The NFL’s Rooney Rule is a worthy idea, clumsily executed.
Established in 2003 and tweaked in 2021, the Rooney Rule requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates in person before they are permitted to hire a head coach. Back when every coaching search was a mad sprint that began the second the regular season ended, that strategy made sense. But the NFL has in recent years turned coaching searches into drawn-out, constipated exercises in which teams need to wait two full weeks before they’re allowed to talk to employed pro coaches in person. While they wait, teams have taken to talking to minority candidates who work outside the NFL, as if to check a box, so they can be ready to make a quick hire once their top choice becomes available.
That’s against the spirit of the rule, even for teams, such as the Bears, who have made promoting diversity a priority of the franchise.
The Bears’ head coaching search was nothing if not wide-ranging, both in terms of experience and background. Seven of their 17 interviews were with candidates of color. Four of the seven members of the Bears’ interview panel were people of color or female. The Bears might have the most diverse power structure in the NFL, both on the business and football sides of Halas Hall. They finished the season with Black men at president, general manager, head coach and all three coordinator spots. Bears chairman George McCaskey was on the NFL’s Workplace Diversity Committee before handing the spot to president/CEO Kevin Warren.
And yet, the timing of the NFL’s hiring season forced them to scramble last week. When Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson lost in the playoffs on Jan. 18, the Bears decided to fly in Tennessee State coach Eddie George, who’d spent all of two weeks inside Halas Hall during a 2023 fellowship, for an in-person interview the next day. That, combined with an interview with former Bear Ron Rivera one week earlier, satisfied the Rooney Rule.
The day after the George interview, the Bears hired Johnson, whom they considered their top candidate.
Hurried in-person interviews happened in Jacksonville. Raiders defensive coordinator Patrick Graham interviewed in person on Thursday morning, only for the team to give the job to Bucs offensive coordinator Liam Coen that night.
Earlier this month, the Patriots were seemingly set on hiring Mike Vrabel, who is in the team’s hall of fame and was one of the most qualified coaches in the cycle. Before they could hire him at the end of the first week of the offseason, the Patriots quickly met in person with Pep Hamilton and Byron Leftwich, who were not in the NFL last year, to satisfy the rule. Former Bears front office executive Rod Graves is the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which promotes diversity in NFL hires. He told TMZ the Patriots made “somewhat of a mockery of the process.”
The most popular, profitable sport in America needs to come up with a better way to execute a well-meaning rule.
“I think the Rooney Rule is working,” Warren said this week. “It provides candidates from diverse backgrounds an opportunity to interview, and I believe, just like a player needs repetitions, individuals need repetitions from an interview standpoint. The more you know, the better you do. …
“There have been tweaks every single year, and I’m sure these are things that we’ll talk about. But I was pleased to see that diverse candidates have had an opportunity to interview.”
McCaskey agreed that there could be changes to the rule. He didn’t regret flying George, the former star running back turned FBS-level coach, in for an interview.
“We had a great conversation with Eddie,” he said. “I think he’s happy that he did it. I know we’re happy that we did it.”
Four minority coaches were hired last offseason, bringing the NFL’s total to nine. The number now sits at seven. Roughly two-thirds of NFL players are minorities.
The Rooney Rule requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates for their coordinator jobs and at least one for the quarterback coach position. Those job searches aren’t nearly as high-profile or hurried as the head coach, though. The NFL slowed down the head coaching search process in recent years, but the Bears landed Johnson without ever having met him in person. Other teams will do the same going forward.
The NFL will have to adjust. Commissioner Roger Goodell could allow virtual interviews to count toward the Rooney Rule, perhaps by insisting on more than two meetings, to encourage teams to talk to more NFL employees. Or he could slow the process even further and disallow any in-person meetings, whether it be with NFL employees or not, until two weeks into the offseason. What teams are doing now — talking in-person to coaches outside the NFL orbit while everyone else is on Zoom — isn’t working.
The Rooney Rule is an imperfect answer to a complicated question. The NFL must try to make it more perfect.