The failed NFL diversity ‘rule’ corporate America loves

Without enforcement, the Rooney Rule failed to create equitable opportunities for Black coaches. Then it spread to corporate America and fell short there, too.

In 2020, as protests raged after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, corporate leaders scrambled to show that they, too, were on the side of racial equity.

Video game company Activision Blizzard told players on a loading screen that the Call of Duty series and developer Infinity Ward “stand for equality and inclusion.” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon took a knee with bank employees. Hundreds of brands posted black squares on Instagram.

And companies across the country flocked to a diversity salve known to be handy during a public relations crisis: the Rooney Rule.

Black Out

This football season, The Washington Post is examining the NFL’s decades-long failure to equitably promote Black coaches to top jobs despite the multibillion-dollar league being fueled by Black players.

The rule, named for a revered Pittsburgh Steelers owner, had been adopted by the NFL 17 years earlier in response to an outcry — and a legal threat — over the glaring dearth of Black head coaches in a league where nearly 70 percent of the players were Black.

The rule required teams to interview at least one minority candidate for every head coach opening. Billed as brilliant in its simplicity, it quickly became popular with corporate America, a trend that culminated shortly after Floyd’s death.

But even as the Rooney Rule was endorsed by some of the most powerful entities in the country, from President Barack Obama to the nation’s biggest banks to the New York Police Department, the NFL appeared to be coming to terms with an uncomfortable reality.

The Rooney Rule had failed.

After apparent success initially, including a Super Bowl matching two Black head coaches and a 2011 season with seven Black men at the helm, racial equity on football sidelines has plunged, with once-encouraging news about the NFL’s diversity revival giving way to a bleakly repetitive news cycle: Black coaches are fired, qualified Black candidates are passed over, and teams are accused of gaming the interview requirement with no fear of consequences.

NFL officials have repeatedly distanced themselves from those failures by pointing out that the league has no control over its teams’ hiring decisions. That shifts the onus to team owners, the predominantly White and male financial titans who tend to exert fierce control over their corporate fiefdoms.

LEFT: Robert Kraft has owned the New England Patriots since 1994. (Doug Murray/AP) RIGHT: Jerry Jones purchased the Dallas Cowboys in 1989 and also serves as team president and general manager. (Josie Lepe/AP)

But an investigation by The Washington Post of the rule’s origins and spread — including interviews with insiders to its history and corporate diversity experts, as well as a review of previously unreported documents — suggests the league for years did too little to exert the influence it did have over its 32 teams. Instead, it clung to a policy that repeatedly proved fallible.

A similar pattern played out as the policy spread to corporate America. Long promoted as a model policy by the NFL, Wall Street’s interest in the rule skyrocketed after Floyd’s death, The Post found in an analysis of corporate filings. In hundreds of mentions of the policy since 2020, it is touted by companies ranging from Regions Bank to Lyft, which said its “Rooney Rule 2.0” accompanied “difficult yet necessary conversations to align and inspire our entire organization.”

[Opinion | The NFL is not doing all it can to help Black coaches]

But The Post found the Rooney Rule’s broader adoption over the past decade-plus, by entities ranging from Wells Fargo to the state of Oregon to the legal community, has been plagued by familiar flaws: allegations of sham interviews, a lack of enforcement and illusory results. Once considered cutting-edge, the rule now runs counter to more recent scholarship suggesting that corporate diversity is achieved through incentives and culture-building rather than mandates.

“These rules — all the research points in the same direction,” said Frank Dobbin, co-author of “Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t” and a sociology professor at Harvard University. “They backfire, or they cause things to get worse.”

Other experts said the early spike in Black head coaches in the NFL was evidence that the policy could be effective if steered correctly. But every expert in diversity policy consulted by The Post agreed on a point that seemed to evade the NFL for years: Such a rule, by itself, is not enough.

Steelers owner Art Rooney II, chair of the NFL’s workplace diversity committee and son of Dan Rooney, for whom the rule is named, concurred.

