Did the N.F.L. Solve Diversity Hiring? (Part 1)

In case you somehow didn’t notice — if you aren’t one of the tens of millions of people watching on TV, or placing some bets, or keeping up with the Taylor Swift news — the National Football League has begun its new season. The N.F.L. is the richest sports league in history, and probably the most growth-obsessed as well. One reason is that many team owners made their money by building their own businesses — in real estate, or oil, in the HVAC industry, in America’s biggest chain of truck stops. That kind of business success requires a strong urge to expand — and so, not surprisingly, the N.F.L. is also driven by expansion. There are more games per season than there used to be, played in more places: this year, in England, Germany, and Brazil. N.F.L. games are distributed on just about every network and streaming platform you’ve ever heard of, and some you haven’t. If you look at the 100 top TV broadcasts last year in the U.S., you’ll see that 93 of them were N.F.L. games. Among the others were the Oscars, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and three college-football games.

The N.F.L. did around $13 billion in revenues last year, and each of the 32 teams are worth, on average, more than $5 billion. That is much more than teams in any other sport. Owning an N.F.L. team has provided a route for wealthy individuals or families to become very wealthy. This creates its own problem: there can be a lot of taxes to pay when it’s time to sell and, there just aren’t that many potential buyers for a $5 billion asset — at least the right kind of buyers. The N.F.L. was founded and run for decades by a relatively small group of families, and it has remained vigilant about who should be let in. In Europe, the top soccer leagues allow their teams to be owned by investment cartels and oligarchs and petrostates. The N.F.L. doesn’t, not yet at least — although they did recently vote to allow private-equity investors to buy up to 10 percent of a team. If they allowed 100 percent, they would likely sell out in 10 minutes, so great are the N.F.L.’s prospects.

There was nothing predetermined about this massive financial success. Professional football was for many years barely professional at all; it was a ragged and violent game, playing deep in the shadow of baseball and other sports. But over the past 50 years, the N.F.L. has turned itself into an entertainment juggernaut; the football games are of course at the center, but the attendant swarms of media and gambling and merchandising and eating and drinking are what make the N.F.L. an industry unto itself. And it is, for the most part, an extremely well-run industry; there is a premium put on modern management techniques when it comes to resource allocation, on-field strategy and off-field strategy, and personnel decisions. Most of us, when we watch a game, we concentrate on the players — 53 per team, divided into defensive, offensive, and special-teams units, each with their own systems and coaches. The average N.F.L. team has 23 coaches. There is the head coach, the offensive and defensive and special-teams coordinators, and then a lot of position coaches, assistant coaches, “quality control” coaches — and that’s not even counting the training and medical staff, the logistics people, and so on. The head coach who sits atop this pyramid is essentially the C.E.O. of what happens on the football field. It is an important, difficult, thrilling job — with a hefty turnover rate and an average tenure of roughly three years.

The most successful teams in the league excel at identifying talent — so we thought it might be interesting to look into how these multi-billion-dollar franchises choose their on-field C.E.O.’s. Especially because there is an obvious discrepancy in the N.F.L.: the majority of the players are Black; the majority of the coaches are not. Today on Freakonomics Radio: why is that?

Jim ROONEY: We don’t take enough time in the interview process. We don’t interview enough different candidates. And if I have to make a decision, I’m going to make a decision of something that’s familiar to me. 

More than two decades ago, the league came up with a policy to address this situation. It’s called the Rooney Rule. We’ll hear about its history; its successes and failures, and how the idea has spread outside of football.

Tynesia BOYEA-ROBINSON: They said, “Oh, George Floyd, that’s bad. We don’t want to be bad. We don’t want to be racist. We’re going to fix diversity.” 

Has it “fixed diversity”?

Herm EDWARDS: I mean, what people do in the dark, you don’t know.

Those are just some of the questions we’ll try to answer — in this episode and next week’s too. Also, questions like this one:

Jeremi DURU: How come I only get to go out and get my bell rung on Sundays, and I don’t get to be on the sidelines or in the executive suites organizing the game?

This is your welcome-to-the-N.F.L. moment. Starting now.

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Imagine that your dream is to become a head coach in the National Football League. How likely are you to make it? Not very likely. There are only 32 of these jobs and, up until now, they’ve always gone to men. Of the men who currently hold those jobs, roughly a third played professional football, and all but one played college football. And even though the majority of N.F.L. players are Black, for many decades, you weren’t going to get a head coaching job unless you were white.

DURU: For a Black former player to become a head coach — there really wasn’t much of a path. 

That is Jeremi Duru. He’s a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and he directs the Sport and Society Initiative at A.U.’s law school.

