When the NFL tabled potential changes to the Rooney Rule involving draft picks, comments from the Commissioner implied that, moving forward, draft picks would be used a compensation for losing minority assistants to promotions with other teams, and not as a reward for hiring a minority coach or G.M. New comments from NFL executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent reinforces the notion that draft picks would be used as compensation for losing a minority assistant, not as a reward for hiring a minority head coach.
“By no stretch of the imagination was there any thought about degrading, using individuals as bribes, pawns,” Vincent told Shlomo Sprung of Forbes.com. “Coach Dungy said it right, we should not be rewarding people or have a system that rewards people for doing the right thing. But we do believe there’s merit in rewarding people for identifying and developing minority coaching talent.”
That’s a roundabout way of saying that, if they do anything, that’s what they’ll do. No draft picks as a reward for making a hire. Draft picks only as compensation for losing a key employee who happens to be a minority.
The urgency to fix a minority hiring system that Vincent has called “broken” will only increase in the wake of current events. The NFL is an example of systemic racial bias, with owners having a tendency to hire coaches and General Managers who look like the owners and/or who have a common experience and background.
The best way to reverse that reality would be, as Tony Dungy recently suggested on #PFTPM, to require teams to maintain a clear list of attributes that they are looking for in coaches and General Managers, with those attributes shaping and guiding and focusing a search, ideally with the assistance of those who are familiar with the candidates, who they are, and what they do.
