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“NFL–Rooney Rule–Makes Progress”

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Congrats to NFL ownership.
They did the right thing, not ripping up the paperwork, but adding to it.

The Rooney Rule, which guided teams for 17-years, to help minorities get opportunities, will have alot more pages added to it.

Under seige for failing to hire blacks for key NFL positions, the league overhauled its meaning and intent, with specific ‘black and white’ declarations.

Owners decided to ‘table any idea’ of using draft picks to bribe teams to hire blacks for key jobs, after Tony Dungy’s impassioned speech “we should not pay people to do the right thing”.

Instead the league owners said they would look at a way of rewarding teams who developed minorities, who went on to key jobs with other teams as they climbed the ladder, maybe with bonus draft picks.  But they don’t have to deal with that now.

But the 2020-Rooney Rule will look different for sure:

..Teams must interview a minority candidate for every key executive job in the front office, from CEO-President to 10-different categories of Senior Executives.  All on the non-football but business side…including Financing-Human Resources-Health systems-Communications-Public Relations and more.

..Teams cannot block any assistant coach, regardless of their color, for interviewing for front office or coaching jobs with another team, as long as it means a job promotion, even if that employee has a contract.

..Teams must interview 2-minorities from the outside for vacant head coaching jobs.

..Teams must interview 1-minority for every open coordinators job or QB job that is available.

..Teams must interview 1-minority for every football related front office job that opens, from the General Manager’s job, to Assistant GM, to Capologist, Director of FB Operations..Head of Scouting..Player Personnel etc.

..Teams must expand their Fellowship jobs program to include multiple hires of jobs with responsibility.

It is progress, because it demands teams look outside their organizations.  It may mean the NFL raiding college campuses for young aspiring head coaches who want to move into the NFL.

We have come thru a tough cycle.  Of the last 12-black head coaches who were hired, and then fired, only two had winning records, Marvin Lewis-Bengals and Jim Caldwell-Colts-Lions, and they were let go after their teams fell into disrepair.

The composite record of the 10-other blacks fired was a staggering
(177-346-1).  Some were saddled with historically bad organizations, some just failed miserably in the leadership category.

The NFL has gone from ‘no system’, to a ‘bad system’, to a ‘broken system’.  It appears to have been fixed.

But it won’t be a solution until the NFL expands the pool of quality applicants.  Just re-interviewing veterans coaches bypassed multiple times before, does not improve the situation.

Alot of new pages in the Rooney Rule-Book.  We see if things change in the next couple of NFL hiring cycles.

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