DURU: One reason for that goes back further historically, Stephen — which is that Black players were expurgated from the league in 1934.

DUBNER: Yeah, talk about that a minute. What we now know is the N.F.L. began in 1920, I believe, is that right?

DURU: Yes.

DUBNER: And there were Black players, not a ton but there were Black players, and coaches as well, yeah? 

DURU: In the very early days, you had a few Black players. You had one Black head coach, amazingly. I mean, for those of us who study American history, you know how savage the racial discord was at the time. For there to be a Black head coach in the N.F.L. was extraordinary. And the coach — Fritz Pollard is his name — was also a player, and it wasn’t rare at the time to have player-coaches. But what’s important to recognize is these players, they literally were seeking to protect themselves on the field from opposing players, from teammates at practice. Fritz had this thing where when he got knocked down, he would as quickly as he could flip onto his back and stick his feet up in the air and start swinging them like he’s riding a bicycle to basically protect himself from getting crushed by people who were seeking to harm him. That’s what we’re dealing with at the time. And so there wasn’t a big Black presence. As of the early 1930s there was a quote-unquote “gentlemen’s agreement” among all owners in the league to kick out Black people altogether. And then Rooney bought in right around that time. He had — in his previous business dealings — been pretty even-handed, one of the more even-handed business people when it comes to race, certainly in Pittsburgh, probably in the East Coast. But he went along with this gentlemen’s agreement.

ROONEY: My grandfather followed the ban on Black players, and he talked about that as being the biggest mistake of his life. 

And that is Jim Rooney, who is now in his fifties.

ROONEY: I grew up as part of a family business, which is the Pittsburgh Steelers. 

The Steelers are still majority-owned by Rooneys. The team president is Art Rooney II; before that, it was Dan Rooney — Jim Rooney’s father; and before that, the original Art Rooney, the team’s founder. Art Rooney came up as a boxer and a semi-pro baseball player, and then he worked as a promoter and a professional gambler. Through this combination of above-board and maybe-not-so-above-board work, Art Rooney became a legend in Pittsburgh, roguish for sure if not quite a rogue. I happen to know all this and much more — way too much — because I have been a Steelers fan since I was a child, and I have a couple shelves’ full of Steelers books. I have written one myself. I now asked Jim Rooney to explain how the Pittsburgh Steelers first came to be.

ROONEY: There is a lifelong family debate on this story, so you’re going to get Jim Rooney’s version. My great-uncle Jim had this semi-pro team, and they were playing all over western Pennsylvania. 

DUBNER: And we should say, this is a time when every steel mill, every little town, they all had their own football teams, right? 

ROONEY: Yep. So my grandfather had a good friend named Charley Bidwill. Charley Bidwill owns the Chicago Cardinals, which are now the Arizona Cardinals. And the story goes that Charley and Art Rooney were running booze across the Great Lakes during Prohibition. And Bidwill says, “Hey Art, we’re putting a team in Philly, do you want to put a team in Pittsburgh?” And so my grandfather goes Uncle Jim, and Jim owed Art like $5,000. It was a lot of money for 1933.

DUBNER: Wait a minute. How does one brother end up owing another brother that much? This was a cut from some project?

ROONEY: Something went on with Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim took risks, and was always in a little bit of trouble. So Uncle Jim owes “the Chief,” as my grandfather was known, $5,000. And so my grandfather says, Jim, if you give me that team, I’m going to put them in this National Football League and we’ll call it even. And so Jim’s response was, “Art, I could never do that to you. That National Football League is not going to make it.” So, thank God my grandfather pushed him a little bit, and took the team and put them into the National Football League.

So Pittsburgh got an N.F.L. team in 1933. They were originally called the Pirates, same as the city’s baseball team, but in 1940, Art Rooney renamed them as the Pittsburgh Steelers. In 1938, they drafted a running back from the University of Colorado named Byron “Whizzer” White; he led the N.F.L. in rushing yards in his rookie season — but he quit the Steelers to go back to school, at Oxford. And he eventually became a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. For the Pittsburgh Steelers, Whizzer White was one of the few bright spots in the first 40 years of their existence: they were, generally, a terrible team. The league itself, meanwhile, was starting to evolve. In 1946, the N.F.L. lifted its ban on Black players. Why? Here, again, is Jeremi Duru:

DURU: You get to 1946, the Rams moved to L.A., and in order to play in the Coliseum — because of a substantial grassroots movement headed by the Black press out there — it was determined that you couldn’t have a segregated league coming in to play games in the Coliseum. So they were forced to bring in a couple of Black players, and they did. And that’s how you had Black players come into the league. 

