603. Did the N.F.L. Solve Diversity Hiring? (Part 1)
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In case you somehow didn't notice, if you aren't one of the tens of millions of people watching on TV or placing some bets or keeping up with the Taylor Swift news, the National Football League has begun its new season.

The NFL is the richest sports league in history and probably the most growth obsessed as well. One reason is that many team owners made their money by building their own businesses in real estate, oil, in the HVAC industry, in America's biggest chain of truck stops. That kind of business success requires a strong urge to expand, expand,

And so, not surprisingly, the NFL is also driven by expansion. There are more games per season than there used to be, played in more places, this year in England, Germany, and Brazil. NFL games are distributed on just about every network and streaming platform you've ever heard of, and some you haven't.

If you look at the top 100 TV broadcasts last year in the U.S., you will see that 93 of them were NFL games. Among the others were the Oscars, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and three college football games. The NFL did around $13 billion in revenues last year, and each of the 32 teams are worth on average more than $5 billion. That is much more than teams in any other sport.

Owning an NFL team has provided a route for wealthy individuals or families to become very wealthy.

This creates its own problem. There can be a lot of taxes to pay when it's time to sell, and there just aren't that many potential buyers for a $5 billion asset, at least the right kind of buyers. The NFL was founded and run for decades by a relatively small group of families, and it has remained vigilant about who should be let in. In Europe, the top soccer leagues allow their teams to be owned by investment cartels and oligarchs and petrostates. The

The NFL doesn't. Not yet, at least. Although they did recently vote to allow private equity investors to buy up to 10% of a team. If they allowed 100%, they would likely sell out in 10 minutes. So great are the NFL's prospects. There's nothing predetermined about this massive financial success.

Professional football was for many years barely professional at all. It was a ragged and violent game playing deep in the shadow of baseball and other sports. But over the past 50 years, the NFL has turned itself into an entertainment juggernaut. The football games are, of course, at the center, but...

The attendant swarms of media and gambling and merchandising and eating and drinking are what make the NFL an industry unto itself. And it is, for the most part, an extremely well-run industry. There is a premium put on modern management techniques when it comes to resource allocation, on-field strategy and off-field strategy, and personnel decisions.

Most of us, when we watch a game, we concentrate on the players. 53 per team divided into defensive, offensive, and special teams units, each with their own systems and coaches. The average NFL team has 23 coaches. There's the head coach, the offensive and defensive and special teams coordinators, and then a lot of position coaches, assistant coaches, quality control coaches. And that's not even counting the training and medical staff,

the logistics people, and so on. The head coach who sits atop this pyramid is essentially the CEO of what happens on the football field. It is an important, difficult, thrilling job with a hefty turnover rate and an average tenure of roughly three years.

The most successful teams in the league excel at identifying talent. So we thought it might be interesting to look into how these multibillion-dollar franchises choose their on-field CEOs, especially because there is an obvious discrepancy in the NFL. The majority of the players are Black. The majority of the coaches are not.

Today on Freakonomics Radio, why is that? We don't take enough time in the interview process. We don't interview enough different candidates. And if I have to make a decision, I'm going to make a decision of something that's familiar to me.

More than two decades ago, the league came up with a policy to address this situation. It is called the Rooney Rule. We will hear about its history, its successes and failures, and how the idea has spread outside of football. They said, oh, George Floyd, that's bad. We don't want to be bad. We don't want to be racist. We're going to fix diversity. And has it fixed diversity? I mean, what people do in the dark.

You don't know. Those are just some of the questions we'll try to answer in this episode and next week's, too. Also, questions like this one. How come I only get to go out and get my bell rung on Sundays and I don't get to be on the sidelines or in the executive suites organizing the game? This is your Welcome to the NFL moment, starting now. Welcome to the NFL.

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. Imagine that your dream is to become a head coach in the National Football League. How likely are you to make it?

Not very likely. There are only 32 of these jobs, and up until now, they've always gone to men. Of the men who currently hold those jobs, roughly a third played professional football, and all but one played college football. And even though the majority of NFL players are Black, for many decades, you weren't going to get a head coaching job unless you were white. For a Black former player...

