Rooney Rule

by Jeremy Leaming

A CBS program on the history of African Americans in the NFL will soon touch on the Rooney Rule, which requires teams with head coaching or general manager vacancies to interview one or more minority candidates.

The documentary, “Third and Long: The History of African-Americans in Pro Football 1946-1989,” will include an examination of the Rooney Rule in its second installment on Dec. 25, at 4 p.m., ET.

Cyrus Mehri, of Mehri & Skalet PLLC, will participate in that segment. Mehri & Skalet, and the late Johnnie Cochran Jr. helped spur implementation of the Rooney Rule. See here for more information about the program.

In an ACS Issue Brief, Douglas C. Proxmire, partner at Patton Boggs LLP, wrote that after the “adoption of the Rooney Rule in December 2002, the number of African-American head coaches increased from two in 2002 to an all-time high of seven in 2006, but the numbers have leveled off since 2006.” Proxmire, however, added that the Rule “has led to some progress for other NFL minority hiring practices. In the five years since the Rooney Rule has been implemented, the number of minority hires in the NFL head coaching, assistant coaching and front offices has increased.”

Mehri & Skalet, adds in a recent promotion of the forthcoming CBS episode that the Rooney Rule “has resulted in historic triumphs of diversity in the sport, including the hiring of Super Bowl-winning head coaches Tony Dungy and Mike Tomlin … and General Manager Jerry Reese of the Giants.”

In late September, the NFL also expanded its efforts to promote diversity by adopting a provision stating, in part, that there “will be no discrimination in any form against any player by the Management Council, and Club or by the NFLPA [NFL Players Association] because of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or activity or lack of activity on behalf of the NFLPA.”

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By N. Jeremi Duru, Associate Professor of Law, Temple University, Beasley School of Law.

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On Sunday, February 6, the Pittsburgh Steelers' head coach, Mike Tomlin, will lead his team into its second National Football League Super Bowl Championship game in three years. He is among the most respected head coaches in the league, and at his pace, he may one day find himself enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He will freely admit, however, that just a few years before the Steelers hired him in 2007, his chances of landing a head coaching position in the NFL would have been frighteningly slim because of a single characteristic: his race.

For decades, the NFL had been a colossal embarrassment from an equal employment opportunity perspective. Between 1926 and the start of the 1989 season, the league featured no African American head coaches, and in the decade that followed, it featured only a few. Neither the National Basketball Association nor Major League Baseball had been nearly as historically homogenous in this respect, and by the turn of the century, both leagues were legions ahead of the NFL in terms of diversity in off-the-field and off-the-court positions.

In 2002, however, two lawyers, Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran, who were both avid football fans disconcerted with the dearth of African American coaches in the NFL, launched a movement that would dramatically impact the NFL and provide black coaches like Mike Tomlin the opportunity to prove themselves. Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL explores this movement and what it has meant to the NFL and to broader society.

The movement began with a University of Pennsylvania economics professor's statistical analysis, which revealed that the few African Americans who attained NFL head coaching positions performed more effectively than their white counterparts but nonetheless had fewer opportunities to ply their trade. Mehri and Cochran, emboldened by the statistics, expanded the analysis into a full blown report alleging racial discrimination in NFL, and, anxious to take the NFL to task, they issued a brash and public litigation threat. A small group of grizzled African American NFL veterans who had long resented being frozen out of off-the-field leadership positions in the league soon caught wind of the lawyers' threat and joined them in their insistence that the NFL change.