Black players in the 1940s N.F.L. encountered the same verbal and physical abuse that players faced in the ‘20s. And even though N.F.L. had reintegrated, the best college football programs of the time — like Alabama, LSU and Texas — remained segregated. So the best Black players often played at H.B.C.U.s — Historically Black Colleges and Universities — and were therefore overlooked by N.F.L. scouts. Black players who did make it to the N.F.L. often found their options limited.

DURU: In those early days of reintegration, Black players were not permitted to play positions that are viewed as “thinking” positions: quarterback, center, middle linebacker. Black players were relegated to wide receiver, cornerback, running back. Now, I do not seek to disparage those positions. But at the time, those were positions that were viewed as “brawn” positions and not the brain position. 

Those “thinking” positions also happen to be the positions that produce a lot of future N.F.L. coaches — offensive coordinators, defensive coordinators, and head coaches especially. So, by excluding Black players from those positions, the league was also cutting off their best route to a coaching future. But not every team went along with these unwritten rules around race. Here’s Jim Rooney again: 

ROONEY: I think my grandfather, and then my father in particular made decisions with an open view of moral scruples, an understanding that, yes, there is a business component, he didn’t dismiss the business component, but there was also this human element. 

It was Dan Rooney — son of Art, father of Jim — who set this new direction for the Steelers. By the early 1960’s, he was running the team’s day-to-day operations.

DURU: As Dan took over the team, he was really intentional and serious about diversity. He was intentional and serious about making sure that different perspectives were articulated, different perspectives were considered in respect to decisions that were made. He hired this guy named Bill Nunn, who was a reporter for a Black newspaper in Pittsburgh, who essentially criticized the Steelers as talking about an interest in diversity but not really backing it up. 

ROONEY: My father, he was invited by a parish priest to march in Selma, Alabama. He didn’t go. Bill Nunn, a newspaper writer, said, “Dan Rooney says he’s open to integration, but really hasn’t done much more than anyone else.” And that became the moment that my father sat down with Bill and said, “Bill, you’re right. I want to do this differently. What can I do?” 

DURU: And he hired Bill Nunn to come in and scout for the team. And Bill Nunn diversified the club by going to H.B.C.U.s to look for players, which few other clubs were doing. And, one, it made the Steelers a more diverse organization and an organization open to forward and interesting and progressive thinking about race. And, two, it made them better because they tapped pools of talent that nobody else was tapping.

DUBNER: What were some things that the Steelers were doing that made Black players and coaches at Black schools so comfortable with their players going there? 

ROONEY: I think so much of it was Bill, because Bill didn’t just go and look at tape, he would spend the weekend there. He always wanted to see the players’ athletic ability outside of the arena where things could be managed by their coaches. If there was family around, he would try to talk to their family, really try to understand the entire persona of a player. And then, he could make a really strong recommendation — because there was less data. What he did was amazing. Bill helped change the N.F.L. 

DUBNER: What’s the Steelers organization doing once the players get there to make it a place where they want to go?

ROONEY: I think the biggest was hiring Bill — but after Bill, was naming Joe Gilliam as the quarterback in 1974. So this is the first time in N.F.L. history that prior to the start of the season, a Black man was named starting quarterback.

That’s right — it took 28 years from when Black players were allowed back into the N.F.L. until a team announced a Black starting quarterback at the beginning of the season. But with the Steelers, it went further than that. Black players on the Steelers were empowered to step up under this new era of leadership — there was team president Dan Rooney, the influential scout Bill Nunn, and a future Hall of Fame coach named Chuck Noll. Noll did not fit any football-coach stereotypes; he was a deep reader, an intellectual and a lover of classical music who saw himself as more teacher than drill sergeant. He was always telling his players that football was just one brief chapter of their existence, and that they had to prepare themselves for what he called “their life’s work.” Keep in mind that players made much less money then; most of them had full-time jobs in the off-season to support themselves.

ROONEY: The decision that Chuck made to start Joe Gilliam — several of the H.B.C.U. players told me that that moment meant so much to them, because it said to them, “Okay, if they’re willing to start a quarterback, then I know if I’m the best defensive back or if I’m the best linebacker, I’m the best tackle, I’m going to have an opportunity here.” That decision was key. Then, I think the next big milestone was Joe Greene becoming captain.

Joe Greene — known as “Mean” Joe Greene — was a defensive lineman who’d been scouted by Bill Nunn out of North Texas State. He was huge, very physical, and — well, mean, at least on the field, especially at the start of his career. The Steelers had drafted Greene in 1969, and he quickly became the foundation of a defense that was known as the Steel Curtain.

