Florida’s AG continues to toy with NFL over ‘minority’ hiring • Florida Phoenix

“I do see color, because I believe if you don’t see color, you can’t see racism.” — former New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo

Like Cervante’s Don Quixote de la Mancha, James Uthmeier has been on a crusade of late, tilting at the latest windmill — the National Football League — which he is pressing to abandon its Rooney Rule.

The Rooney Rule is a 23-year-old program named after the late Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney. Since 2003, NFL owners must interview non-white candidates for coaching and front office slots. Teams must also interview at least two non-white candidates from outside their organization for head coaching, general manager, and coordinator positions. And one non-white candidate must be interviewed for a quarterback coach position.

In March, Uthmeier began twisting the NFL’s arm. “Failure to do so may result in enforcement actions against the league for race-based 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.”

It’s almost refreshing to hear Uthmeier advocate for a “merit-based system.” But it’s MAGA politics. He’s not interested in helping create a level playing field for Black people vying for coaching jobs and executive positions. His stated mission — in line with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ anti-DEI position — is to destroy any mechanism that might equalize the NFL’s hiring processes.

What’s weird is that in going after the NFL, Uthmeier is attacking a reliable ally that has itself spent most its 106-year existence employing subterfuge to deny Black players, prospective coaches, and general managers their deserved place in NFL management.

In response to his threats, the NFL went ahead and massaged Rooney Rule language on its website. Uthmeier was quick to pounce, claiming the changes constitute an admission of guilt and points to “deceptive and unfair business practices.”

Head fake

Unsurprisingly, Uthmeier, 38 — a DeSantis appointee and loyal instrument — announced the revisions don’t go far enough and pledged to keep fighting until the NFL repeals the project and its accelerator program.

Then came the head fake.

Uthmeier’s plan of attack, a purposeful escalation, moved from vague threats to a subpoena ordering NFL officials to appear in Tallahassee.

“We appreciate how quickly the NFL changed its website in response to our letter and capitulated on some of their discriminatory hiring quotas,” Uthmeier said on social media. “But their response raises more questions about the Rooney Rule, and we look forward to their cooperation with the investigative subpoena we issued them today.”

Uthmeier sent the subpoena and a letter to NFL executive vice president and attorney Ted Ullyot on May 13 commanding NFL officials to appear at the attorney general’s office in Tallahassee, Florida, on June 12,” the letter reads.

On Monday, Uthmeier’s office said the league has provided records in response to the subpoena, which sought “all diversity reports, coaching census data, or demographic surveys that reflect the race and sex of coaching staffs of the teams from 2017 to the present.”

It added: “All in all, the Rooney Rule and the NFL’s related ‘inclusive hiring’ policies — and the NFL’s representations about these policies — continue to raise significant concerns under Florida law.”

Goodell and the owners of the Miami Dolphins, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Jacksonville Jaguars realize they have the misfortune of being targeted as an example to anyone who doesn’t meet the far-right’s ideological purity standards. Uthmeier mirrors DeSantis’ desire to stamp out liberalism and “identity politics” and replace them with what they earnestly describe as “merit-based” everything and institutional neutrality.

So, with this move, DeSantis and his acolyte illustrate to their supporters their Christian nationalist and white-privilege credentials.

Politics?

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

Facts, data, and a host of critics say otherwise.

Politics of course, is playing an outsized role in this drama because Uthmeier is running for election to a full term in November.

While Uthmeier’s quixotic quest for racial purity is a notable distraction for league officials, there is a larger, more consequential racial steamroller bearing down on the NFL, whose 32 franchises were collectively worth more than $228 billion as of August 2025, with the average team value sitting at $7.13 billion.

For the past four years, league brass have been steadfastly trying to stave off or extinguish a lawsuit filed by former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores.

In 2022, Flores, 45, asserted that he was treated unfairly because of his race when the Dolphins fired him as head coach. He sued the league and the Dolphins, Broncos, and Giants for being “rife with racism” in their hiring and promotion of Black coaches.

