INSIDER FEATURED ARTICLE
What the NFL's Rooney Rule gets wrong about diversity — and what every employer can learn from its blind spots
By
Aki Ito
Last week, a long-simmering controversy in the NFL exploded into view when the former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a scathing lawsuit against the league. "The NFL remains rife with racism," the complaint said. "The racial discrimination has only been made worse by the NFL's disingenuous commitment to social equity."
At the center of the lawsuit is a diversity initiative known as the Rooney Rule, which the NFL adopted in 2003 following a national outcry over its long-standing failure to hire Black coaches. The rule required teams to interview at least one person of color whenever they were selecting a head coach. The hope was that forcing owners to consider candidates of color would prompt them to hire more coaches of color, without the legal and political messiness of racial quotas.
At first, the rule seemed to work: The number of coaches of color rose from three in 2003 to eight in 2011. Other employers, seeing the NFL's success, quickly adopted the Rooney Rule. Tech giants like Facebook and Amazon, local governments like the city of Pittsburgh, and large law firms implemented their own versions of the rule, with the aim of making their workforces more representative and inclusive. Soon, the Rooney Rule was everywhere.
But back in the NFL, the initial progress proved illusory. Today, the league is back down to only five coaches of color in the top job at its 32 teams. While players of color make up 70% of the NFL, only 16% of all teams are headed by coaches of color. "What is clear," the Flores lawsuit alleges, "is that the Rooney Rule is not working."
Academic studies confirm that conclusion. There are many ways to measure racial inequality, and in the age of "Moneyball," professional sports happens to be the perfect place to quantify discrimination in hiring. In football, success is objective — wins and losses, points scored, touchdowns denied, balls fumbled — and statistics on the performance of coaching staffs have been meticulously tracked for decades. It's the kind of data economists would kill to have in the corporate world. So it's not surprising that academic researchers have pored over NFL data to evaluate the efficacy of the Rooney Rule.
The Rooney Rule was actually born, in part, because of a study. In 2002, after the firings of two successful Black head coaches, the civil-rights attorneys Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran commissioned the economist Janice Madden to analyze racial disparities in NFL coaching. Madden looked at the performance of Black head coaches and white head coaches from 1986 to 2001. She found that Black coaches performed better than their white counterparts — a finding that suggested Black candidates were being held to a higher standard to get the top job. But when Madden ran a follow-up analysis in 2009, she found the racial difference in performance had disappeared — leading her to conclude the Rooney Rule had probably eliminated the racial disadvantage faced by Black head-coaching candidates.
But the fact that coaches of different races perform similarly once they get the job doesn't necessarily prove there's no discrimination before they get the job. So a team of researchers led by Christopher Rider zeroed in on the coaching hierarchy in football. In the corporate world, people typically climb a well-defined ladder of senior-level jobs on their way to becoming CEO. In football, coaches climb a similar ladder — assistant coach, position coach, offensive or defensive coordinator, and then head coach. So Rider and his team looked at the bottom end of the ladder. What was the likelihood, they wondered, of Black and white coaches with similar records in lower-level positions getting promoted to the coordinator level?
What they found was substantial. From 1985 to 2015, Black coordinators and white coordinators had comparable chances of getting promoted to head coach. But Black coaches were 88% less likely than white coaches to get promoted to the coordinator level — even when they had similar levels of performance and experience. In other words, the disadvantage for Black coaches is already baked into the system by the time they're up for the top job because the discrimination starts far earlier, preventing most of them from ever getting there.
"Our study demonstrates that there's been a long-running, persistent racial disparity in promotion rates, both before and after the Rooney Rule," Rider, a professor of strategy at the University of Michigan, told me. "There's no evidence that the Rooney Rule has changed anything in terms of the promotion rates of lower-level coaches."
So: If the Rooney Rule isn't enough to ensure Black candidates are given a fair shot at top jobs, what can be done to fix it? The answer to that question matters not just for professional football but for all employers seeking to diversify their ranks. I talked to economists, scholars, and diversity experts about seven possible solutions, for the NFL and beyond:
1. Apply the rule to every job
The biggest takeaway of Rider's research is that it's not enough to apply the Rooney Rule to the top job in an organization — we also need to apply it to the lower-level jobs that serve as a pipeline for leadership positions. The NFL took a step in that direction in 2020, extending the rule to coordinator positions. But the league should go further and apply the rule to all coaching jobs. Rider would also like to see the NFL expand the rule beyond the team's coaching staff and top operational roles to other employees, like sales representatives and financial analysts. In the corporate world, the same lesson applies. The rule should apply to every role, from entry-level to middle management, not just the CEO and the board.