ROONEY: It was clear that Joe was the leader of the team. He had those two phenomenal qualities in a leader. He was ferocious, and he had that ability to intimidate. And I’m not saying a leader should be intimidating all the time, but there’s a time you have to get a group of people to line up. But then once you got Joe’s stamp of approval, he showed this care for them and their families that was just the essence of what any locker room would want.

By the mid-1970s, the Steelers looked markedly different than most other N.F.L. teams — more Black players, more Black leadership, and an unusual sense of cohesion. Now, none of this would be remembered today except for the fact that this unusual team, after 40 years of losing, finally began to win. The Steelers went on one of the most historic hot streaks in sports history, winning four Super Bowls in six years. They beat the Minnesota Vikings in 1975, the Dallas Cowboys in 1976, the Cowboys again in 1979, and the Los Angeles Rams in 1980. And in the midst of this, in 1977, the Steelers picked up an undrafted player whose name you will know if you’re a football fan.

ROONEY: Tony Dungy comes in, is an okay football player, but Chuck Noll immediately sees how brilliant he is, and then hires him as an assistant coach. He becomes, at a very young age, I think he was 29 — he becomes the first Black man and youngest person ever to be named defensive coordinator of an N.F.L. team. So Chuck saw how talented Dungy was. And then Tony goes on to have the amazing career he’s had. 

By now, other teams had taken notice of the Steelers’ success with Black talent, and they began to copy the scouting strategy established by Bill Nunn. In 1959, before Nunn joined the Steelers, only 12 percent of N.F.L. players were Black. By the 1990s, around two-thirds were. And how about coaches? Through the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s and most of the ’80s, Fritz Pollard remained the only Black head coach in N.F.L. history. But that finally changed in 1989, when Oakland Raiders’ owner Al Davis named his former lineman Art Shell as the team’s head coach. Dan Rooney, who came from a long line of Irish-Catholics, was a soft-spoken consensus-builder; Al Davis, from a Brooklyn Jewish family, was more aggressive, and more willing to go off on his own.

ROONEY: You know, Al Davis is very different than my father. But both Al and Dan had this fundamental respect for people, and were interested in overcoming these barriers. 

To Jim Rooney, the late ’80s were a time when a lot of barriers were coming down.

ROONEY: In 1989, you had Shell hired, you had what was going on in the world where the Berlin Wall was coming down, Russia was starting to fall apart. You had this sense of great change, and the N.F.L. was in a massive change era as well. You got a new commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, was young, up and coming, a person who had a very open worldview. You had the sense then that things were moving and were going to only move in that direction. 

So did things keep moving in that direction, in the N.F.L.? That would be a no.

ROONEY: This is outrageous. How can a guy like Dungy get fired?

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In 1997, National Football League Commissioner Paul Tagliabue appointed Harold Henderson as the league’s executive vice president for labor relations. This made Henderson one of the highest-ranking Black executives in professional sports. Given all the momentum we were hearing about before the break, you might think that a lot of N.F.L. teams by now would have hired a Black head coach. After all, across the league’s 32 teams, more than half the players were Black, and many head coaches are former players. But the decision to hire a coach is a team decision, not a decision made by some executive in the league office. And the team owners were white. Here, again, is the legal scholar Jeremi Duru:

DURU: The easiest way to think about it is that the N.F.L. is like an umbrella organization, and under that umbrella, you have 32 different clubs that are their own businesses. They’ve got their own owners, they’ve got their own presidents, they’ve got their own culture, they’ve got their own policies. The umbrella seeks to organize them in a way such that they can have competitive games against each other, and a league in which to play. I think that the casual observer would view the commissioner as in charge of this whole thing. And the commissioner is the head of the league. But who hires the commissioner? The owners. The owners hire the commissioner. The owners have the power to not renew the contract of the commissioner. At the end of the day, these are individual businesses, and it’s very important to understand that.

And so each team — specifically the owner of each team, someone who is accustomed to operating as the master of his personal universe — he is free to adopt whatever hiring policy he wants. But by the end of the 2000 N.F.L. season, there had only been five Black head coaches in league history. If nothing else, the optics were not good.

DURU: Football, it is a collision sport. There is violence in the sport. And the idea of a team that’s predominantly Black being sent out into essentially sport-related combat by a group of people who are entirely white, who are standing outside on the sidelines looking on, it’s a painful picture. It harkens back to the days of battle royales and other exploitation of Black athletes. And so, I think inside those orga— 

DUBNER: I mean, to say nothing of slavery, let’s be honest. 

