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“Our rules and our policies are really designed around: How do we increase the number of people that have an opportunity to have a career in the NFL, including people of color and women?”
NEW ORLEANS – The nation’s most popular and prosperous professional sports league arrives at its signature event having vowed in recent months to stick by its diversity initiatives, which once were widely copied by other businesses. But the landscape that the NFL confronts at this Super Bowl week has changed.
President Donald Trump’s administration is targeting such hiring measures and the federal employees who have been involved in them, while some of the country’s most prominent businesses are retreating from their own diversity initiatives. The NFL, meanwhile, has failed to build on its year-old minority hiring gains during the current cycle, which has seen six teams choose new head coaches since the end of the regular season last month. The league is poised to have fewer minority head coaches next season than it did this season.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in December that the league was “not in this for any trends or non-trends” and would continue to abide by its minority hiring programs and guidelines “because this has made the NFL better.” That message was reinforced by other league leaders and the NFL’s team owners.
The NFL has an uneven history with diversity in its coaching and leadership ranks. Black coaches often have had a difficult time advancing to head coaching jobs. In 2022, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the league and teams. But the NFL has stood by its minority interviewing requirement for key positions, known widely as the “Rooney Rule.”
That now puts it at odds with Trump’s moves toward having federal agencies eliminate all positions related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump ordered all federal employees whose work is focused on DEI initiatives to be placed on leave and he revoked a 60-year-old executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors.
Companies such as Target, Amazon, Walmart, Meta, McDonald’s and Ford have announced that they would end or modify their DEI initiatives. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post. Others, such as Apple and Costco, have remained committed to their DEI programs.
“We’re all certainly hoping that the league continues with this focus on providing fair, open and competitive hiring practices,” said Rod Graves, the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, the diversity group that works with the NFL on its minority hiring. “I very much assume that they will. I think that it’s still a high value and priority of the league as a whole.”
The NFL has had to deal with being at odds with Trump previously. Trump sparked an intense national controversy in 2017 by saying at a campaign rally in Alabama that NFL owners should fire any player – referred to as a “son of a bitch” by Trump – who protested by kneeling for the national anthem.
Goodell said at an NFL owners’ meeting in December that the league would not change its approach.
“We didn’t get into this because it was a trend,” Goodell said then. “And we’re not getting out of it because it’s a trend. We’re in it because it makes the NFL better. And what it is, is to make sure that we’re attracting the best possible talent into our league and to allow them opportunities to be able to advance. The best people are going into the league. And that’s what’s good for us.”
Goodell is scheduled to speak Monday afternoon in New Orleans at his annual news conference during Super Bowl week.
NFL rules require each team with a vacancy at a key position such as head coach or general manager to conduct in-person interviews with at least two minority candidates from outside the organization.
Last year, those rules helped to produce minority hiring gains, including in the high-profile ranks of the league’s head coaches. NFL teams hired four minority head coaches, including three Black coaches, among eight vacancies last year. That gave the league nine minority head coaches, including six Black head coaches, among its 32 teams at the outset of the 2024 season.
One of those minority coaches was fired in October when the New York Jets dismissed Robert Saleh, who is of Lebanese descent. Two Black head coaches were fired by their teams last month after the completion of the regular season, Jerod Mayo by the New England Patriots and Antonio Pierce by the Las Vegas Raiders. Mayo, the first Black head coach in Patriots history, lasted only one season as the successor to six-time Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Belichick. Pierce was fired by the Raiders after one season as the full-time head coach, following a stint as the team’s interim coach during the 2023 season.
This offseason, six of the seven NFL teams with head coaching vacancies have made their hires. The New Orleans Saints continue their search. The only minority coach hired thus far is Aaron Glenn, the former defensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions who was hired by the Jets. The Lions will be awarded a pair of third-round draft picks, one in each of the next two drafts, under the NFL’s program that rewards teams that develop minority head coaching and general manager candidates hired by other franchises.
“I think for African American coaches and executives, this hiring cycle has probably produced more questions and concerns about where we’re headed with respect to those goals and objectives,” Graves said in a phone interview Sunday.