To become a head coach, there really wasn't much of a path. That is Jeremy Duru. He's a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and he directs the Sport and Society Initiative at AU's law school. One reason for that

goes back further historically, Stephen, which is that black players were expurgated from the league in 1934. Yeah, talk about that a minute. What we now know is the NFL began in 1920, I believe. Is that right? Yes. And there were black players, not a ton, but there were black players and coaches as well, yeah? In the very early days, you had a few black players. You had one

black head coach. Amazingly, I mean, for those of us who study American history, you know how savage the racial discord was at the time. For there to be a black head coach in the NFL was extraordinary. And the coach, Fritz Pollard is his name, was also a player. And it wasn't rare at the time to have player coaches.

But what's important to recognize is these players, they literally were seeking to protect themselves on the field from opposing players, from teammates at practice. Fritz had this thing where when he got knocked down, he would as quickly as he could flip onto his back and stick his feet up in the air and start swinging them like he's riding a bicycle.

to basically protect himself from getting crushed by people who were seeking to harm him. That's what we're dealing with at the time. And so there wasn't a big black presence. As of the early 1930s, there was a quote unquote gentleman's agreement among all owners in the league to kick out black people altogether.

And then Rooney bought in right around that time. He had, in his previous business dealings, been pretty even-handed, one of the more even-handed business people when it comes to race, certainly in Pittsburgh, probably on the East Coast. But he went along with this gentleman's agreement. ♪

My grandfather followed the ban on Black players, and he talked about that as being the biggest mistake of his life. And that is Jim Rooney, who is now in his 50s. I grew up as part of a family business, which is the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers are still majority owned by Rooney's. The team president is Art Rooney II. Before that, it was Dan Rooney, Jim Rooney's father. And before that, the original Art Rooney, the team's founder.

Art Rooney came up as a boxer and a semi-pro baseball player, and then he worked as a promoter and a professional gambler. Through this combination of above-board and maybe not-so-above-board work, Art Rooney became a legend in Pittsburgh. Roguish, for sure, if not quite a rogue.

I happen to know all this and much more, way too much, because I have been a Steelers fan since I was a child, and I have a couple shelves full of Steelers books. I've written one myself.

I now asked Jim Rooney to explain how the Pittsburgh Steelers first came to be. There is a lifelong family debate on this story. So you're going to get Jim Rooney's version. My great uncle Jim had this semi-pro team and they were playing all over western Pennsylvania. And we should say this is a time when every steel mill, every little town, they all had their own football teams, right? Yep.

So my grandfather had a good friend named Charlie Bidwell. Charlie Bidwell owns the Chicago Cardinals, which are now the Arizona Cardinals. And the story goes that Charlie and Art Rooney were running booze across the Great Lakes during Prohibition. And Bidwell says, hey, Art, we're putting a team in Philly. Do you want to put a team in Pittsburgh?

And so my grandfather goes to Uncle Jim and Jim owed Art like $5,000. It was a lot of money for 1933. Wait a minute. How does one brother end up owing another brother that much? This is a cut from some project. Something went on with Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim took risks and was always in a little bit of trouble.

So Uncle Jim owes the chief, as my grandfather was known, $5,000. And so my grandfather says, Jim, if you give me that team, I'm going to put him in this National Football League and we'll call it even. And so Jim's response was, Art, I could never do that to you. That National Football League is not going to make it. So thank God my grandfather pushed him a little bit and took the team and put him into the National Football League. ♪

So Pittsburgh got an NFL team in 1933. They were originally called the Pirates, same as the city's baseball team. But in 1940, Art Rooney renamed them as the Pittsburgh Steelers. In 1938, they drafted a running back from the University of Colorado named Byron Whizzer White. He led the NFL in rushing yards in his rookie season, but he quit the Steelers to go back to school at Oxford. And he eventually became a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

For the Pittsburgh Steelers, Whizzer White was one of the few bright spots in the first 40 years of their existence. They were generally a terrible team.

The league itself, meanwhile, was starting to evolve. In 1946, the NFL lifted its ban on black players. Why? Here again is Jeremy Duru. You get to 1946, the Rams moved to L.A. And in order to play in the Coliseum, because of a substantial grassroots movement headed by the black press out there, it was determined that the

You couldn't have a segregated league coming in to play games in the Coliseum. So they were forced to bring in a couple of black players, and they did. And that's how you had black players come into the league. Black players in the 1940s NFL encountered the same verbal and physical abuse that players faced in the 20s.

