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.
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