Flores, now defensive coordinator for the Minnesota Vikings, also accused teams of conducting “sham interviews” to satisfy the NFL’s Rooney Rule and that the Dolphins offered him $100,000 per game to deliberately throw games.

Not worth defending

The NFL filed to have the case handled through its arbitration process instead of open court in New York, which the U.S. Supreme Court denied, questioning the fairness of a process overseen and completely controlled by Goodell. Former Arizona Cardinals head coach Steve Wilks and longtime assistant coach Ray Horton joined Flores as co-plaintiffs, each alleging retaliatory behavior and discriminatory interview practices by certain teams.

Flores has subpoenaed 25 NFL teams, requesting information that pinpoints teams’ hiring practices.

Goodell has often stressed that the Rooney Rule is not a hiring mandate and that the spirit of the initiative has proved successful in football and even beyond, bringing “better talent and giv[ing] us an opportunity to hire the best talent, ultimately.”

DeMaurice Smith is unequivocal in his condemnation of the Rooney Rule. He believes it “should be abandoned and replaced with a set of bold leadership steps to limit the discretion of NFL team owners in order to ensure a more fair and inclusive hiring system.”

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.”

Smith argues that a lack of oversight means NFL owners and the rest can easily ignore the rule.

“In a closed system where they are accountable to no one, these owners simply do whatever they want to do,” Smith said during an interview with Pro Football Talk. Add to “that the stark employment statistics, evidence of double standards, and anecdotal evidence and NFL and its owners’ failure to diversify,” and the story becomes clearer.

The Athletic’s Jayna Bardahl said Flores’ May 20 amended complaint argues that the head coach hiring process is not a set of mere independent discretionary decisions by each team but rather operates within a closed and highly connected ecosystem.

Tanya Ray Fox, host of the ‘Almost Shameless’ Podcast and news editor for FS1’s daily shows, went further: “That closed and highly connected ecosystem is what we often refer to as “the good ol’ boys’ club,” she said in an Instagram post. “And as it stands right now, if this continues into open court, this will be the largest challenge to the NFL’s racism problem that we have seen in recent memory. If the NFL is actually forced to comply with providing decades of employment hiring histories and documents, that will be a gamechanger.”

It starts with coaches

“Side-by-side is this absurd lawsuit against the Rooney Rule. AG says NFL is favoring minority interviewing and hiring. This is a massively consequential situation w/I the NFL, w/I the scope of the NFL around racial discrimination in the NFL both if it goes in BF’ flavor and especially if it doesn’t.”

Legendary sportswriter Sally Jenkins is one of a long list of critics who have remonstrated against the NFL for its history of racial discrimination.

Jenkins, a feature writer for The Atlantic, slammed the NFL in a 2020 column, asserting that the NFL’s bleak record on diversity hiring ends with owners but starts with coaches.

“The cure for the Rooney Rule is not more mandates and rote interviews. The cure is an unblinkering of the eyes and an unstoppering of the mouth,” she wrote in 2020 while at the Washington Post. “The lack of minority coaches in the NFL isn’t just the fault of white team owners. That’s too easy. Less easy to speak aloud is the deep racial bias among a generation of head coaches who have made a habit of promoting younger white replicants of themselves.”

A multiplicity of factors feeds this situation, Jenkins argues: what the NFL has called “a troubling reshuffling effect” wherein “white men who get fired are retreaded and rehired at a ridiculously high rate by white coaches” “who give their old colleagues soft landings rather than promoting young minorities.”

For white men, young and old, the NFL has become a fathers-and-sons business in which coaches “unquestionably are protecting turf for their progeny” while ensuring “the maintenance and perpetuation of certain power structures,” Jenkins asserts.

“Owners can pass all the Rooney Rules they want. What such rules can’t do is untie unspoken agreements, quash the quiet patronage system or cure hearts,” Jenkins declared. “These things are diffuse, pervasive and difficult to extirpate.”