And even though the NFL had reintegrated, the best college football programs of the time, like Alabama, LSU and Texas, remained segregated. So the best black players often played at HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities, and were therefore overlooked by NFL scouts. Black players who did make it to the NFL often found their options limited.

In those early days of reintegration, Black players were not permitted to play positions that are viewed as quote-unquote thinking positions, quarterback positions.

center, middle linebacker. Black players were relegated to wide receiver, cornerback, running back. Now, I do not seek to disparage those positions, but at the time, those are positions that were viewed as quote-unquote brawn positions and not the brain position. Those thinking positions also happen to be the positions that produce a lot of future NFL coaches, offensive coordinators, defensive coordinators, and head coaches especially.

So by excluding black players from those positions, the league was also cutting off their best route to a coaching future.

But not every team went along with these unwritten rules around race. Here's Jim Rooney again. I think my grandfather and then my father in particular, you know, made decisions with an open view of moral scruples and understanding that, you know, yes, there is a business component. He didn't dismiss the business component, right?

but there was also this human element. It was Dan Rooney, son of Art, father of Jim, who set this new direction for the Steelers. By the early 1960s, he was running the team's day-to-day operations. As Dan took over the team...

He was really intentional and serious about diversity. He was intentional and serious about making sure that different perspectives were articulated, different perspectives were considered in respect to decisions that were made. He hired this guy named Bill Nunn, who was a reporter for a black newspaper in Pittsburgh who essentially criticized the Steelers as talking about interest in diversity, but not really backing it up.

My father, he was invited by a parish priest to march in Selma, Alabama. He didn't go. Bill Nunn, a newspaper writer, said Dan Rooney says he's opened integration, but really hasn't done much more than anyone else. And that became the moment that my father sat down with Bill and said, Bill, you're right. I want to do this differently. What can I do? And he hired Bill Nunn to come in and scout for the team. And Bill Nunn diversified the club.

by going to HBCUs to look for players, which few other clubs were doing. And one, it made the Steelers a more diverse organization and an organization open to forward and interesting and progressive thinking about race. And two, it made them better because they tapped pools of talent that nobody else was tapping. What were some things that the Steelers were doing that made Black players and coaches at Black schools so comfortable with their players going there?

I think so much of it was Bill because Bill didn't just go and look at tape. He would spend the weekend there. He always wanted to see the players play.

athletic ability outside of the arena where things could be managed by their coaches. If there was family around, he would try to talk to their family, really try to understand the entire persona of a player. And then he could make a really strong recommendation because there was less data. What he did was amazing. Bill helped change the NFL. What's the Steelers organization doing now?

once the players get there to make it a place where they want to go. I think the biggest was hiring Bill, but after Bill was naming Joe Gilliam as the quarterback in 1974. So this was the first time in NFL history that prior to the start of a season, a black man was named starting quarterback. That's right. It took 28 years from when black players were allowed back into the NFL until a team announced a black starting quarterback at the beginning of the season.

But with the Steelers, it went further than that. Black players on the Steelers were empowered to step up under this new era of leadership. There was team president Dan Rooney, the influential scout Bill Nunn, and a future Hall of Fame coach named Chuck Knoll.

Knoll did not fit any football coach stereotypes. He was a deep reader, an intellectual and a lover of classical music who saw himself as more teacher than drill sergeant. He was always telling his players that football was just one brief chapter of their existence and that they had to prepare themselves for what he called their life's work.

Keep in mind that players made much less money then. Most of them had full-time jobs in the offseason to support themselves. The decision that Chuck made to start Joe Gilliam, several of the HBCU players told me that that moment meant so much to them because it said to them, okay, if they're willing to start a quarterback...

Then I know if I'm the best defensive back or if I'm the best linebacker, I'm the best tackle, I'm going to have an opportunity here. That decision was key. Then I think the next big milestone was Joe Green becoming captain. Joe Green, known as Mean Joe Green.

was a defensive lineman who had been scouted by Bill Nunn out of North Texas State. He was huge, very physical, and, well, mean, at least on the field, especially at the start of his career.