2. Give the rule some teeth
Rules work only if they're enforced, and the NFL hasn't done much to enforce the Rooney Rule. Only once has the league fined a team for violating the policy — the Detroit Lions had to pay $200,000 in 2003 — even though it's clear some teams have been interviewing minority candidates just for show. Brian Flores discovered he was walking into such a "sham interview" with the New York Giants by accident: New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick mistakenly tipped him off to the fact that the Giants had already decided to hire someone else as head coach three days before Flores was scheduled to be interviewed. N. Jeremi Duru, a law professor at American University who wrote "Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL," says there's an obvious solution to such rule skirting. "I think the Rooney Rule should remain in existence," he told me, "but the league should come down extremely hard on clubs that don't implement it." Corporate leaders can do the same thing with the "teams" they supervise: Track whether managers are implementing the rule in good faith, and hold them accountable if they aren't.
3. Take longer to hire
In the NFL, teams fire losing coaches the minute the season ends. Then they all plunge into a mad rush to scoop up a new coach, sometimes within days. "When you're forced into a quick decision, you're most likely to gravitate to what's familiar to you," Duru told me. "And because the ownership is almost entirely homogeneous racially, it's often the case that what's comfortable and familiar is not going to be the coaching candidate of color." To counteract such inherent bias, Duru has called for a moratorium on hiring during the monthlong hiatus between the end of the regular season and the Super Bowl. "A more intentional, more deliberate, more broad-based interviewing process and candidate search is going to lead to greater diversity," he said. When companies lose a CEO, they face similar pressure to hire a replacement fast. But establishing some kind of minimum length for the search process would probably be worth the wait — not just for the sake of inclusion but for landing on the person best suited for the job.
4. Make the minority the majority
One criticism of the Rooney Rule is that interviewing a single candidate of color for a job actually makes things worse. The minority status of such candidates stands out so much that it stigmatizes them in the eyes of the search committee, overshadowing their qualifications. In a study of one university's hiring process, researchers found that slight differences in the pool of candidates was enough to alter who got hired. When there was one woman and three men in the finalist pool, the job almost never went to the woman. But when there were two women and two men, the job went to a woman 50% of the time. And when there were three women and one man, a woman got the job 67% of the time. The NFL took a step in this direction in 2020, when it directed teams to interview not one but two candidates of color for every head coach position. Businesses could also make immediate progress by requiring that at least half of all final candidates be women or people of color. White men, after all, are a minority in the US workforce, so it's simple fairness to make them a minority of all job finalists.
5. Diversify the hiring committee
Studies have found that majority groups are much better at accurately evaluating other members of their own group than they are at assessing members of minority groups. White interviewers, in short, are more apt to see the value in white candidates than in candidates of color. That means altering the pool of who gets interviewed won't necessarily lead to greater diversity. Indeed, a recent theoretical model created by the economists Alessandro Pavan and Daniel Fershtman demonstrated that in certain situations, adding more candidates of color could even backfire, resulting in less diversity. One solution is to change who does the hiring. Since there are no Black owners in the NFL, the next-best thing would be for each team to add more people of color to their hiring committees, enabling them to more accurately evaluate candidates of color. Many companies are already implementing this approach, mandating that search committees for executive roles include people with diverse backgrounds.
6. Preset the hiring criteria
Pavan and Fershtman offer another way to get around the fact that majorities are bad evaluators of minorities: Determine the criteria for assessment ahead of time. Otherwise, managers are free to hire on gut instinct, using vague terms like "cultural fit" — something that leaves plenty of room for bias. Approaching job interviews like an informal conversation, Pavan told me, is "a recipe for disaster." Nowhere should it be easier to hire based on objective performance criteria than in the world of professional sports. And even in the broader world of business, where job performance is harder to quantify, companies are trying to formalize their evaluations of both prospective and existing employees, measuring everyone based on the same criteria.
7. The last resort
The surest way to hire more candidates of color, to cite a popular sports mantra, is also the simplest: Just Do It. Setting a specific hiring goal for a job — as President Joe Biden has done with his coming Supreme Court nomination — is the most direct and immediate way to correct the imbalance wrought by centuries of job discrimination. Hiring quotas often provoke political controversy and legal challenges. But in the end, they're a reminder that indirect approaches to discriminatory hiring, like the Rooney Rule, will get us only so far. "Making a good-faith effort" is more an excuse than an action plan. In the end, there is no substitute for intent. If you want to hire more women and people of color, then hire more women and people of color.
It's easy to armchair quarterback the NFL for the way it discriminates against coaches of color. But in reality, professional football has made far more progress on diversity than the rest of the business world. "In many ways, the NFL has led in this area," said Rider, the University of Michigan professor. Last year, among the 32 teams in the NFL, three head coaches were Black — a share of 9%. Among the Fortune 500, by contrast, only six CEOs were Black — a share of 1%. When it comes to diversity in hiring, it's long past time for corporate America to up its game.
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