NFL Institutes Blatantly Racist Hiring Mandate: Every Team Must Follow This One Rule
Leftist ideas of “anti-racism” and equality of outcome have officially made their way into the NFL. Instead of letting coaches earn jobs based on merit, the league is now forcing teams to hire them based on skin color or gender.
The NFL announced Monday that all 32 teams must hire a minority offensive assistant coach for the upcoming season.
The change is part of an expansion to the Rooney Rule, an NFL policy with a goal “to foster and provide opportunity to diverse leadership throughout the NFL,” according to the league’s website.
The rule — named after the late Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, who served as a chairman of the NFL’s Workplace Diversity Committee — was instituted in 2003.
Up until now, the rule had required only that NFL teams interview minority candidates for various open positions. Now, however, the league has explicitly mandated that teams hire a minority coach.
Current Steelers owner Art Rooney II, who is the son of Dan Rooney and chairman of the NFL Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee, said the mandate is aimed at encouraging more minority head coaches.
“It’s a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions,” Rooney said, according to 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],” he said.
The league said women count as a minority under this mandate, and NFL chief administrative officer Dasha Smith said teams that already have a minority offensive assistant can count that person toward the program.
“We’ve worked for years and made progress in many areas to ensure that staff and leaders in our office and at our clubs reflect the racial and gender makeup of America, but we have more work to do, particularly at the head coach and front-office level,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.
While both the NFL and woke outlets such as ESPN are attempting to paint this mandate as a positive development for minorities, the reality is just the opposite. This hiring mandate goes against one of the stated goals of the Rooney Rule.
On its website, the league says the Rooney Rule is meant “to ensure that promising candidates have the opportunity to prove they have the necessary skills and qualifications to excel.” However, this mandate cuts against that goal.
While minority candidates might benefit from this rule change, it promotes candidates based on skin color — or gender — rather than qualifications.
If a white man and a black man are the finalists for a certain offensive coaching position, a team might be inclined to hire the black man even if the white man is more qualified in order to fulfill this mandate.
By forcing teams to hire candidates based on skin color or gender instead of skill, the NFL is also signaling to minorities that they are somehow inferior.
If someone is a minority, they should have pride in knowing they were able to earn a position based on merit and hard work. Instead, the NFL is implying minorities are unable to achieve positions based on merit, so they must create policies to help these people be hired.
This is completely contrary to the rhetoric of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who argued against giving people preferential treatment based on their race.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” King said in his famous Aug. 28, 1963, speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
If the NFL mandated teams to hire a white coach, everyone would clearly be able to see the racism involved. Yet because the requirement pertains to other races, we are supposed to pretend it is acceptable. It’s not.
Finally, the mandate could disadvantage minorities in the long run — and not just because it casts doubt on whether a minority coach is hired for merit or to fulfill the mandate.
Think back to the scenario above — a white man is more qualified for a position, but a black man gets hired because of his skin color.
Eventually, if the team is not successful in the area where the black man was hired, it will blame him for the failure. And if the coach is not the most qualified person for the position, the team would be right to fire him and hire a more qualified candidate.
This is not the fault of the minority coach, but rather the NFL. The league promoted a mandate that increases the possibility of a less-qualified candidate getting hired.
Of course, even if the team were right in firing that minority coach, woke outlets such as ESPN would certainly blame the move on racism.
This is the vicious cycle of affirmative action, and it might be exactly where the NFL is headed thanks to this senseless new mandate.
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