The Steelers had drafted Green in 1969, and he quickly became the foundation of a defense that was known as the Steel Curtain. It was clear that Joe was the leader of the team. He had those two phenomenal qualities in a leader. He was ferocious, and he had that ability to intimidate. And I'm not saying leaders should be intimidating all the time, but there's a time you have to get a group of people involved.

By the mid-1970s, the Steelers looked markedly different than most other NFL teams. More black players, more black leadership, and an unusual sense of cohesion.

Now, none of this would be remembered today except for the fact that this unusual team, after 40 years of losing, finally began to win. It's all over. The Steelers went on one of the most historic hot streaks in sports history, winning four Super Bowls in six years. With this great victory. They beat the Minnesota Vikings in 1975. The Steelers.

The Dallas Cowboys in 1976. Cowboys again in 1979. And the Los Angeles Rams in 1980. And in the midst of this, in 1977, the Steelers picked up an undrafted player whose name you will know if you're a football fan. Tony Dungy comes in, is...

An okay football player, but Chuck Noll immediately sees how brilliant he is and then hires him as an assistant coach. He becomes, at a very young age, I think he was 29, he becomes the first coach

Black man and youngest person ever to be named defensive coordinator of an NFL team. So Chuck saw how talented Dungy was, and then Tony goes on to have the amazing career he's had. By now, other teams had taken notice of the Steelers' success with black talent, and they began to copy the scouting strategy established by Bill Nunn.

In 1959, before Nunn joined the Steelers, only 12% of NFL players were Black. By the 1990s, around two-thirds were. And how about coaches? Through the 1950s and 60s and 70s and most of the 80s, Fritz Pollard remained the only Black head coach in NFL history. But that finally changed in 1989 when Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis named his former lineman Art Schell as the team's head coach.

Dan Rooney, who came from a long line of Irish Catholics, was a soft-spoken consensus builder. Al Davis, from a Brooklyn Jewish family, was more aggressive and more willing to go off on his own. You know, Al Davis was very different than my father, but both Al and Dan were

had this fundamental respect for people and were interested in overcoming these barriers. To Jim Rooney, the late 80s were a time when a lot of barriers were coming down. In 1989, you had Art Shell hired. You had what was going on in the world where the Berlin Wall was coming down. Russia was starting to fall apart. You had this sense of great change and

And the NFL was in a massive change era as well. You got a new commissioner. Paul Tagliabue was young, up and coming person who had a very open world view. You had the sense then that things were moving and were going to only move in that direction. So did things keep moving in that direction in the NFL? No.

That would be a no. This is outrageous. How can a guy like Dungy get fired? That's after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner, and you are listening to Freakonomics Radio. I hope you will spread the word about this show. Maybe give it a review or rating in your podcast app. Those are great ways to support the shows you love. We will be right back. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by LinkedIn. When you're hiring for your small business, you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role. That's why you have to check out LinkedInJobs.com.

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In 1997, National Football League Commissioner Paul Tagliabue appointed Harold Henderson as the league's executive vice president for labor relations. This made Henderson one of the highest ranking black executives in professional sports.

Given all the momentum we were hearing about before the break, you might think that a lot of NFL teams by now would have hired a black head coach. After all, across the league's 32 teams, more than half the players were black and many head coaches are former players. But the decision to hire a coach is a team decision, not a decision made by some executive in the league office. And the team owners were white.

Here again is the legal scholar Jeremy Duru. The easiest way to think about it is that the NFL is like an umbrella organization. And under that umbrella, you have 32 different clubs that are their own businesses. They've got their own owners. They've got their own presidents. They've got their own cultures. They've got their own policies.

The umbrella seeks to organize them in a way such that they can have competitive games against each other and a league in which to play. I think that the casual observer would view the commissioner as in charge of this whole thing. And the commissioner is the head of the league. But who hires the commissioner? The owners.

The owners hire the commissioner. The owners have the power to not renew the contract of the commissioner. At the end of the day, these are individual businesses, and it's very important to understand that. And so each team, specifically the owner of each team, someone who is accustomed to operating as the master of his personal universe, he is free to adopt whatever hiring policy he wants.

