Uthmeier using the Rooney Rule to stir grievance, grease re-election

“To the privileged, equality feels like oppression.” — Labor Activist Mark Caddo

It is no accident that Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is suddenly concerned about the National Football League’s hiring practices. Twenty-three years after the Rooney Rule was established, he sent a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell expressing his profound concerns about the rule.

His is a shot across the NFL’s bow as he seeks to coerce the owners into alignment with his white-first MAGA ideology.

Two things are at play here: a reelection campaign battle culminating on Nov. 3 for this enormously powerful position bestowed by Ron DeSantis upon a callow man whose main qualifications are his skin color and voracious MAGA ideological appetite.

And this is also an opportunity to step into the limelight and get a rack of ink while continuing to wave the flags of white dominance and Christian nationalism.

On Wednesday, March 24, Uthmeier dispatched his letter to Goodell demanding that the NFL — a private entity and America’s most popular sport — jettison the program created ostensibly to correct decades-long racial prejudice and inequity.

“As Florida’s chief legal officer … I write with a word of caution to the NFL on its race-and-sex-based hiring policies. As applied in Florida, the NFL’s ‘Rooney Rule,’ which governs the hiring of certain team executives and coaches, brazenly violates Florida law,” he said. “These methods of directing the selection and training of certain executives, coaches, and other employees based on skin color and sex is discriminatory and violates Florida law.”

“Florida law is clear: hiring decisions cannot be based on race and the Rooney Rule mandates race-based interviews and incentivizes race-based decisions. That’s discrimination. … NFL teams and their fans don’t care about the race of the coaching staff. They want a merit-based system that gives their team the best chance to win,” Uthmeier said.

Uthmeier is focused on the Miami Dolphins, Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He is threatening unspecified “enforcement actions against the league for race-based discrimination” if the NFL doesn’t comply and said it has until May 1 to respond.

Predictably, he is running for election to a full term and has been endorsed by Donald Trump and DeSantis.

And he is leaning into the crass political playbook that has served MAGA so well. They have made a cottage industry of fear, resentment and grievance. What unspools with regularity is clumsily cooked-up evidence and jarring rhetoric revealing their deepest fears about the ascendency of Blacks, other non-white people, and women. They demean, dismantle, and attempt to destroy every program or policy statewide that has offered the disinherited a leg up.

Uthmeier echoes DeSantis’ desire to stamp out liberalism and “identity politics” and replace them with what they earnestly describe as “merit-based” everything and institutional neutrality.

Backlash

It has been satisfying to see commentators and sports analysts clown Uthmeier.

“But this time, James Uthmeier  — the architect of some of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ dumbest stunts, before DeSantis rewarded his buddy by naming him to fill out former Attorney General Ashley Moody’s term — has truly outdone himself,” the Orlando Sentinel said in an editorial.

“You’d think that someone serving as Florida’s chief legal officer would understand that federal law trumps state law,” the editors added.

ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith argues the rule itself is ineffective in hiring of non-white candidates. Other critics have castigated Uthmeier for getting a plum teaching gig at the University of Florida that pays him $100,000 yearly to teach for two hours a week. To which one Instagram critic posted: “If he’s actually worried about unqualified people getting job handouts, he can try looking in the mirror first and foremost.”

Going after the NFL is curious, because the league has never been a bastion of social justice, racial equality, DEI, or affirmative action even as Black players make up 70% of those taking the field. Both Uthmeier and NFL owners have used African Americans as pawns. The NFL and the MAGA crowd pretend meritocracy is real and that race neutrality is an established, deeply embedded operating principle governing sport, commerce, and life generally in America.

The NFL is a good ol’ boys club. The league has tried and failed to shrug off its racist past, including a “gentleman’s agreement” that barred Black players from the game beginning in the 1920s. Since then, Black and female representation in that space has been scant. Meanwhile, a succession of mediocre white men have run teams while talented, smart, experienced Black men were overlooked.

The Rooney Rule was created to placate league critics. In its simplest terms, the Rooney Rule requires teams to interview two non-white or female candidates for any open head coach, general manager, or offensive coordinator positions.