DURU: Yeah, right. What’s painful for athletes in those organizations, you know — I don’t think they’re saying, “Hey, listen, we need all of the coaching staff to be Black.” But there’s got to be a thought, “Well, how come I only get to go out and get my bell rung on Sundays, and I don’t get to be on the sidelines or in the executive suites organizing the game?”

DUBNER: Whether it’s wins and losses or the spirit and camaraderie or friction, et cetera, of a team, talk about the ways in which a team that may be 60 or 70 percent Black players, how it’s different under a Black head coach or coordinators or a white head coach or coordinators. 

DURU: For those who don’t follow football, I mean, one way to look at it is the head coach is like the C.E.O. of this team. They are making decisions. They are running things. They are the model at the top. They’re the one who gives a last word before a game. They’re the one who decides what sort of schedule we’re going to have — it’s all in the head coach’s purview. There are Black head coaches and there are white head coaches who have been deeply successful on the interpersonal level with Black players. But I think there’s something important for a Black player to recognize that there is at least some Black representation on the coaching staff. I’m responsible for that player’s well-being, head coach or otherwise. 

Frustration around the absence of Black coaches seemed to hit a peak around the 2001 N.F.L. season, when two Black head coaches — two of only five in history — were fired. They both had winning records, and had both taken their teams to the playoffs multiple times. Those are the kind of accomplishments that tend to not get you fired as an N.F.L. head coach. One of the fired coaches was Dennis Green, of the Minnesota Vikings. The other was Tony Dungy, of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Dungy, you’ll remember, got his start with the Steelers — as a player and then as a very young coach, hand-picked by Chuck Noll. The firing of Tony Dungy now caught the attention of Dan Rooney, the Steelers’ owner and president. Here, again, is his son Jim Rooney.

ROONEY: So Dungy comes to the Steelers in ’77. He and my father build a really close partnership. And my father sees throughout the ’80s and then the ’90s — he sees and has this ongoing conversation with Tony about job interviews. And my father sees the dehumanization. They’ve both talked to me about this, and the impact that had on my father, to see someone that he knew was better than so many folks who were getting interviews and getting jobs. And saying, you know, this is just completely wrong.

But Tony Dungy finally did get his chance, with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — only to lose his job after six seasons. Jim Rooney remembers his father’s reaction.

ROONEY: I remember him just being really disillusioned. You know, “This is outrageous, how can a guy like Dungy get fired”? There’s these different moments in life where bad things happen, and they become the catalyst to change.

Let me say here two things. The first is that Tony Dungy did get another chance, with the Indianapolis Colts, and Dungy led the Colts to a Super Bowl victory. So, happy ending there. The other thing to say is this: Jim Rooney is an unabashed fan of his late father Dan. He wrote a book about his father, called A Different Way to Win. “Most books written by an offspring,” he writes, “fall into one of two categories: A Tell-All or a Beatification. … This book falls into the latter.” Jim Rooney argues that his father was successful with the Steelers because of the kind of person he was: honest, humble, compassionate. He wasn’t colorful, like his father, The Chief. But Dan Rooney cared about building things well, running things well, and he didn’t need to get the credit. These traits also made him valuable to his fellow N.F.L. owners and to the league itself. Rooney was heavily involved in labor relations, league strategy, broadcast negotiations, and more. He had the ear of other owners when he needed it, and when other owners needed to be brought in line, it was often Rooney who did that. And now in 2001, we know that Rooney was steamed about what happened to Tony Dungy. Here’s Jeremi Duru again.

DURU: Tony Dungy got fired by the Buccaneers. Not only had he been successful, but he took the organization from pure doormat status, and made them a contender every year. After he was fired, and Dennis Green was fired, this is after the 2001 season, we now had one coach of color in this league of 32 clubs. One head coach of color, league of 32 clubs. And it was just crazy. 

Around this time, Duru was working for a Washington law firm called Mehri & Skalet. They specialize in employment-discrimination cases. Cyrus Mehri is an Iranian-American attorney who had successfully brought racial-discrimination cases against Coca-Cola and Texaco, and was now suing Johnson & Johnson. His co-counsel on the Johnson & Johnson case was the superstar Black attorney Johnny Cochrane, who successfully defended O.J. Simpson on murder charges.

DURU: And so Cyrus and Johnnie, I think during a break from a deposition — they were working on that case just after Tony Dungy got fired by the Buccaneers, and Dennis Green got fired by the Vikings — were just talking in the break room, you know, “You guys see what happened in the N.F.L.? This is ridiculous.” And they were like, “You know what? What we’re seeing there is reflective of the work that we do in employment discrimination, our civil-rights work. We need to dig into this a little bit.”