But by the end of the 2000 NFL season, there had only been five black head coaches in league history. If nothing else, the optics were not good. Football, it is a collision sport. There is violence in the sport. And the idea of a team that's predominantly black being sent out into essentially sport-related combat is

by a group of people who are entirely white, who are standing outside on the sidelines looking on, it's a painful picture. It hearkens back to the days of battle royales and other exploitation of black athletes. And so I think inside those org... I mean, to say nothing of slavery, let's be honest. Yeah, right. It was painful for athletes in those organizations. You know, I don't think they're saying, hey, listen, we need all of the coaching staff to be black.

But, you know, there's got to be a thought, well, how come I only get to go out and get my bell rung on Sundays and I don't get to be on the sidelines or in the executive suites organizing the game? Whether it's wins and losses or...

The spirit and camaraderie or friction, et cetera, of a team. Talk about the ways in which a team that may be 60 or 70 percent black players, how it's different under a black head coach or coordinators or a white head coach or coordinators.

For those who don't follow football, I mean, one way to look at it is the head coach is like the CEO of this team. They are making the decisions. They are running things. They are the model at the top. They're the one who, you know, gives the last word before a game. They're the one who decides what sort of schedule we're going to have. It's all in the head coach's purview. They're black head coaches and they're white head coaches who have been deeply successful on the interpersonal level.

level with black players. But I think there's something important for a black player to recognize that there is at least some black representation on the coaching staff.

I'm responsible for that player's well-being, head coach or otherwise. Frustration around the absence of Black coaches seemed to hit a peak around the 2001 NFL season when two Black head coaches, two of only five in history, were fired. They both had winning records and had both taken their teams to the playoffs multiple times. Those are the kind of accomplishments that tend to not get you fired as an NFL head coach.

One of the fired coaches was Dennis Green of the Minnesota Vikings. The other was Tony Dungy of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Dungy, you will remember, got his start with the Steelers as a player and then as a very young coach, handpicked by Chuck Knoll.

The firing of Tony Dungy now caught the attention of Dan Rooney, the Steelers owner and president. Here again is his son, Jim Rooney. So Dungy comes into the Steelers in 77. He and my father built a really close partnership. And my father sees throughout the 80s and then the 90s, he sees and has this ongoing conversation with Tony about job interviews. And my father sees the dehumanization

They both talked to me about this and the impact that had on my father to see someone that he knew was better than so many folks who are getting interviews and getting jobs and saying, you know, this is just completely wrong. But Tony Dungy finally did get his chance with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, only to lose his job after six seasons. Jim Rooney remembers his father's reaction. I remember him just being really disillusioned.

you know, this is outrageous. How can a guy like Dungy get fired? There's these different moments in life where bad things happen and they become the catalyst to change. Let me say two things here. The first is that Tony Dungy did get another chance with the Indianapolis Colts and Dungy led the Colts to a Super Bowl victory. So happy ending there.

The other thing to say is this. Jim Rooney is an unabashed fan of his late father, Dan. He wrote a book about his father called A Different Way to Win. Most books written by an offspring, he writes, fall into one of two categories, a tell-all or a beatification. This book falls into the latter category.

Jim Rooney argues that his father was successful with the Steelers because of the kind of person he was. Honest, humble, compassionate. He wasn't colorful like his father, the Chief, but Dan Rooney cared about building things well, running things well, and he didn't need to get the credit. These traits also made him valuable to his fellow NFL owners and to the league itself.

Rooney was heavily involved in labor relations, league strategy, broadcast negotiations, and more. He had the ear of other owners when he needed it, and when other owners needed to be brought in line, it was often Rooney who did that.

And now, in 2001, we know that Rooney was steamed about what had happened to Tony Dungy. Here's Jeremy Duru again. Tony Dungy got fired by the Buccaneers. Not only had he been successful, but he took the organization from pure doormat status and made them a contender every year. After he was fired and Dennis Green was fired, this is after the 2001 season, we now had one coach of color.

In this league of 32 clubs, one head coach of a league of 32 clubs. And it was just crazy. Around this time, Duru was working for a Washington law firm called Mary and Scallop. They specialize in employment discrimination cases. Cyrus Mary is an Iranian-American attorney who had successfully brought racial discrimination cases against Coca-Cola and Texaco and was now suing Johnson & Johnson.

His co-counsel on the Johnson & Johnson case was the superstar Black attorney Johnny Cochran, who had successfully defended O.J. Simpson on murder charges. And so Cyrus and Johnny, I think during a break from a deposition...