For many years, sport journalists and columnists like Jemele Hill, William Rhoden, Sally Jenkins, and Mina Kimes, political commentators like David French, NFL players including Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reed, former NFL Players’ Association President DeMaurice Smith, and a succession of Black coaches have blasted the NFL. They’ve objected to the racism, the slow pace of change, and its stubborn reluctance to honestly and openly confront the racial albatross that has hung around its neck for 100 years.

Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president for football operations and a five-time Pro Bowl cornerback, wants to see minority hiring become a standard practice in the league for all businesses and companies.

“We should be creating a workplace culture that doesn’t require mandates to interview people of color and minorities. They should be doing the right thing for the right reasons, not because there’s a policy,” Vincent said in a 2021 interview with The Associated Press.

In 2003, the Rooney Rule, named after the late Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, was a necessary tool toward promoting fair and equitable hiring, he argued.

“Now we are reimagining hiring practices taking into consideration tenure, impact, stability, and financial risk reduction resulting in better informed decisions. It’s not about percentages, it’s about intentionally normalizing fairness, inclusivity, and opportunity as an extension of football for all.”

DeMaurice Smith, who headed the NFL Players Association from 2009 to 2023, co-wrote a 76-page treatise in the Yale Law & Policy Review with law student Carl Lasker about why the Rooney Rule was doomed to fail.

‘Rooney suggestion’

They assert that the “Rooney Suggestion” failed to defeat the institutional barriers to equitable hiring practices in the NFL, illustrating how owners, executives and coaches used the rule to deflect from a “deep-rooted bias about what leaders should look like, traditions of nepotism, professional cliques, positional prejudices, and regional biases that block” the paths of African Americans to top jobs.

“The process through which NFL teams hire and fire coaches is inherently discriminatory,” the authors contend. “We believe that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the lack of diversity in the NFL’s coaching and executive ranks is not an accident but rather the result of a deliberate — or deliberately indifferent — policy of control exerted by the NFL owners. The Rooney Rule has failed.”

Smith argues his immersion in the NFL gives him unique insight into the world of pro football.

“The stark employment statistics, evidence of double standards, and anecdotal evidence only begin to tell the story of the NFL and its owners’ failure to diversify,” the authors write.

Smith argues the rule can be easily sidestepped because there is no oversight.

“The Rooney Rule is the only rule that I have ever seen in the history of the National Football League that they don’t follow and they don’t enforce,” Smith said during an interview with Pro Football Talk. “They have nobody that they’re accountable to, nobody to answer to. In a closed system where they are accountable to no one, these owners simply do whatever they want to do.”

In 2026, racial favoritism persists, deeply embedded in this multi-billion-dollar industry. Following the end of the NFL’s most recent hiring cycle, of the 10 head coaching vacancies — the most since 11 jobs were available in 2000 — none was filled by a Black person for the fifth time in the Rooney Rule era.

Of those vacancies, one position went to Robert Saleh, a coach with Lebanese ancestry, to Tennessee. As a consequence, the NFL is left with three Black head coaches out of 32 in a league in which roughly 70% of the players are Black.

“You look at the former coach of the New England Patriots who is now in the Superbowl. Jerod Mayo got fired after one season. That’s understandable in a certain context but guys like that don’t get another chance,” former ESPN columnist Clinton Yates said in a recent ABC News interview. “Meanwhile, you’ve got other guys who were coaches for some time or not a lot of time, who get choices over and over again.”

Modern day plantations

But supporters of the Rooney Rule and those seeking meaningful and lasting racial change have come to understand that you can’t legislate morality, fairness, or justice, or make people do what is not already in their hearts to do.

The NFL brass and owners have never been serious about really addressing much less correcting the NFL ecosystem. Old white men have tightly held the levers of control for the entirety of the league’s existence. Black players have so little leverage and so few rights that they are often likened by Rhoden and others as handsomely paid slaves on a modern-day plantation.

Uthmeier may have gotten some mileage from his political stunt, but it may have hit a brick wall.

NFL Commish Roger Goodell made it clear at the end of league meetings last week that there are no plans to reverse course.

“One thing that doesn’t change is our values and we believe in diversity and its benefit to the National Football League. We are well aware of the laws and where the laws are changing and evolving,” Goodell said. “We think the Rooney Rule is consistent with those and we certainly will engage with the Florida AG or anybody else as we have in the past to talk about our policies.”