“I certainly would agree that the Rooney Rule by itself is not an effective diversity policy,” he said, adding that the league’s changes in recent years, including turning to concepts it previously rejected, reflected its shifting views on how to address the problem. “You could make that argument that we thought maybe we solved the issue by just requiring a certain number of interviews. And, obviously, by itself that wasn’t enough.”

[Key findings from ‘Black Out,’ The Post’s series on Black NFL coaches]

The NFL declined to make Commissioner Roger Goodell available for an interview and did not respond directly to requests for comment for this article.

In an interview with The Post on the broader subject of the dearth of Black head coaches, NFL officials emphasized a variety of initiatives that the league has implemented, especially since 2020, that have made it less singularly reliant on the Rooney Rule. “We have not been an organization, certainly over the last three years, that has said, ‘We’re going to put these in place, and that’s it, and it’s good enough,’ ” said Dasha Smith, the NFL’s chief administrative officer.

A ‘very chilly’ meeting

It started with a bluff.

The news conference that spawned the Rooney Rule was held Sept. 30, 2002, in a side room of a Shula’s Steak House, with a media turnout unobtrusive to the early-bird diners on a Monday afternoon.

Television crews were conspicuously absent. Some of the newspapers with the biggest national reach, including The Post, did not send anyone to cover it.

“Nothing new there, really,” the Chicago Sun-Times mused. “From time to time, a prominent person or group takes up this cause and gets some publicity. Then the issue fades away.”

There were two Black head coaches in the NFL at the time. Between 1990 — the year after the Los Angeles Raiders made Art Shell the first Black head coach in modern NFL history — and 2002, just six of the league’s 91 new head coach hires were Black. There had never been more than three Black head coaches at a time. The recent firings of two well-respected Black coaches, Tampa Bay’s Tony Dungy and Minnesota’s Dennis Green, only reinforced the inequity.

Cyrus Mehri, one of the attorneys staging the news conference, didn’t expect to make history. The event was the culmination of a pro bono passion project for a group of lawyers, academics and activists. Mehri had put on enough press events to know even the most successful of them typically lead to a few articles before being largely forgotten.

“This could’ve easily been a one-week story,” Mehri said.

And it might have been — if not for an off-the-cuff threat uttered by Mehri’s partner in the effort.

Some in the group had warned Johnnie Cochran Jr. against threatening to sue the NFL for discrimination. After all, he and Mehri didn’t even have an ingredient that’s essential for a lawsuit: a client.

But Cochran believed the NFL would never right itself unless it was forced. He was also the most famous defense attorney on the planet, his successful work for O.J. Simpson having ensured his catchy legal rhymes would not be underestimated again.

“You only litigate,” Cochran proclaimed that day in Baltimore, “after you’ve done everything you can to negotiate.”

Mehri and Cochran handed out copies of a 78-page report titled “Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities.” It was based largely on the research of Janice Madden, a labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I didn’t know anything about football,” Madden said recently, and she had never spoken at a news conference. But she knew corporate inequity. Mehri and Cochran were familiar with her work that showed women in the financial sector were losing out on commissions despite outperforming men, so they asked her whether a similar phenomenon could be studied as it pertained to Black head coaches in the NFL.

Madden compared the performance of the five Black head coaches of the modern era — Shell, Dungy, Green, Ray Rhodes and Herm Edwards — with the performance of the league’s other head coaches over the previous 15 years. She found the Black coaches outperformed their White counterparts by more than a full win per season, including in seasons after which they were fired. The findings were similar to what The Post would discover two decades later, in its data analysis for this project, including that, since 1990, Black head coaches whose teams had won at least nine games were roughly as likely to be fired, on average, as White coaches whose teams had won at least six.

“Black coaches are being held to a higher standard,” Cochran said. “Now is the time for the NFL to step up and make a change.”

Initially, it was unclear how seriously the NFL would take that demand. Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell groused that if he listened to Cochran, “he’d have O.J. Simpson coaching my team.”

But the next month, the NFL invited Mehri and Cochran to a meeting at league headquarters in Manhattan. Harold Henderson, then the league’s executive vice president for labor relations, said recently that it wasn’t the threat of litigation that got the league’s attention.

