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Florida’s Rooney Rule Challenge is Rooted in White Supremacy – and Legal Fiction

OPINION: The ongoing legal challenge to Florida’s Rooney Rule, a policy designed to promote diversity in the hiring of state college coaches and athletic directors, must be understood not as a legitimate legal argument, but as an act of legal fiction rooted in white supremacy.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has put the NFL “on notice” that the league’s Rooney Rule violates state law. Since 2003, the Rooney Rule has aimed to increase diversity among the NFL’s head coach, general manager, and coordinator ranks. Today, the policy requires teams to interview two minority candidates for every such vacancy.

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In a letter sent to the NFL last Wednesday, Uthmeier excoriated the Rooney Rule, alleging the policy is tantamount to race-based discrimination and that it “brazenly” violates Florida law. He demanded that the league suspend the rule immediately or face possible enforcement action.

What Uthmeier did not state in his letter is that the NFL has only three Black head coaches. In a league where roughly 70% of players are Black, fewer than 10% of head coaches identify as such. Only five head coaches overall identify as minorities, a number that has trended downward over the past three years, from nine to seven to five. 

From these data points, one could reasonably conclude that the Rooney Rule has not worked. Sports journalist Jemele Hill, a Rooney Rule skeptic, has referred to the policy as a “charade of inclusion.” Instead of serving as an engine of minority hiring, Hill has argued that the policy merely serves as a box to check. After all, teams must only interview minority candidates. Yes, the league has tweaked the Rooney Rule over the years to incentivize teams to hire minority candidates using draft picks, but even so, the results have been underwhelming.

Even so, the NFL’s head coaching and front office ranks are apparently now too diverse for Uthmeier. Conservatives like him want Black and brown men to keep knocking their heads together on the field, instead of putting their heads together in the board room.

Uthmeier claims this latest legal challenge is about rooting discrimination out of the NFL’s hiring practices. That cannot possibly be the case. Against whom could the Rooney Rule possibly even discriminate? The answer to that question, according to his letter, is “applicants of disapproved races.” Assuming he was referring to white candidates, it’s hard to call them “disapproved” since owners routinely hire white candidates over minority candidates. During this past offseason alone, nine out of ten head coaching vacancies were filled by white coaches – even though at least two minorities were considered for each job.

The Rooney Rule also does not appear to violate Florida law. Borrowing from legal scholar N. Jeremi Duru’s analysis of the rule under the federal Civil Rights Act, although the policy does segregate applicants by race, it does not do so “in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities,” nor does it compel a team to “refuse to hire any individual” on account of their race. The Rooney Rule was written strategically to prevail against the exact kind of challenge it now faces in the Sunshine State.

Make no mistake, Uthmeier is picking this fight with the NFL for the same reason the Trump administration is waging its war against all forms of DEI initiatives: white supremacy. Those who endorse white supremacy believe affirmative steps to increase opportunity for minorities advantage those who are not worthy of that opportunity – at the expense of those who are. It’s like President Trump said in a recent interview: civil rights programs and affirmative action policies must go because “white people were very badly treated” by them.

Uthmeier’s motivations become even clearer when considering what else he’s done during his first thirteen months on the job. He sued Starbucks over its hiring practices. He disqualified law firms with workplace DEI training, diversity fellowships, or diversity mentorship programs from working with the state. And he declared that any company with “woke” ideology is unwelcome in the state of Florida. He even took steps to invalidate over 80 state laws that sought to protect minority workers and minority-owned businesses – on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

If Uthmeier thinks he can scare the NFL into abandoning the Rooney Rule, he is sure to be proven wrong. The NFL has stood by the Rooney Rule over the last two decades. Last February, Commissioner Roger Goodell defended the league’s diversity policies as falling “well within the law” and helping “attract the best possible talent” into the NFL. And despite the fact that Uthmeier alleged in his letter that “NFL fans in Florida don’t care what color their coach’s skin is,” a majority of Americans believe the Rooney Rule is good for sports.

At this point, the NFL has the ball and must stand firm against MAGA’s latest all-out blitz, drawn up from the pages of its Project 2025 playbook. I hope the league beats the pass rush and steps up to connect on bigger, bolder plays – including diversifying the ownership ranks – that will keep it competitive for generations to come.

Gevin Reynolds writes about sports, politics, and culture. A J.D. candidate at Yale Law School, he is the former co-host of the Lowlights Podcast, a former speechwriter to VP Kamala Harris, and a former member of the NFL’s front office staff.

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