New NFL Policy on Coaching Staff Composition was Long Overdue
What good is the Rooney Rule when almost every offensive coordinator in the NFL is white?
Owners across the league began to acknowledge the harsh reality of the answer on Monday at the NFL Meetings by amending the rule to require that each team to employ at least one minority or woman offensive coach.
This is a long-overdue policy made necessary by a trend in which teams with head-coaching vacancies rarely seriously consider candidates from the defensive side anymore. And defense is where the vast majority of the league's Black coaches have been employed for decades.
Even the ones who work on offense generally are restricted to coaching positions other than quarterbacks and wide receivers, which provide faster tracks to coordinator positions and eventually head-coaching opportunities.
Before Monday's change, the Rooney Rule, required that teams simply interview at least two minority candidates for all head-coaching and senior football operations openings.
That obviously wasn't effective enough in today's environment to accomplish its objective of increasing minority hiring for the league's most visible and important jobs.
"It's a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions," said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, chairman of the NFL Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, via ESPN. "We clearly have a trend where coaches are coming from the offensive side of the ball in recent years, and we clearly do not have as many minorities in the offensive coordinator [job]."
Art Rooney is the son of the late Dan Rooney, for whom the rule was named.
This year, seven of the league's nine new head-coaching hires were white. Of the two Black coaches, Lovie Smith (Texans) came from the defensive side. The other, Mike McDaniel, was most recently the San Francisco 49ers' offensive coordinator and has a white mother. He identifies as "biracial."
Of the seven white coaches, only two coached defense.
One of the white coaches hired was Buffalo Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll, by the New York Giants.
Bills defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier, who has head-coaching experience, was never a serious candidate for any opening. This, despite commanding a unit that ranked first in the league in many statistical categories, including scoring and yards.
The Bills already are in compliance with the new requirement, having had running backs coach Kelly Skipper on their staff since 2017.
But it's worth noting that when it was time to fill the offensive coordinator opening following Daboll's departure, the job went to quarterbacks coach Ken Dorsey, who has only eight years of NFL coaching experience — compared to 15 for Skipper.
Last year, five of the seven head-coaching openings were filled by white men. A sixth went to Robert Saleh, who qualifies as a minority because he's a Lebanese-American. The seventh went to David Culley, who guided a Houston Texans team with a roster that was widely considered to be the worst in the league to four wins.
Culley then was fired after just one season. When Brian Flores of the Miami Dolphins also was let go, it left the Steelers' Mike Tomlin as the only Black head coach in the league until McDaniel and Smith were hired.
What's more, Flores was terminated despite becoming the first coach in 20 years to lead the Dolphins to back-to-back winning seasons.
Flores then filed a lawsuit against the league after he contends he was part of sham interviews with the Denver Broncos and New York Giants, who passed him over for white candidates with no previous head-coaching experience.
Nick Fierro is the publisher of Bills Central. Check out the latest Bills news at www.si.com/nfl/bills and follow Fierro on Twitter at @NickFierro. Email to Nicky300@aol.com.
