Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said he issued an investigative subpoena to the NFL less than two months after threatening potential action over the league’s Rooney Rule.
In a letter sent to NFL executive vice president and general counsel Ted Ullyot on Wednesday, Uthmeier said he commended the league for removing references to “inclusive hiring” practices on its website, but added that “these updates raise new concerns under the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.”
“The NFL for years has repeatedly represented its commitments to, among other things, (i) ‘diverse candidates,’ (ii) mandating teams ‘employ a female or minority coach as an offensive assistant,’ (iii) providing ‘female and minority prospects with leadership development sessions,’ and other apprenticeship and training and (iv) ‘increas(ing) the number of minorities hired’ through ‘hiring best practices,’” Uthmeier wrote. “Now you say the NFL has scrubbed those representations from its website because they do not ‘accurately reflect the NFL’s current programs and policies.’ Why, then, were they there to begin with?”
The NFL did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Uthmeier first sent a letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in late March threatening possible enforcement if the league didn’t suspend the Rooney Rule, which Uthmeier claimed violated Florida law “by requiring race-based considerations in hiring.”
“Florida law is clear: Hiring decisions cannot be based on race,” Uthmeier said in a video posted on social media. “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.”
NFL executive vice president Jeff Miller said in a statement then that “we believe our policies are consistent with the law and reflect our commitment to fairness, opportunity, and building the strongest possible teams.”
Goodell doubled down when asked about Uthmeier’s letter during the NFL’s annual league meetings in Arizona.
“One thing that doesn’t change is our values, and we believe that diversity has been a benefit to the National Football League,” Goodell said on March 31. “We are well aware of the laws and that laws are changing or evolving. 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 and what they are.”
As first noted Wednesday by ESPN, the NFL made a number of alterations in recent weeks to the section of its Operations website that explains the purpose and mission of the Rooney Rule. The league changed the subheading describing the Rooney Rule by replacing the words “best practices to foster and provide opportunity to diverse leadership” with “best practices designed to expand opportunity and strengthen the NFL’s talent pipeline across leadership roles,” according to a comparison of the website now with a snapshot from April 27, via the Wayback Machine archive.
The sentence “Final hiring decisions remain with each club” was added to the page, and multiple references to the NFL’s DEI Committee have been changed to the league’s “Workplace Diversity Committee.”
The league did not, however, alter its policy, which mandates that teams interview at least two external candidates who are persons of color and/or women for vacant head coach, GM and coordinator positions, and at least one person of color and/or a woman for vacant quarterback coach and senior-level executive positions. It also did not remove the mention that the Rooney Rule is “one of several league wide efforts to provide diversity and inclusion on and off the field,” including the Nunn-Wooten Scouting Fellowship, Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship and the Coach and Front Office Accelerator Program.