They were working on that case just after Tony Dungy got fired by the Buccaneers and Dennis Green got fired by the Vikings. We're just talking in the break room, you know, you got to see what happened in the NFL is ridiculous. And they were like, you know what? What we're seeing there is reflective of the work that we do in employment discrimination or civil rights work. We need to dig into this a little bit. And what was the next step? They figured, okay, all the anecdotes in the world, right?

May have some impact, but let's get some stats on this. So they commissioned a study. They got someone named Janice Madden, a labor economist at University of Pennsylvania. They asked her if she would study the previous 15 years of the NFL and see how black head coaches were stacking up to white head coaches.

Cyrus and Johnny, they get this report from Janice Madden. The report indicated that in the first year, a black head coach won 2.7 more games than the white head coach. Which is a lot in a league of only... That's exactly right. 16-game season, right? I mean, that is through the roof...

And in the season of termination, they won 1.3 more. Overall, they won more. They went to the playoffs more often as a percentage matter. They were, according to the numbers, better.

And the conclusion from the report was not that black coaches are somehow inherently better coaches. The conclusion was that black coaches had been made to apprentice so long in assistant positions that when they became head coaches, they were just better as a matter, you know. And so Cyrus and Johnny had a press conference releasing the report and they also sent it to the league. And during the press conference, they,

Johnny said, if they don't negotiate, we will litigate. And so essentially in sending it to the NFL, it was sent with a litigation threat. So what would it be like to be an owner in 2002?

And here, Johnny Cochran say, hey, if you don't negotiate, we're happy to litigate. What's the perspective of the owner there? I think a lot of the owners are saying, OK, go get it. Let's see what happens if you litigate. To be quite frank, I think that is what a lot of folks were saying, but not everybody. And here's where the rubber met the road in a very interesting way. The NFL at the time, the league office now, there is a recognition that they've got a problem.

The NFL recognized that the numbers were bad and the media was telling them about it as well. So they felt like they had to do something. And so when this threat came in, there was a decision made. Paul Tagliabue was the commissioner. I give him credit. Jeff Pash was the general counsel of the league at the time and still is. I give him credit. These folks were saying, we've got to do something rather than just say,

bleeding them with a thousand cuts in litigation, which they could have done. The NFL is so highly capitalized. They could have fought them and probably would have won.

They said, why don't you come in and let's talk about this? There were some other key figures getting involved, like John Wooten. He was a Black former NFL player who had also worked as an executive at a few NFL teams and came to chair an advocacy group called the Fritz Pollard Alliance, named for that first Black head coach way back in 1920. So the NFL was ready to talk. The advocates were ready to talk.

And how about the team owners, the ones who actually hire the football coaches? Among the owners, you would have found considerably less enthusiasm.

But Dan Rooney of the Steelers was an exception. Dan Rooney recognized that what these lawyers were talking about was something that the league had to engage and embrace. And Dan Rooney was trying to get other owners in the league to do something to try to increase equity. And what was the something then that was decided upon? So the report that I mentioned was in late September of 2002, and

And over the course of the following three months, the lawyers were brought in to meet. The owners had their own internal meetings. They talked to their outside counsel. There was a great deal of resistance, but there seemed to be some sort of galvanization around this idea, which the lawyers called the fair competition resolution.

which was a requirement that every club interview at least one person of color before making a head coach hire. So this new idea is to have one minority candidate be among the interviewees. Was there also any kind of rule or requirement about the number of interviewees for an open position? No. At the time, there was no rule about that. The idea was just, hey, have one person of color. And there was a great deal of resistance. There's one really interesting meeting where...

where the NFL brought their outside counsel, a guy named Tom Williamson, to talk to the owners at the owner's meeting about why this might be a good idea. And the owners are saying, well, you can't tell me who to hire and, you know, this and that. And Tom says, look, we're getting crushed in the press. We have ridiculous disproportionality between our head coaches and our players. What better idea do you have? And all these billionaire owners had nothing to say.

