DeMaurice Smith’s time with the NFL Players Association may be in its final days, but he’s not quite done battling with NFL team owners.
On Wednesday, Smith published a nearly 100-page article he’s been working on for about two years in which he calls the Rooney 20-year rule a failure and calls for its elimination, instead offering 12 recommendations for the league to create. a fair and equitable hiring system.
Co-authored with Carl Lasker, a Yale law student and Smith’s teaching assistant at the school, Smith offers an insider’s perspective on exactly why the Rooney Rule – here called a “suggestion” – n has no chance of succeeding and appeals to federal, state and local governments to exercise their legal control to ensure reform.
“The system is broken inside and out and any effort to affect it that didn’t compel NFL owners to buy in or reform was doomed from the start,” said Smith to Yahoo Sports via text.
As executive director of the NFLPA for 14 years, Smith guided players through the molding of two collective bargaining agreements and several other issues large and small. Coaches were not within his jurisdiction and indeed do not have their own union to bargain on their behalf.
The Rooney Rule has been in place for 20 years, and many have written about and commented on its failures. At the time it was enacted there were two black head coaches. Two decades later, that number has barely increased (there are currently four black NFL head coaches), underscoring Smith’s point.
Recommendations include more transparency, tougher fines
Smith and Lasker offer “a set of bold leadership steps,” 12 recommendations they believe will lead to fairer hiring practices. They understand:
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Amend the current open-hire-for-all system by requiring all managerial, executive and leadership positions to be posted, with specific job descriptions, and held open for at least 30 days. For head coach and coordinator positions, the league should require that no positions be filled until a certain number of days after the Super Bowl, ensuring that each candidate has time to apply for vacancies. and preventing teams from ignoring qualified applicants because their teams are in the playoffs
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The NFL is adopting a consistent and transparent system by which all teams must comply when it comes to hiring and retention, abandoning its current system in favor of one “that fairly assesses talent, prevents team ownership from engage in illegal and/or meaningless activities “check the ‘protocols’ and enforce a deliberate, professional, and responsible system.” Smith and Lasker cite state laws in California and Colorado, both of which are home to teams of the NFL, and a law of the city of New York, where the league is headquartered, which require the transparency of job offers in terms of salary and compensation.
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Eliminate “any rule, custom or practice requiring coaches to seek permission from team owners to apply for jobs with other teams”
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The league selects an external monitor to periodically audit the team’s hiring processes and publish an annual report on hiring, retention and franchise promotion for all employees
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Require the NFL’s Director of Diversity to develop league-wide job descriptions, uniform standards for contracts, objective guidelines, and legal interview questions for all leadership and management positions, including head coach and general manager
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Adopt strict and meaningful penalty systems for team and league officials, jointly overseen by the league and an outside monitor, who fail to adhere to fair workplace rules, with fines starting at $5 million dollars and increasing for individuals and teams who violate the adopted system. In the same way that the league uses large fines to control player conduct on and off the field, Smith and Lasker wrote, “it is ironic that the league has not adopted a similar fine structure of” zero tolerance “when it comes to achieving a fair and inclusive workplace”
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Develop uniform and consistent evaluation guidelines for all coaching, executive and management positions. “All NFL coaches should be received annually as NFL referees, and the results should be shared with the senior team and League members,” the couple wrote.
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Develop and implement policies limiting nepotism
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NFL drops opposition to unionizing coaches
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Each year, have the NFL and outside monitor interview and evaluate coaches who are interested in a job change to assess their qualifications, and ask teams to provide a justifiable basis for hiring decisions. The NFL would release an anonymized report indicating whether applicants deemed qualified by the league and outside monitor were interviewed by teams and the reasons for their hiring, promotion or rejection.
Additionally, the writers want to present an “aspirational” argument to league fans that while they want fairness and fairness on the pitch, those principles should also be found in off-pitch decisions.
“There are NFL team owners and senior NFL leaders who believe hiring systems should change to ensure fairness and the betterment of the NFL,” reads the article. by Smith and Lasker. “The NFL is at a crossroads; its senior leadership will change over the next five years. Some have inherited the problem of lack of diversity from the front office and coaching staff, and the future presents an opportunity to make decisions major steps to address these glaring, long-standing issues.”
Smith and Lasker argue that although the NFL obtains numerous concessions from the government, ranging from hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local stadium taxes to federal antitrust exemptions, the league is also not subject to oversight or government requirements, facing neither shareholder nor consumer liability. , with no public board or compliance reports. And “governments seem content to let the NFL operate like an unbridled cartel,” Smith and Lasker wrote. “Empowered by its antitrust exemptions, the NFL has become the wealthiest and most powerful sports league in the country. … NFL owners are using the League’s popularity and lack of competition to build a network of media partners financially dependent and personalities that insulate them from meaningful criticism.”
Survey shows low opinion of minorities in NFL
Last year, the NFLPA sent a confidential survey to 65 current and former NFL coaches of color and received 47 responses. Of these respondents, almost all (92%) said there needed to be more transparency in the hiring process, salaries and benefits for head coaches; 90% said they believe race plays a role in all coaching decisions, including head coaches and coordinators; 90% said federal laws prohibiting discrimination are not observed or enforced in hiring practices; and two-thirds said the NFL league office is not sensitive to issues of discrimination, equity, diversity and inclusion at the team level.
In a league where 55% of players identify as black and 70% identify as a racial minority, currently three head coaches are black and one is Hispanic (Miami’s Mike McDaniel identifies as biracial). But overall, team owners are the decision makers when it comes to hiring head coaches, and the controls in place at other large companies don’t exist for class members. NFL ownership – even the commissioner works for franchise owners and has no authority to resolve employment discrimination issues or issue hiring warrants.
“The NFL system is broken,” write Smith and Lasker. “To fix this, landlords must abandon the Rooney Rule and replace their unchecked discretion with comprehensive requirements to eliminate discrimination, ensure fairness, improve diversity, and build a fair, transparent and accountable system.
“Imposing transparent processes and protocols with clear goals and implementing an accountability-based system that punishes non-compliance should improve diversity in the NFL, and it will most certainly lead to a fairer system than the one that exists. Currently.”