“There was something of a PR concern,” said Henderson, who is Black, referring to the lawyers’ media blitz. “The look, the appearance, the whole notion of it was distasteful and unpleasant.”

Cochran was unavailable, so Mehri was accompanied by Richard Lapchick, a professor and author who regularly clashed with the NFL over the poor grades it earned on his “Racial and Gender Report Card.” The reception from the assembled NFL executives was “very chilly,” Lapchick recalled. “They were obviously not happy to have us there.”

When they got to the topic of how to address the problem, the meeting only got chillier. Mehri pointed to the “fair competition resolution” on the report’s final page. Among the ideas: require a “racially diverse final candidate slate” for teams hiring head coaches and their top assistants and coordinators.

Mehri and Cochran also proposed that the league force teams that bypass the diversity requirement to forfeit draft picks and that then-Commissioner Paul Tagliabue could award additional picks to teams that showed the greatest progress toward diversity.

[Perspective: NFL owners love to extol the Rooney Rule — and then hire White guys]

As Mehri recalls it, that’s when Henderson started “pounding the table [and] getting visceral,” booming that the involvement of draft picks, the sport’s treasured currency for divvying up young talent, was a non-starter.

Henderson recently said he doubted that he banged on the table. “Intimidation is not my style,” he said. But he did remember the league shooting down the involvement of “football capital,” such as draft picks, in any diversity push.

“I recall it as having no traction at all, just no support,” Henderson said. “It was just an idea: ‘Yeah, well, that’s nice, but that probably wouldn’t work.’ ”

The NFL, Henderson said, didn’t consider the meeting an open forum.

“Those guys were there to give us information and make their arguments,” Henderson said of Mehri’s team. “But they didn’t have a seat and a vote and a voice. We weren’t there to argue with them. ... It was: ‘Thank you very much for bringing us this information and bringing this to our attention. And we agree that something needs to be done. And we’re working on it.’ ”

That job fell to the newly created NFL committee on workplace diversity, chaired by Steelers owner Dan Rooney. It included four other owners, all of them White men, and a “working group” of five club executives, two of whom were Black.

In December 2002, two months after the meeting between Mehri and the NFL, the committee emerged with what the NFL billed as a “comprehensive program to promote diversity in [the] coaching and front office ranks.”

But the program included only one notable requirement, which would soon be dubbed the Rooney Rule. “[Team] owners strongly agreed on the principle,” the NFL’s news release read, “that any club seeking to hire a head coach will interview one or more minority applicants for the position.”

It was a stripped-down version of a concept already gaining traction in business circles — the “diverse slate” of candidates, typically for management positions. Companies including fast-food giant Yum! Brands, Goldman Sachs and the supply chain wing of Starbucks adopted similar policies, corporate and court records show.

[New York City comptroller pushes 56 companies to commit to diversity and adopt the NFL’s Rooney Rule]

Even baseball had a version. In 1999, then-MLB Commissioner Bud Selig told teams that they had to furnish him with a diverse list of job candidates when filling key leadership roles: manager, general manager, assistant general manager and directors of player development and scouting. Selig threatened to discipline clubs that did not “aggressively pursue equal opportunities and initiatives.”

But football’s version focused on only one role and did not refer to any potential enforcement. Gone were forfeited draft picks and any focus on other leadership positions, replaced by a single clause worded more like a gentlemen’s agreement than a contract.

DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association, calls it the “Rooney suggestion,” dreamed up by billionaire owners he said would be loath to hold themselves accountable. “You really have to ask yourself: Was it designed to work in the first place?” Smith said.

Smith suggested the NFL and its team owners saw through the lawyers’ posturing and “created a public relations feel-good moment” that didn’t result in any modifications to the NFL constitution and spelled out no penalties.

“When you agree to call something a rule knowing that there isn’t an enforcement mechanism, who got bluffed?” Smith said.

But to John Wooten, who played 10 seasons in the NFL before working in front offices, the new policy seemed to have struck a balance that couldn’t be accomplished with a stricter rule such as a hiring mandate.

