kind of unique circumstances. When you look at the heart of this year's hiring cycle, we thought our candidates were as strong or stronger as the guys who were hired, and that points to a continuing double standard."

This year's hiring cycle was the fourth in a row in which the NFL increased its number of minority head coaches since team owners, under the threat of litigation, enacted a minority interviewing rule. The rule requires that each club with a head-coaching vacancy interview at least one minority candidate and is widely known as the "Rooney Rule" for Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, head of the league's workplace diversity committee.

The Pollard Alliance has urged the league in recent years to extend the Rooney Rule to also cover interviews for key front-office jobs, such as team president and general manager. The NFL has resisted that, with Rooney and other league leaders saying they would encourage teams to interview minority candidates for such jobs but weren't prepared to require it.

Wooten said he thinks the results of this year's hiring cycle for coaches have left NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and others in the league more receptive to the idea. Tagliabue expressed his disappointment before Shell's hiring by the Raiders, and said at his state-of-the-league news conference two days before the Super Bowl that the league would "redouble" its efforts in the area of diversity in hiring.

"We need to tweak the system," Wooten said. "The commissioner has spoken to that. We have to work on making some changes in the front office. That's where the hiring takes place. We need to push the Rooney Rule to cover the front office. The league has always wanted to say, 'Let's wait. Let's sit back and see if the system works without doing that.' It didn't work this year. I think the league is as disappointed as we are about what took place. I think there's a very sincere feeling that something needs to be done about the front offices."

Wooten and Mehri said they will discuss the issue with representatives of the league in the coming weeks.