DeMaurice Smith wants NFL to eliminate Rooney Rule in final move as NFLPA executive director

DeMaurice Smith is entering his final days as NFL Players Association executive director after 14 years in the position following the election of Lloyd Howell to succeed him. 

But Smith isn’t leaving without one last battle with NFL owners. 

In a 100-page paper, which Yahoo Sports obtained, Smith and Carl Lasker, a Yale law student and teaching assistant to Smith, called for the Rooney Rule to be eliminated because they believe it’s failed to serve its purpose. 

The Rooney Rule was deemed a failure by Smith and Lasker, but many others have said the same thing over its 20 years in existence. 

The rule was put in place, as the league’s football operations website says, to “increase the number of minorities hired in head coach, general manager, and executive positions. This diversity enriches the game and creates a more effective, quality organization from top to bottom.”

But after seeing the number of Black head coaches virtually remain stagnant — the number was two when the rule was put in place and there are three ahead of the 2023 season — Smith and Lasker believe it’s time for something different. 

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“The system is broken from the inside out and outside, and any effort to affect it that didn’t obligate NFL owners to adherence or reform was doomed from the start,” Smith told Yahoo Sports. 

They also viewed the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action no longer being used in private and public colleges across the country as something that could impact the NFL down the road. 

“The reality of its possible impacts beyond the specifics of that case is troubling. The need, therefore, for fair, equitable, and lawful hiring practices in the NFL can never be greater, and the necessity of government investigation and oversight as well as the enforcement of equitable hiring practices has never been more necessary,” Smith and Lasker wrote.

Smith and Lasker made 12 recommendations about how the league should move away from the Rooney Rule. They included changing the hiring system to require all positions to be posted with “specific job descriptions and held open for at least 30 days,” adopting a “consistent and transparent system by which all teams must comply with respect to hiring and retention” and eliminating the need for coaches to seek permission from teams to apply for jobs with other organizations among others. 

There was also a survey that was conducted by the NFLPA last year with 65 current and former NFL coaches of color showing clearly how they feel about their representation in major positions across the league. 

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There were 47 responses among the 65, and it showed 92% of them believed more transparency was needed in the hiring process for head coaches, 90% believe race plays a role in coaching hires and 90% said “federal statutes prohibiting discrimination are not observed or obeyed in hiring practices.”

“The NFL’s system is broken,” Smith and Lasker wrote. “To fix it, owners need to abandon the Rooney Rule and replace their unchecked discretion with comprehensive requirements to eliminate discrimination, ensure fairness, improve diversity and build an equitable, transparent and accountable system.”

Smith and Lasker believe there’s no better time than now with the league seeing a shift in representation. 

“The NFL is facing a crossroads; its senior leadership will change in the next five years. The issue of the lack of front office and coaching diversity was inherited by some, and the future offers an opportunity to make major decisions to resolve these longstanding egregious issues.”

Heading into the 2023 season, the only Black head coaches are the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Todd Bowles and the Houston Texans’ DeMeco Ryans, who was hired this offseason.