And so out of that meeting came this idea that, you know what, maybe we should try this. And Dan Rooney worked to get support from all the other owners. My father felt that it was important that you get a complete consensus. That, again, is Jim Rooney. You had a couple folks hold out and you had Al Davis, who really has been a leader in diversity, holding out for a while saying, I already do this. I think he was scolding the league a little bit.

but eventually my father said to Al, well, if you're doing it, then you're already in agreement. And Al kind of nodded to my father and said, okay, Dan, you win this one. And then Mike Brown of the Bengals, my father had a conversation with Mike, whose father, Paul Brown, really invented modern football. And Paul Brown's history with black players is mixed. So, you know,

It was getting not just enough consensus where you had majority, but really getting to the point where you had a unanimous vote. There were holdouts, but ultimately Dan Rooney was able to wrangle everybody. And out of this came this idea, well, Dan Rooney was the strongest proponent inside for this. Let's call it the Rooney Rule. And so the Rooney Rule became reality in the NFL. How did it work out?

After the break, we speak with one former black head coach. In the beginning, it was a good rule to put in. But it soon got complicated. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

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Before the break, we heard the history that led the NFL to adopt a novel hiring policy called the Rooney Rule, which mandated that when a team was hiring a head coach, they had to interview at least one minority candidate. The goal was to ensure that qualified minority candidates didn't get overlooked. Or as the legal scholar Jeremy Duru puts it, you know, fish the whole pond, fish the whole pond.

One idea behind fishing the whole pond in any hiring process, not just the NFL, is to make sure that your own cognitive biases don't overwhelm your search for the best candidate, that you don't give in to familiarity and hire someone who feels right for the part or someone who, in this case, looks like a football coach. One of the things that the Rooney rule does is it slows down processes, right? It forces you to slow down.

We talk a lot about how important it is to slow down your decision-making process and be more intentional and deliberate. When you are grinding in a short period of time to make a decision, you generally retreat to what's comfortable. And if you are running an organization and you are white,

You generally retreat to whiteness. You retreat to hiring someone who is like you and not even on a conscious level. But if you take time and you release some of that pressure and you're a little more open and intentional about thinking broadly, then you don't retreat into that safety space as much. And I think you have a better opportunity to make a decision that's ultimately better for you and your organization. ♪

So what happened in the early days of the Rooney Rule? We have one head coach of color after 2001. The following year, there were three head coaches of color. The following year was up to five. And in a few years, it was up to eight.

So there really did seem to be progress being made. One of those black coaches, Marvin Lewis, had been hired by Mike Brown of the Cincinnati Bengals. As we mentioned earlier, Brown had been one of the holdouts on the Rooney Rule vote. And yet Mike Brown, he put together a textbook interview process in light of the Rooney Rule. It's important to note at the time, the Bengals were terrible.

And there was a sense that, you know, we need discipline here. Mike Brown went out and one person who was available was Tom Coughlin. So Tom Coughlin is a coach that's had a lot of success in the league and was known as a disciplinarian. Seemed like he'd be the perfect solution to the Bengals problem. And so Mike Brown interviewed him, but also interviewed Marvin Lewis,

who was defensive coordinator with the Ravens, long time. Even though he didn't fit what appeared to be the mold the Bengals wanted, they went through the process. They interviewed him. They brought him back for a second one. They were impressed by him and they hired him. He turned around the club the next year, went to eight and eight after I think the club won two games a year before. And he ended up being there forever, yeah? Forever. Ended up being there forever.

So when you look back at that incident with an owner who was not enthusiastic but went through the process and ended up hiring a black coach who proved to be very successful, I mean, that sounds like the poster boy situation for your argument, yes? Yeah, that was the poster for the argument.

In the beginning, it was a good rule to put in. That is Herm Edwards. He played in the NFL, coached in the NFL, and today he is an NFL analyst for ESPN. I mean, pro football, I've been in this league for over 30 years. Edwards' father was a black man with a long career in the U.S. Army. He met his wife while stationed in Germany after World War II.

Herm Edwards has said that being in an interracial marriage was hard on his parents, but that there was no bitterness from my mom or dad. We just marched on. For Herm Edwards, football was part of that march. I'm indebted to the game of football. And it started for me in high school.

And then obviously from there to college and professional football as a player and then as a coach, assistant coach, a scout. Edwards had a 10-year career playing cornerback in the NFL before he moved into coaching.