Questions have occasionally been raised about whether teams give serious consideration to minority candidates or merely perform the interviews to fulfill the NFL’s requirement. In this cycle, some observers criticized the Patriots for interviewing two Black coaches who were out of the NFL, Pep Hamilton and Byron Leftwich, before hiring Mike Vrabel as their coach. Andsome eyebrows similarly were raised when the Jacksonville Jaguars interviewed a Black coach, Raiders defensive coordinator Patrick Graham, on the same day they moved toward hiring Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive coordinator Liam Coen as their coach. The Jaguars announced an agreement with Coen the following day
Some observers criticized the Patriots for interviewing two Black coaches who were out of the NFL, Pep Hamilton and Byron Leftwich, before hiring Mike Vrabel as their coach. Andsome eyebrows were raised when the Jacksonville Jaguars interviewed a Black coach, Raiders defensive coordinator Patrick Graham, on the same day they moved toward hiring Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive coordinator Liam Coen as their coach. The Jaguars announced an agreement with Coen the following day.
Graves mentioned the NFL’s lack of minority offensive coordinators, the assistant-coaching position that is often the final stepping stone to head coaching opportunities.
“It makes you wonder whether teams are truly committed to the spirit of the Rooney Rule and what we were trying to accomplish with respect to diversity,” Graves said.
The NFL has five active Black head coaches, with Glenn joining the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, the Buccaneers’ Todd Bowles, the Houston Texans’ DeMeco Ryans and the Atlanta Falcons’ Raheem Morris. The league has seven active minority head coaches. That includes the Carolina Panthers’ Dave Canales, who is Mexican American, and the Dolphins’ Mike McDaniel, who is biracial.
Graves, formerly the general manager of the Arizona Cardinals, said there has been bigger-picture progress.
“We see a lot more diversity in terms of not only candidates of color but … experience,” Graves said. “It’s certainly more diverse in that area than it was five, certainly 10 years ago.”
The league has pointed to its minority hiring gains in other areas, such as with team presidents and general managers, and has said that its diversity efforts extend to all levels of its franchises and within the league office. In December, the NFL said that 53 percent of team employees and league staffers were minorities or women. In addition to its nine minority head coaches during the 2024 season, the league said it had five women as principal franchise owners, six minority team presidents and eight minority general managers. About two-thirds of the NFL’s players were minorities in the 2023 season, the most recent for which data is available, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.
“Our rules and our policies are really designed around: How do we increase the number of people that have an opportunity to have a career in the NFL, including people of color and women?” Goodell said in December. “And that’s something that we believe fully is going to make the NFL better. So those are processes that give our teams a chance to attract the best talent. That’s good for us. So we’re not in this for any trends or non-trends. We’re in this because this has made the NFL better.”
The league regularly conducts what it calls “accelerator” programs to provide professional training and networking opportunities with owners to minority general manager and head coaching candidates. It conducted a front office accelerator at the December owners’ meeting.
“I’ve been in this league for 22 years,” Terrance Gray, the Buffalo Bills’ director of player personnel, said at that meeting. “And the greatest thing that we can be provided as you move up in this industry is access and opportunity. And I feel like the accelerator program provides those two things, and I look forward to the continued growth with the program.”
Steelers owner Art Rooney said then: “It’s always a great program. It gives ownership as well as the potential candidates an opportunity to get to know each other and network a little bit. So I think it’s been a good program. … I think it’s been a positive. And I think both the ownership and the participants have enjoyed it and look forward to continuing to do it in the years to come.”
Rooney is the chairman of the NFL’s diversity, equity and inclusion committee. The league’s minority interviewing rule is named for his late father Dan Rooney, the longtime Steelers owner who was the chairman of what was then known as the workplace diversity committee.
Jonathan Beane, an NFL senior vice president who is the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, said in December that the league’s focus was on attempting to bring transparency and clarity to the hiring process. The NFL has tweaked its interviewing rules in recent years to try to slow teams’ hiring decisions, encouraging franchises to conduct extensive searches with large and diverse pools of candidates.
“For us, we remain committed to the work that we’re doing,” Beane said then. “We see it, whether it’s social justice work or whether it’s inclusion work … as something that’s extremely beneficial for our business. It supports our objectives to be a global brand. … We feel very confident with the work that we’re doing and we’re committed to that.”
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