When it comes to the NFL’s hiring practices, there’s plenty of talk. But there’s little if any action. That’s because there’s no accountability.
Former NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith made that point in 2023, in an article co-authored for the Yale Law and Policy Review. In a Thursday conversation at the set of PFT Live, Smith added an important twist.
With the federal government currently displaying open hostility to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and practices — and with the NFL rigging the civil justice system to force any claims from open court into secret arbitration — the accountability, if any, will come from the attorneys general of the states in which NFL teams are headquartered.
Most if not all states have civil rights laws that operate in parallel with federal civil rights laws. For the states with the political climate and will that would be conducive to exploring the league’s hiring practices, an investigation and potential administrative action is possible.
The historical data speaks for itself. NFL executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent has talked candidly about the double standard. There’s enough there to justify a full and complete probe of the situation.
Without accountability, nothing will happen. In every cycle, there will be word salads but never a main course of change.
For any business, problems don’t get addressed until they impact the bottom line. If a factory has a broken pipe that derails production, the pipe gets fixed. If a store has a pothole in the parking lot that is causing injuries to customers, the pothole gets paved.
Unless and until the NFL’s hiring practices become something more than a smattering of press-conference questions through which the Commissioner has to annually stickhandle, the NFL will continue to skate away from any and all complications of hiring practices that result, as they did this year, in 10 head-coaching vacancies and zero Black coaches filling any of them.