DUBNER: And what was the next step? 

DURU: They figured, okay, all the anecdotes in the world may have some impact, but let’s get some stats on this. So they commissioned a study. They got someone named Janice Madden, a labor economist at University of Pennsylvania. They asked her if she would study the previous 15 years of the N.F.L. and see how Black head coaches were stacking up to white head coaches. Cyrus and Johnnie, they get this report from Janice Madden. The report indicated that in the first year, a Black head coach won 2.7 more games than the white head coach. 

DUBNER: Which is a lot in a league of only — 

DURU: That’s exactly right, 16-game season, right? I mean, that is through-the-roof high. And in the season of termination, they won 1.3 more. Overall, they won more. They went to the playoffs more often as a percentage matter. They were, according to the numbers, better. And the conclusion from the report was not that Black coaches are somehow inherently better coaches. The conclusion was that Black coaches had been made to apprentice so long in assistant positions that when they became head coaches, they were just better. And so, Cyrus and Johnnie had a press conference releasing the report, and they also sent it to the league. And during the press conference Johnnie said, “If they don’t negotiate, we will litigate.” And so essentially, in sending it to the N.F.L., it was sent with a litigation threat. 

DUBNER: So what would it be like to be an owner in 2002 and hear Johnnie Cochran say, “Hey, if you don’t negotiate, we’re happy to litigate.” What’s the perspective of the owner there? 

DURU: I think a lot of the owners are saying, “Okay, go get it, let’s see what happens if you litigate,” to be quite frank. I think that is what a lot of folks were saying, but not everybody. And here’s where the rubber met the road in a very interesting way. The N.F.L., at the time, the league office now, there is a recognition that they’ve got a problem. The N.F.L. recognized that the numbers were bad. And the media was telling them about it as well. So, they felt like they had to do something. And so, when this threat came in, there was a decision made. Paul Tagliabue was the commissioner. I give him credit. Jeff Pash was the general counsel of the league at the time, and still is. I give him credit. These folks were saying, we’ve got to do something rather than just bleeding them with a thousand cuts in litigation — which they could have done. The N.F.L. is so highly capitalized, they could have fought them, and probably would have won. They said, “Why don’t you come in and let’s talk about this?” 

There were some other key figures getting involved, like John Wooten. He was a Black former N.F.L. player who had also worked as an executive at a few N.F.L. teams, and came to chair an advocacy group called the Fritz Pollard Alliance, named for that first Black head coach way back in 1920. So the N.F.L. was ready to talk, the advocates were ready to talk — and how about the team owners, the ones who actually hire the football coaches? Among the owners, you would have found considerably less enthusiasm. But Dan Rooney, of the Steelers, was an exception.

DURU: Dan Rooney recognized that what these lawyers were talking about was something that the league had to engage and embrace. And Dan Rooney was trying to get other owners in the league to do something to try to increase equity.

DUBNER: And what was the something then that was decided upon? 

DURU: So, the report that I mentioned was in late September of 2002. And over the course of the following three months, the lawyers were brought in to meet. The owners had their own internal meetings. They talked to their outside counsel. There was a great deal of resistance. But there seemed to be some sort of galvanization around this idea, which the lawyers called the “fair competition resolution,” which was a requirement that every club interview at least one person of color before making a head coach hire. 

DUBNER: So, this new idea is to have one minority candidate be among the interviewees. Was there also any kind of rule or requirement about the number of interviewees for an open position? 

DURU: No. At the time, there was no rule about that. The idea was just, hey, have one person of color. And there was a great deal of resistance. There was one really interesting meeting where the N.F.L. brought their outside counsel, a guy named Tom Williamson, to talk to the owners at the owners’ meeting about why this might be a good idea. And the owners are saying, “Well, you can’t tell me who to hire,” and this and that. And Tom says, “Look we’re getting crushed in the press, we have ridiculous disproportionality between our head coaches and our players. What better idea do you have?” And all these billionaire owners had nothing to say. And so, out of that meeting came this idea that, “You know what? Maybe we should try this.” And Dan Rooney worked to get support from all the other owners. 

ROONEY: My father felt that it was important that you get a complete consensus. 

That, again, is Jim Rooney.

ROONEY: You had a couple folks hold out. And you had Al Davis, who really has been a leader in diversity, holding out for a while, saying, “I already do this.” I think he was scolding the league a little bit, but eventually, my father said to Al, “Well, if you’re doing it, then you’re already in agreement.” And Al kind of nodded to my father and said, “Okay, Dan, you win this one.” And then, Mike Brown of the Bengals, my father had a conversation with Mike, whose father, Paul Brown, really invented modern football, and Paul Brown’s history with Black players is mixed. So it was getting not just enough consensus where you had majority, but really getting to the point where you had a unanimous vote. 

