Without enforcement, the Rooney Rule failed to create equitable opportunities for Black NFL coaches. Then it spread to corporate America and fell short there, too.
And companies across the country flocked to a diversity salve known to be handy during a public relations crisis: the Rooney Rule.This football season, The Washington Post is examining the NFL’s decades-long failure to equitably promote Black coaches to top jobs, despite the multibillion-dollar league being fueled by Black players.
But an investigation by The Washington Post of the rule’s origins and spread — including interviews with insiders to its history and corporate diversity experts, as well as a review of previously unreported documents “These rules — all the research points in the same direction,” said Frank Dobbin, co-author of “Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t” and a sociology professor at Harvard University. “They backfire, or they cause things to get worse.”
The NFL declined to make Commissioner Roger Goodell available for an interview and did not respond directly to requests for comment for this article. “Nothing new there, really,” the Chicago Sun-Times mused. “From time to time, a prominent person or group takes up this cause and gets some publicity. Then the issue fades away.”
“You only litigate,” Cochran proclaimed that day in Baltimore, “after you’ve done everything you can to negotiate.”.” It was based largely on the research of Janice Madden, a labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania.“I didn’t know anything about football,” Madden said recently, and she had never spoken at a news conference. But she knew corporate inequity.
But the next month, the NFL invited Mehri and Cochran to a meeting at league headquarters in Manhattan. Harold Henderson, then the league’s executive vice president for labor relations, said recently that it wasn’t the threat of litigation that got the league’s attention. Mehri and Cochran also proposed that the league force teams that bypass the diversity requirement to forfeit draft picks and that then-Commissioner Paul Tagliabue could award additional picks to teams that showed the greatest progress toward diversity.
In December 2002, two months after the meeting between Mehri and the NFL, the committee emerged with what the NFL billed as a “But the program included only one notable requirement, which would soon be dubbed the Rooney Rule. “[Team] owners strongly agreed on the principle,” the NFL’s news release read, “that any club seeking to hire a head coach will interview one or more minority applicants for the position.
Smith suggested the NFL and its team owners saw through the lawyers’ posturing and “created a public relations feel-good moment” that didn’t result in any modifications to the NFL constitution and spelled out no penalties. To Mehri, getting 32 teams to sign off on the initiative was a miracle that could be improved upon later — if they were sincere about the effort..
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