Great article and analysis. I agree that this type of requirement has served its purpose and should probably be removed, but you can bet Cyrus and Johnnie will fight that with the ever present threat of litigation.
My feeling is that this situation is very similar to blacks (and other minorities) as quarterbacks or, to go back further, playing in baseball. Once the door is opened and teams gain a competitive advantage by using them, everyone will follow suite or, at least, not back away from a clearly qualified candidate.
With both head coaches in the superbowl being black, I have to believe that most owners will have less reservations about hiring a black head coach next time around. Certainly the goal here is to have coaching candidates judged on their abilities not the color of their skin. Ben points out pretty clearly that the Rooney Rule forces teams to consider skin color in the hiring process - exactly what we'd like to get away from.
I'm not going to weigh heavily on the issue (yet) as I want to do some additional thinking on it, but I think your article hits on some excellent points.
I do want to add that I always found it kind of insane to believe that an owner racist enough not to give a qualified black man an opportunity to coach his football team isn't likely to be swayed merely by a compulsatory interview -- no matter how well it goes.
"Proving" the efficacy of the Rooney rule would depend (for me) upon finding an owner willing to admit that they would not have interviewed someone they eventually hired to coach their team. Stated differently, it would require an owner to admit that they were a racist yet overcame that because a committee (they might have been a part of) forced them to check a box.
I just don't see that happening.
Wilbert- the threat of litigation will always be there considering I can sue you for anything, including the cut of your beard. How do you prove racism was ever the problem in the first place? The original Mehri-Cochran report detailed that the few black coaches there were or had been were more successful than their white counterparts, but were underemployed. This quickly becomes a subjective matter of who is(and how many are) considered talented and when in the process they are considered talented. The NFL wanted to avoid the legal conflict, but I'll bet the owners sitting around in a smoke-filled rule were pretty certain they could beat the rap. It would be very public and not very pretty to do so however.
Johnnie won't be suing anyone any time soon. He died in 2005.
Skin Patrol- I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me as though this whole thing is a case of disproving a negative. You can make an empirical observation that X number of black coaches are in the league and Y number may be qualified to be head coaches, but proving that owners refused to hire qualified coaches because of racism is difficult without someone that can credibly testify that words to that effect were uttered or written. Again, it goes back to my argument that the Rooney Rule is all about PR and not about equality.
As a side note, while we are talking about qualifications, what black coaches are on the bench as the next group? Dallas brings in Mike Singletary for an interview, and Mike has 4 years coaching experience. That does not necessarily disqualify him as a candidate, but if you look at Wiki, Lovie Smith has 27 years coaching experience. Tony Dungy has 27 years coaching experience. Romeo Crennel has 37 years experience. These guys got where they are on merit. It may have happened sooner for both of them, yes, but I am arguing that the economics of the matter have changed in the past 20 years.
Ah yes, but it would appear that Jerry Jones' current coach search is about anything but coaching merit. It would appear that it is mostly about who will be willing to be obey him. His insistence on considering only wash-ups and guys who have only been coaching a few years clearly indicates this.
I just stumbled across this. So much of this article is so wrong it's hard to know where to start. First of all the Rooney Rule had little to do with Cochran or Mehri and reading any interview that Dan Rooney has done on the subject would make this clear. Most people outside of Pittsburgh don't realize that Tony Dungy and Dan Rooney have a very deep and longstanding relationship. Dungy came into the league as a Steeler and first became both a position coach and Coordinator under Chuck Noll (who thought very, very highly of him, so highly he made him the youngest DC in the league and actively tried to get him a HC job) Rooney proposed the Rule after seeing how Tony Dungy (then in Minn. and one of the sharpest coordinators) kept getting passed over for HC jobs often without even being considered. Rooney (who, you know, is an actual NFL owner and has personal relationships with the other owners) then asked GMs and owners what was keeping Dungy back, and after canvassing the League came to the conclusion that racism was a primary (although not solitary) culprit. Rooney found this heartbreaking and tried to convince others that they didn't understand Dungy. He was convinced that if Tony could get an interview that he could change minds, but he wasn't even getting invites. In the meantime Rooney's lobbying on behalf of Dungy paid off with Tony getting hired in Tampa. Ronney thought that Dungy's success might change things, but it didn't. Rooney thought the situation over and after a year or two came up with the solution that we now know of. Cochran and Mehri came and talked to Rooney and he encouraged them in their endeavors thinking that a two-pronged approach would be more successful. How anyone could argue that the RR hasn't been wildly successful is beyond me, as the culture of the NFL has changed dramatically in just a few short years. There has even been progress on the GM front with the RR being extending to cover top FO jobs. In fact the RR has been so successful Rooney himself thinks that the time is approaching where the NFL may not need it anymore.
If this is DJ Renegade then welcome to Curly R and thanks for reading.
I am not certain anything in the factual record I cited contradicts any of the historical and background information you have cited, and if this is an accurate summary of Dan Rooney's personal involvement in the creation of the Rule then thank you for appending this post.
The appearance that favoritism for a particular minority individual was as prime a motivator for the Rule as a lawsuit by Cochran and Mehri does not accrue well to the legitimacy of the Rule.
Favoritism and tokenism, two great tastes that go great together.
I have also weighed in on the Rule as prospectively applied to front office positions.
http://curlyr.blogspot.com/2009/...g-in-
wrong.html
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