DURU: There were holdouts, but ultimately Dan Rooney was able to wrangle everybody. And out of this came this idea, “Well, Dan Rooney was the strongest proponent inside for this. Let’s call it the Rooney Rule.”

And so the Rooney Rule became reality in the N.F.L.. How did it work out? Coming up, we speak with one former Black head coach:

EDWARDS: In the beginning, it was a good rule to put in.

But it soon got complicated.

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Before the break, we heard the history that led the N.F.L. to adopt a novel hiring policy, called the Rooney Rule, which mandated that when a team was hiring a head coach, they had to interview at least one minority candidate. The goal was to ensure that qualified minority candidates didn’t get overlooked. Or, as the legal scholar Jeremi Duru puts it:

DURU: You know, fish the whole pond. Fish the whole pond!

One idea behind “fishing the whole pond” — in any hiring process, not just the N.F.L. — is to make sure that your own cognitive biases don’t overwhelm your search for the best candidate, that you don’t give in to familiarity and hire someone who “feels” right for the part, or someone who, in this case, “looks like” a football coach.

DURU: One of the things that the Rooney Rule does is, it slows down processes. It forces you to slow down. We talk a lot about how important it is to slow down your decision-making process, and be more intentional and deliberate. When you are grinding in a short period of time to make a decision, you generally retreat to what’s comfortable. And if you are running an organization, and you are white, you generally retreat to whiteness. You retreat to hiring someone who is like you. And not even on a conscious level. But if you take time, and you release some of that pressure, and you’re a little more open and intentional about thinking broadly, then you don’t retreat into that safety space as much. And I think you have a better opportunity to make a decision that’s ultimately better for you and your organization.

So what happened in the early days of the Rooney Rule?

DURU: We have one head coach of color after 2001. The following year, there were three head coaches of color. The following year, was up to five. And in a few years, it was up to eight. So, there really did seem to be progress being made. 

One of those Black coaches, Marvin Lewis, had been hired by Mike Brown of the Cincinnati Bengals. As we mentioned earlier, Brown had been one of the holdouts on the Rooney Rule vote. And yet:

DURU: Mike Brown, he put together a textbook interview process in light of the Rooney Rule. It’s important to note, at the time the Bengals were terrible. And there was a sense that, you know, we need discipline here. Mike Brown went out, and one person who was available was Tom Coughlin. So, Tom Coughlin is a coach that’s had a lot of success in the league and was known as a disciplinarian. Seemed like he’d be the perfect solution to the Bengals’ problem. And so, Mike Brown interviewed him, but also interviewed Marvin Lewis, who was a defensive coordinator with the Ravens a long time. Even though he didn’t fit what appeared to be the mold the Bengals wanted, they went through the process, they interviewed him, they brought him back for a second one, they were impressed by him, and they hired him. He turned around the club the next year, went to eight and eight after, I think, the club won two games the year before. 

DUBNER: And he ended up being there forever, yeah? 

DURU: Forever. Ended up being there forever. 

DUBNER: So, when you look back at that incident, with an owner who was not enthusiastic but went through the process and ended up hiring a Black coach who proved to be very successful, I mean, that sounds like the poster-boy situation for your argument, yes? 

DURU: Yeah, that was the poster for the argument.

EDWARDS: In the beginning, it was a good rule to put in. 

That is Herm Edwards. He played in the N.F.L., coached in the N.F.L., and today he’s an N.F.L. analyst for ESPN.

EDWARDS: I mean, pro football — I’ve been in this league for over 30 years. 

Edwards’s father was a Black man with a long career in the U.S. Army; he met his wife while stationed in Germany after World War II. Herm Edwards has said that being in an interracial marriage was hard on his parents, but that there was “no bitterness from my mom or my dad … We just marched on.” For Herm Edwards, football was part of that march.

EDWARDS: I’m indebted to the game of football. And it started for me in high school. And then obviously from there to college and professional football as a player and then as a coach, assistant coach, a scout.

Edwards had a 10-year career playing cornerback in the N.F.L. before he moved into coaching. Tony Dungy is a part of this story too.

EDWARDS: Tony gets hired in Tampa, and I go with Tony, and become — 

DUBNER: You were defensive backs or D.C. in Tampa? 

