Rooney Rule Opens Door for Great Coaches

February 8, 2010 by James E. Johnson Jr.
Filed under: Sports 
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As many of you may remember from a previous blog, ‘The Oakland Raiders: Misfits, Rebels and Progressives’, I am a Raider fan. Yesterday’s game was another reminder that my team has fallen on hard times; not only did we not make it to the Super Bowl, we couldn’t even dream of making the playoffs.

What a game it was yesterday, there is nothing like a good Super Bowl to begin the week and end a season. Especially with a Cinderella ending like it was for the Saints. The two best NFL teams this year put on quite a display for football fans and non-fans alike. I would bet that most of the people watching the game were not thinking about the opportunities the NFL has opened up for historically overlooked people. And with that comes the of another NFL season.

Super Bowl XLI, in 2007, was historic because it was the first time an African American head coach led his team to the Super Bowl (in 2007 both of the head coaches, Tony Dungy, of the Indianapolis Colts and Lovie Smith, of the Chicago Bears, are African Americans). Since that historic game there have been eight head coaches competing in the Super Bowl, of those 4 have been African Americans. This is quite an accomplishment coming just 20 years after “my” Raiders hired Art Shell as the first African American head coach in the modern era (Fritz Pollard served as co-head coach of the Akron Pros in 1921).

A report co-authored by Johnnie Cochrane and Cyrus Mehri entitled “Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities.”, helped create opportunities in the ranks of NFL coaches. When the report was written in 2002 only six minority men (Tom Flores, Art Shell, Dennis Green, Ray Rhodes, Tony Dungy, and Herman Edwards) had held head coaching jobs in the NFL.

As a result of the report and with a sincere desire to deal with the lack of diversity in its coaching ranks, the NFL created the Workplace Diversity Committee to address how they should go about correcting this issue. The committee developed the Rooney Rule which requires teams who have an opening for the head coach to interview at least one minority candidate. The rule does not mandate who the team can hire, nor does it impose a quota for the league.

It has been evident that the Rooney Rule has opened the door for minority coaching candidates to get an opportunity to show what they know about the X’s and O’s and provides a real opportunity to prove themselves. The NFL now has six minority head coaches and many more minority coaches in its ranks. Due to the success of the rule people are asking if it should be considered for the college ranks where only seven of the 119 head coaches at the beginning of last season were African Americans.

While the Rooney Rule is an example of an Affirmative Action program gone right (as evidenced by the diversity in coaching staffs and front office hires around the league) each year since its inception it has been attacked. Most of the attacks have twisted what the rule says and its intent.

In 2003, Jay Nordlinger, managing editor of the National Review could hardly contain his contempt in an article where he wrote, “What if there’s a half-black coach? Do you have to interview another half-black coach—or another “fully” black coach, making one and a half, total—to be in compliance with Rooney?”

Last year on a blog called “Stuff Black People Don’t Like” which states, “We at SBPDL believe Black History Month to be a special time to reflect upon the contributions of Black people to the United States of America. However, the endless and comical quest of locating individuals worthy of admiration and remembrance is a task on par with cleaning the Augean Stables,” the issue is ranked number 75 and described as “the lack of Black coaches in the college ranks.”

The time has come for us to look at Affirmative Action programs as what they are meant to be, an opportunity to prove they are worthy of a chance instead of conjuring excuses of why historically overlooked people are not worthy.

Who was the first minority head coach the win the Super Bowl? Tom Flores coached “my” Raiders to a Super Bowl win in 1980 and became the first Latino and the first minority head coach to win the Super Bowl. He won it again in 1983 for good measure.

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