Why the NFL's 'Rooney Rule' Needs to Go
If the NFL is smart, it will scrap the Rooney Rule, which fails at every level: legally, morally, and practically.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles said he “absolutely” believed that he was sometimes brought in by NFL teams just to check the “Rooney Rule” box.
The Rooney Rule is an NFL policy instituted more than two decades ago that requires teams to interview — though not to hire — at least one minority candidate when hiring new coaches.
The rule was designed to increase the number of minority head coaches in the NFL, a goal it has failed to achieve. For years, it has been a source of moral controversy, but new developments suggest it may now be a legal issue for the league.
Last week, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) sent a letter to the NFL calling the Rooney Rule “blatant race discrimination,” adding that hiring decisions should be based solely on merit.
Though the NFL says it believes its policy “is consistent with the law” and promotes fairness, others have indicated the Rooney Rule may be on the chopping block, given recent legal challenges to other forms of racial preferences.
“There’s no question that the environment has changed in recent years,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the son of Dan Rooney, for whom the rule is named. “We do have an obligation to make sure that our policies comply with the laws, whatever the law is, and whatever the changes in law might be.”
Art Rooney didn’t specify the laws the NFL may not be in compliance with, but he might have been referring to last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services. In that decision, the court unanimously ruled that separate standards for minority and majority plaintiffs seeking redress for racial discrimination were illegal.
The ruling undercut the ability of organizations to use race or sex in hiring decisions — even for ostensibly benign or diversity-promoting purposes — because majority-group plaintiffs are now allowed to sue under the same legal standard as minority groups.
As I wrote at the time, the Ames decision was likely to be a wrecking ball to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which employers had used for years to discriminate against majority ethnic groups (and non-focus minorities, such as Asians), in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
In other words, in the wake of Ames, Uthmeier appears to be right: the NFL may be violating federal law with the Rooney Rule, which gives preference to interviewing minority coaching candidates on the basis of race.
This is not the only reason the NFL should ditch the Rooney Rule, however. There are two additional reasons.
First, the rule has failed to deliver on its promise. In 2003, when it was instituted, there were three black head coaches in the NFL: Tony Dungy (Indianapolis Colts), Herman Edwards (New York Jets), and Marvin Lewis (Cincinnati Bengals). In 2026, there are still three: DeMeco Ryans (Houston Texans), Aaron Glenn (New York Jets), and the aforementioned Bowles.
In this sense, the Rooney Rule appears to have been more about optics and virtue signaling than actual outcomes. To the extent that racial discrimination is a problem in the NFL — a debatable claim — the rule gave the league a fig leaf, making it appear that it was taking action to correct a problem without actually doing so. To borrow Bowles’s metaphor, black coaches were trotted out “to check a Rooney Rule box.”
Secondly, hiring on the basis of race is not just illegal; it is wrong. The protections workers have today under the Civil Rights Act stem from this moral understanding.
People are individuals and should be treated as such. It is no better to award someone a job because of their sex or race than it is to deny them a job on those grounds — because in selecting one candidate, you deny someone else an opportunity simply because they have the “wrong” race or sex.
When color barriers were broken in sports, it was not to ensure proportional representation. It was to ensure that all people were treated equally.
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Unfortunately, today’s social justice dogmas turn this ethic on its head. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek once observed, social justice — an idea the NFL endorses as part of its mission — demands the unequal treatment of individuals.
“The classical demand is that the state ought to treat all people equally in spite of the fact that they are very unequal,” Hayek said. “You can’t deduce from this that because people are unequal you ought to treat them unequally in order to make them equal. And that’s what social justice amounts to.”
Treating people as individuals, not as members of a collective group, is the proper ethic.
If the NFL is smart, it will embrace this truth and scrap the Rooney Rule, which fails at every level: legally, morally, and practically.
It is racism pure and simple.