EDWARDS: I was a defensive backs, but I was the assistant head coach. And that was the key. Tony said, when he brought me down there, he said, “Look. You can go a lot of places in college, go be a coordinator.” He said, “You don’t need to do that. I’m going to teach you how to be a head coach.” And he gave me a lot of responsibility as a head coach. 

DUBNER: You’re the same age, roughly, yes? 

EDWARDS: Yes. Came in the league the same time. Exactly right. 

DUBNER: So, what did he do? What did he show you? What did he teach you? 

EDWARDS: So all the meetings that he would be in, with the general managers, with the owners, the draft, all those things behind closed doors where the head coach is involved in it, I would sit in there. He would make decisions like training camp. He’d go down the training camp schedule. And then I would ask him, I say, “Now, Tony, why did you do this?” And he would say, “Well, I did it because this reason.” Then he’d — 

DUBNER: Give me an example. What’s something he would do? 

EDWARDS: You know, something simple. Why are you giving them an off-day here? And he’d go, “Well, because we’re going to do this, this and this.” And then he looked at me, would tell me this. He said, “Herm, you might do it different. But I’m going to give you knowledge. You don’t have to follow everything I do, because you got to look at it out of your eyes, and it’s okay.” And so I sat there for I don’t know how long, for about five years — and this is kind of interesting, I had chances after my second year there to go to places to be a coordinator. And he goes, “You don’t want to do that.”

DUBNER: Because why?

EDWARDS: Well, because you get stuck. 

DUBNER: Because you weren’t ready or — 

EDWARDS: No. Tony said, “No, just stay here. He said you’re going to be a head coach.”

DUBNER: Interesting. So he was grooming you from the beginning to be a head coach. 

EDWARDS: He was grooming me from the beginning. And it was interesting, because I could have went to college. And he goes, “You don’t want to do that.” He said, “You need to be an N.F.L. head coach.” And he was right. 

In 2001 — before the Rooney Rule was adopted — Herm Edwards became the sixth Black head coach in N.F.L. history. He spent several seasons coaching the New York Jets, another few with the Kansas City Chiefs, and eventually he did take a college head-coaching job, at Arizona State University. Edwards did not have a great coaching record — that’s why he’s a broadcaster now — but he did get the opportunity. He recognizes that his path was easier than most, thanks to the mentorship of Tony Dungy. So why does Edwards think the Rooney Rule was, as he put it, “good in the beginning?”

EDWARDS: Well, because it slowed guys down from hiring their buddies. This is a big job. When you get ready to hire somebody, you want to know some information. Owners talk. They say, “You interviewed this guy, you interviewed that guy, what did it look like?” “Well, he did okay, didn’t do okay, whatever.” They all speak. So, in the beginning, it forced you to slow down. Because what used to happen, teams who got in the playoffs, those are the guys you went after. When they lost — like some of these dudes couldn’t even interview when they’re in the playoffs. Really? I had to lose a game to get an interview? And then sometimes the job would be gone. Because the time you got out of the playoffs, it was too late. They wanted to hire somebody. So, I try to be an optimist about this because I’ve been in the league for so long, and I’ve watched it grow. And wherever I’ve been, I’ve been the first Black head coach. The Jets. Kansas City. Arizona State. So I chuckle because I know that eventually someone was going to ask me the question. When I went to Kansas City. “Hey, you know —” and I said, “I already know.” And then when I went to Arizona State, they went — I said, “I already know, don’t ask the question.” And so yeah, you’d think in 2024, you know — this shouldn’t be a question. It should no longer be a question, but it still is. Has it gotten better? It’s gotten a lot better. But there’s still a lot of work to do.

What kind of work still needs to be done? Well, consider those interviews that were required by the Rooney Rule.

EDWARDS: So in the beginning, it was a good way of slowing it down and getting interviews. But then it became almost like, “Okay, I’m gonna interview some guys. But I already know who I’m going to hire.”

DUBNER: So were those sham interviews? 

EDWARDS: Yeah. I mean, some of them were phone calls. I interviewed a guy, he didn’t even bring you in. 

Coming up next time, in part two: the underbelly of the Rooney Rule.

DURU: It wasn’t two weeks after everybody had agreed to the rule that it was totally flouted by an owner who just agreed to it.

And then the Rooney Rule started drifting into corporate America. This too had its problems:

Tynesia BOYEA-ROBINSON: It’s no different than saying, “Oh, you know what? I want to run a marathon.” There is a 42-week process where you like, train, y’all. You don’t just get up and say, I’m going to run 26.2 miles. And that’s what people did with their diversity efforts. 

That’s next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Theo Jacobs. Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Jon Schnaars, Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilley, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.