NFLPA’s DeMaurice Smith Proposes Replacement for the Rooney Rule

Outgoing NFL Players’ Association executive director DeMaurice Smith co-authored an article with Yale Law School student Carl Lasker outlining why the NFL should abandon the current Rooney Rule and replace it with a series of guidelines that better guarantees more diversity hiring among coaching staffs and front offices.

That paper, set to be published in the Yale Law and Policy Reviewnoted that the NFL “should adopt a consistent, fair, transparent, and lawful system by which all NFL teams must comply with respect to hiring and retention.”

Their hope for such a system is that it “fairly evaluates talent, constrains team ownership from engaging in unlawful and/or meaningless ‘check the box’ protocols, and enforces a deliberate, professional, and accountable system.”

Among the 12 overall recommendations is that the NFL remove the policy that requires coaches to seek permission from team owners to interview with other organizations; to appoint an outside watchdog who would “periodically audit team hiring processes and publish an annual report on the successes and failures of team hiring, retention, and promotion across all”; expand the chief diversity officer’s duties to ensure better hiring practices; enforce harsher penalties for teams that don’t abide by the new system; create harsher anti-nepotism policies; and allow coaches to unionize.

“The NFL’s system is broken,” Smith and Lasker wrote. “To fix it, owners need to abandon the Rooney Rule as a failure and replace their unchecked discretion with comprehensive requirements to eliminate discrimination, ensure fairness, improve diversity, and build an equitable, transparent, and accountable system.”

The Rooney Rule, as currently constructedrequires NFL teams with head coaching vacancies to interview at least two external minority/female candidates, and at least one external minority/female candidate for coordinator posts.

Teams are also required to interview at least two external minority/female candidates for general manager positions, one external minority/female candidate for senior front-office positions (club president, senior executives, etc.) and one external minority/female candidate for vacancies at quarterback coach.