Diversity

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By N. Jeremi Duru, Associate Professor of Law, Temple University, Beasley School of Law.

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On Sunday, February 6, the Pittsburgh Steelers' head coach, Mike Tomlin, will lead his team into its second National Football League Super Bowl Championship game in three years. He is among the most respected head coaches in the league, and at his pace, he may one day find himself enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He will freely admit, however, that just a few years before the Steelers hired him in 2007, his chances of landing a head coaching position in the NFL would have been frighteningly slim because of a single characteristic: his race.

For decades, the NFL had been a colossal embarrassment from an equal employment opportunity perspective. Between 1926 and the start of the 1989 season, the league featured no African American head coaches, and in the decade that followed, it featured only a few. Neither the National Basketball Association nor Major League Baseball had been nearly as historically homogenous in this respect, and by the turn of the century, both leagues were legions ahead of the NFL in terms of diversity in off-the-field and off-the-court positions.

In 2002, however, two lawyers, Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran, who were both avid football fans disconcerted with the dearth of African American coaches in the NFL, launched a movement that would dramatically impact the NFL and provide black coaches like Mike Tomlin the opportunity to prove themselves. Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL explores this movement and what it has meant to the NFL and to broader society.

The movement began with a University of Pennsylvania economics professor's statistical analysis, which revealed that the few African Americans who attained NFL head coaching positions performed more effectively than their white counterparts but nonetheless had fewer opportunities to ply their trade. Mehri and Cochran, emboldened by the statistics, expanded the analysis into a full blown report alleging racial discrimination in NFL, and, anxious to take the NFL to task, they issued a brash and public litigation threat. A small group of grizzled African American NFL veterans who had long resented being frozen out of off-the-field leadership positions in the league soon caught wind of the lawyers' threat and joined them in their insistence that the NFL change.

The Seattle Seahawks swift hiring of USC's Pete Carroll and its apparent short-shrift of the NFL's Rooney Rule, which is intended to diversify the League's head-coaching ranks, may actually work to strengthen the rule, writes Johnette Howard for ESPN.com. The Seattle Seahawks apparently had settled on Carroll and gave a cursory interview to the Viking's Assistant Head Coach/Defensive Coordinator Leslie Frazier (right).

Howard notes that the Rooney Rule adopted by the NFL in 2002 after pressure from prominent attorneys, the late Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., civil rights attorney Cyrus Mehri, and labor economist Dr. Janice Madden, has continued to be bolstered by outside pressure. (Including an Issue Brief released by ACS.)

Howard writes:

A watchdog group, the Fritz Pollard Alliance [for which Mehri serves as counsel], now monitors how well teams comply, along with the NFL. The same group - buttressed by a persuasive argument that attorney Douglas Proxmire published in a December 2008 paper for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy - succeeded just months ago in getting the NFL to extend the Rooney Rule to hiring of general managers and other front-office personnel.

The Seahawks case should be another pivot point. More pressure needs to be exerted on [NFL commissioner] Goodell now.

In his ACS Issue Brief, "Coaching Diversity: The Rooney Rule, Its Application and Ideas for Expansion," Proxmire noted the 2002 report co-authored by Cochran, Mehri and Madden, detailing the NFL's hiring and firing practices over the previous 15 seasons. Their report, Proxmire wrote led "to an obvious, but disconcerting conclusion: despite an overall better record than their white counterparts, black coaches had a difficult time getting hired, and once hired, black head coaches were fired before their white counterparts." Proxmire also urged the NFL to strengthen the Rooney Rule by extending it to cover front-office vacancies. Last summer, Commissioner Roger Goodell announced that the League would indeed require NFL teams to interview more minority candidates for front-office openings.