NFL Misses Out On Racial Awakening Taking Hold at U.S. Companies
NFL Misses Out On Racial Awakening Taking Hold at U.S. Companies
(Bloomberg) -- The racial awakening that roiled corporate America after the police murder of George Floyd has spurred record gains for Black directors in the boardroom and prompted hundreds of companies to commit to hire more people of color. In the National Football League, though, it’s been a time of regression.
The NFL started the season with three Black coaches and has now dropped to just one. As recently as the end of the 2018 season, there were seven.
Brian Flores, who was one of those three at the start of the year but was fired last month despite putting together back-to-back winning seasons, sued the league on Tuesday over its hiring practices. Flores said the league’s “Rooney Rule” — which requires teams to interview minority candidates for head coach, general manager and other positions — isn’t having its intended effect.
Team owners still lack pressure to actually hire a Black coach, said Stefanie Johnson, associate professor of organizational leadership and information analytics at the University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business. That’s a sharp contrast, she notes, to public companies that have adopted similar policies, where activist investors, regulators and employees nudge them to keep their commitments.
“When you think of these NFL owners, they are extremely wealthy and powerful people. I think the reality is they don’t think things like employment laws apply to them,” said Johnson, who has studied the impact of diverse slates on hiring. “There is no accountability.”
Johnson’s research shows that including at least two diverse candidates in a set of choices for an executive role is enough to make a meaningful difference. However, in the NFL, the inclusion of such candidates hasn’t shown the expected increase in hiring, she said.
‘Dismal’ Despite Efforts
The Flores lawsuit may be a wake-up call that forces NFL owners to create more accountability around the Rooney Rule, said Kenneth Shropshire, chief executive officer of the Global Sport Institute and the Adidas distinguished professor of global sport at Arizona State University. The idea showed initial success in the league and has gotten results in the corporate world. Twitter Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and US Bancorp are among the companies that have cited the Rooney Rule as the model for their own initiatives to create more diverse slates of candidates.
The NFL has tried to tweak the rule to get better results. Some changes would work for a short time, Shropshire said, but the past three years have been “dismal” despite all efforts.
Civil rights attorney Cyrus Mehri, who played an integral role in creating the rule, says its effectiveness in the NFL is tied to poor efforts to enforce it.
“You have a successful rule, but it requires enforcement, it requires good-faith implementation, and the fact is that the league has moved mountains to have an inclusive set of policies,” Mehri, a founding partner of Mehri & Skalet PLLC, told Bloomberg Law. “The rule has to have teeth.”
The NFL didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the Rooney Rule’s efficacy. Troy Vincent, the league’s executive vice president of football operations, said in a February 2021 report that the rule needs to be updated. “Adherence to what the industry professes as ‘best practices’ has yielded little results,” Vincent wrote in the diversity and inclusion report. “In fact, the outcomes are in no way commensurate with the tremendous efforts invested by the well-intentioned advocates across the football universe.”
"In order to reach our intended goals, we must acknowledge our shortcomings and use that data and information to examine, analyze, and revitalize the entire hiring system at both the Club and League levels," he said in the report. The NFL later expanded interviewing requirements for additional coaching roles and made other changes in an attempt to improve diversity in hiring.
Litigation as Catalyst
According to Global Sport Institute data, the league has three head coaches of color: Mike Tomlin, the Black coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers; Robert Saleh at the New York Jets, who is Arab American; and Ron Rivera at the Washington Commanders, who is Latino. Counting all people of color in head-coaching positions, the previous two seasons have been running at half the rate of representation seen in 2017 and 2018. Three head coaches of color is the lowest since 2003, when the Rooney Rule was introduced.
The offensive and defensive coordinators positions — often a stepping stone to head coach — aren’t faring much better in recent hiring patterns. Some 71% of 13 offensive coordinators and 57% of 14 defensive coordinators hired during the 2020-2021 season are White, according to data from the Global Sport Institute. Between the advent of the Rooney Rule and the end of 2020, 69 of the 115 head coaches that were hired came from offensive or defensive coaching ranks, the data show.
Even if Flores’ lawsuit results in a settlement, it could spur change.
“Litigation might be the catalyst to really get to another level of sincerity and contemplation by decision makers, to step back and think, ‘Am I not hiring this person because they are Black?” Shropshire said.
Racial equality issues in the league came into a brighter spotlight in 2016, when Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to protest the mistreatment of Black people in the U.S. by police. Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, notes the Kaepernick controversy came before the activism that arose from George Floyd’s death. Now, players are able to have a bigger role in calling attention to social issues in sports.
“What Flores did was throwing out the gauntlet, this is kind of the coaching equivalent of Colin Kaepernick,” Lapchick said. “We are now in a period that calls for a racial reckoning, where there is intensified scrutiny not only in the NFL, but also in corporations and other leagues.”
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
