DeMaurice Smith has long been one of the smartest people in sports, and a plan he’s devised to improve racial hiring in the NFL is, not surprisingly, brilliant. It’s what you’d expect from him.
Smith is the outgoing executive director of the NFL Players Association, and he’s co-authored an article that will appear in the upcoming edition of the “Yale Law and Policy Review” that’s offered as a counter to the Rooney Rule. In fact, in the article, Smith calls for the end of the Rooney Rule.
Smith offers 12 solutions to better the hiring process and make it more equitable:
- Discard the Rooney Rule.
- Improve the system of hiring and retention.
- Get rid of the rules that require coaches to get permission from owners on their current team to apply for future jobs.
- Use an outside firm to audit the hiring process of teams.
- Develop job descriptions for all key positions such as CEO, general manager or head coach.
- Punish teams that don’t comply with the initiatives.
- Use consistent evaluation guidelines.
- Develop rules that stop nepotism.
- Have key jobs posted and held open for 30 days.
- Use programs to help coaches get experience.
- Use league resources to pre-screen candidates so qualified ones can’t be ignored.
- Back unionizing for coaching.
All smart stuff. Typical of Smith.
The problem? His plan won’t work.
It would fail in the same way that Smith says the Rooney Rule does. The reason? You can’t fix people’s hearts. No number of rules or threats will make owners hire a person of color if they don’t want to. Racism ain’t ‘fraid of no fines.
These rules don’t work properly because people don’t work properly. You can’t fix this problem until you fix people.
A racist owner can’t say publicly that he or she won’t hire a Black head coach. That would be both disgraceful and illegal. What a racist owner can do is just say he prefers another coach who happens to be white over a Black candidate. The Rooney Rule, or the Smith rules, do nothing to stop this, because it can’t be stopped.
It’s true that laws help repair the damage that racists cause and laws are protective measures. Laws can work. But the Rooney Rule and the Smith Rules aren’t laws. The rules are more like suggestions, and I promise you, any owner or executive, if they don’t want to hire a Black head coach, for example, can get around Smith’s rules as easily as they do the Rooney ones.
‘It’s safe for now’: The Rooney Rule is an NFL institution. But for how much longer?
Lawsuits can potentially change things, but they can take years, and because the NFL is often highly successful at burying them in its secretive arbitration process, a process that heavily favors the league, they don’t have much impact.
The executive summary of Smith’s work hits on the most important point of all, and none of it has to do with his rules. It has to do with regulation.
“While the NFL and its member teams appear to the public – and are often discussed in the media – as if they are structured as one regulated entity, and thus people may assume that this behemoth entity is subject to rigorous oversight and regulation like a publicly owned corporation, that is not that case,” part of the executive summary reads. “In fact, neither the League nor its member teams have any semblance of the accountability that many companies in the world have in their respective markets.
“The NFL faces neither shareholder nor consumer accountability. There is no public board of directors, there are no public compliance or audit reports, there are virtually no federal or state mandated public disclosures, nor government operational oversight. All of this should be surprising – and profoundly troubling – given the tax benefits, special antitrust treatment, stadium funding, and other publicly enabled benefits that the NFL and its member teams have enjoyed for generations.”
The NFL faces no governmental accountability, or any regulatory pressure of any kind, to repair the racial imbalance inside the league. Without those things, there’s no reason for the NFL to take more stringent measures.
So, yes, what Smith has composed is a brilliant document, and like him, it’s got intellectual heft. But it can’t do something that’s sorely needed:
Fix people.