Tony Dungy is a part of this story, too. Tony gets hired in Tampa and I go with Tony and become defensive backs or D.C. and Tampa. I was a defensive backs, but I was the assistant head coach. And that was the key. Tony said when he brought me down there, he said, look, you can go a lot of places in college, go be a coordinator. He said, you don't need to do that. I'm going to teach you how to be a head coach. And he gave me a lot of responsibility as a head coach.

You're the same age, roughly, yes? Yes. Came in the league the same time. Exactly right. So what did he do? What did he show you? What did he teach you? So all the meetings that he would be in with the general managers, with the owners, the draft, all those things behind closed doors with the head coaches involved in it, I would sit in there. He would make decisions like training camp. He'd go down to training camp schedule. And then I would ask him, I said, now, Tony, why did you do this?

And he would say, well, I did it because this reason. Give me an example. What's something he would do? You know, something simple. Why are you giving him an off day here? And he'd go, well, because we're going to do this, this and this. And then he looked at me, would tell me this. He said, he said, Herm, you might do it different, but I'm going to give you knowledge. You don't have to follow everything I do because you got to look at it, you know, out of your eyes and it's okay. And so I sat there and

for I don't know how long, for about five years. And this is kind of interesting. I had chances after my second year there to go to places to be a coordinator. And he goes-

You don't want to do that. And I said, because why? Well, because you get stuck. Because you weren't ready or? No. Tony said, no, just stay here. So you're going to be a head coach. Interesting. So he was grooming you from the beginning to be a head coach. He was grooming me from the beginning. And it was interesting because I could have went to college. And he goes, you don't want to do that. He said, you need to be an NFL head coach. And he was right.

In 2001, before the Rooney Rule was adopted, Herm Edwards became the sixth black head coach in NFL history. He spent several seasons coaching the New York Jets, another few with the Kansas City Chiefs, and eventually he did take a college head coaching job at Arizona State University. Edwards did not have a great coaching record. That's why he's a broadcaster now. But he did get the opportunity.

He recognizes that his path was easier than most, thanks to the mentorship of Tony Dungy.

So why does Edwards think that the Rooney rule was, as he put it, good in the beginning? Well, because it slowed guys down from hiring their buddies. This is a big job. When you get ready to hire somebody, you want to know some information. Owners talk. They say, well, you interviewed this guy, you interviewed that guy. What did it look like? Well, he did okay, didn't do okay, whatever. They all speak. So in the beginning, it forced you to slow down. Because what used to happen, the teams that got in the playoffs,

Those are the guys you went after when they lost. Like some of these dudes couldn't even interview when they're in the playoffs. Really? I had to lose a game to get an interview. And then sometimes the job would be gone because the time you got out of the playoffs, it was too late. They wanted to hire somebody. So I try to be optimistic about this because I've been in the league for so long and I've watched it grow. And wherever I've been, I've been the first black head coach.

The Jets, Kansas City, Arizona State. So I chuckle because I know that eventually someone was going to ask me the question when I went to Kansas City. Hey, you know, and I said, I already know. And then when I went to Arizona State, they went, I said, I already know. Don't ask the question. And so you think in 2024, you know, this shouldn't be a question. It should no longer be a question, but it still is.

Has it gotten better? It's gotten a lot better, but there's still a lot of work to do. What kind of work still needs to be done? Well, consider those interviews that were required by the Rooney Rule. So in the beginning, it was a good way of slowing it down and getting interviews. But then it became almost like, no.

Because the interviews was like, okay, I'm going to interview some guys, but I already know who I'm going to hire. So were those sham interviews? Yeah. I mean, some of them were phone calls. I interviewed with a guy. He didn't even bring you in.

Coming up next time in part two, the underbelly of the Rooney Rule. It wasn't two weeks after everybody had agreed to the rule that it was totally flouted by an owner who just agreed to it. And then the Rooney Rule started drifting into corporate America.

This, too, had its problems. It's no different than saying, oh, you know what? I want to run a marathon. There is a 42-week process where you, like, train, y'all. You don't just get up and say, I'm going to run 26.2 miles. And that's what people did with their diversity efforts. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else, too.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Tao Jacobs. Our staff also includes Alina Kullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth,

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Okay. And then what about special teams coordinators? Special teams coordinators. I'm not exactly sure where special teams coordinators are. No one pays attention to special teams. We're just being honest here. Sorry, special teams folks. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.

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