“This is a thin line that we walk,” said Wooten, who became chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a nonprofit that served as a watchdog on the NFL’s diversity efforts, and which involved Mehri in various capacities. “I would not want for me to be hired because I was Black. ... And that’s why we stand with the very simple principle: Give me the opportunity to show you what I can do to help your football team.”

To Mehri, getting 32 teams to sign off on the initiative was a miracle that could be improved upon later — if they were sincere about the effort.

“The key is the implementation and carrying it out with a full commitment,” Mehri said at the time.

‘Football mentality’

That the Rooney Rule could be undermined with sham interviews was known from the beginning to be a possibility — or, given the personalities of the men who run football, perhaps a likelihood.

“ ‘If I can find a way to circumvent the rule and have it my own way, then I should do that,’ ” said Henderson, the former NFL executive, in describing a mind-set prevalent in the league. “That’s what I call a football mentality.”

Then-Atlanta Falcons vice president Ray Anderson, who was on the working group that helped come up with the Rooney Rule, said recently that he warned the group that it could become a “check-the-box exercise.”

“We’ve got to make sure and really promise each other that it’s not going to be used as a tokenism tool,” he recalled saying.

Within months of the rule’s passage, the league’s owners and executives began showing how seriously they took that promise.

Less than two weeks after the rule’s passage, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hired a new coach. He met with Bill Parcells, who is White, for five hours in a jet on a New Jersey tarmac. Jones satisfied the new rule by interviewing Green over the phone.

That same offseason, Detroit Lions President Matt Millen hired Steve Mariucci without interviewing any minority candidates. None would interview, Millen explained, because they knew he was going to hire Mariucci.

Tagliabue gave Jones a pass, explaining that “everyone is satisfied that there was a bona fide interest there,” but he fined Millen $200,000. Almost two decades later, that remains the only fine the NFL has levied in connection with the Rooney Rule.

Several Black coaches said, during interviews for this project or in legal documents, that since the implementation of the Rooney Rule, suspected sham interviews were a constant presence during their time in the NFL.

Former Los Angeles Chargers coach Anthony Lynn, who interviewed with six teams before being hired, said the phenomenon was so persistent that he turned down meetings with teams that hadn’t interviewed a minority candidate “because I did not want to be a token interview.”

But the NFL proudly touted the rule as the number of Black coaches climbed following its implementation. Robert Gulliver, a former human resources head at Citi and Wells Fargo, was hired in 2010 as the league’s first chief diversity officer and quickly became a full-throated ambassador for the Rooney Rule.

He was a regular at business symposiums — holding court with a PNC bank executive in Pittsburgh and a chamber of commerce in Cleveland — where he described the policy as a best practice for diversity inside and outside of football. At the Board Leadership Forum in New York, Gulliver described the Rooney Rule as “the NFL’s most significant export besides the game itself.”

Football’s faith in the rule received the highest possible affirmation — that of the president of the United States — in 2015. As part of an initiative to diversify start-ups and the tech industry, Obama’s administration touted that companies including Facebook, Box, Intel, Xerox and Pinterest had committed to variations of the Rooney Rule, which the White House deemed among “effective methods” for achieving corporate diversity.

The NFL continued to stand by its rule even as its own numbers dropped. Other than expanding the rule to apply to general managers in 2009, the league resisted significantly modifying or overhauling its signature policy.

In 2013, none of the eight open coaching spots went to a minority, and the number of Black head coaches dropped to three. That year, the Fritz Pollard Alliance pointed out to the NFL what is now a well-known phenomenon — that a leaguewide trend of hiring offensive-oriented coaches was further tilting the odds in favor of White candidates. The group attempted to get the NFL to address the lack of Black coaches in the offensive pipeline by expanding the Rooney Rule to include coordinators, according to a letter obtained by The Post.

The NFL declined, with the apparent objection that the modification would interfere with incoming head coaches assembling their staffs. The following year, the alliance tried again, this time with a condition to address that concern: The Rooney Rule would only apply to coordinators when such a spot becomes vacant for teams with an incumbent head coach.

“We strongly believe this modification is in the long term best interest of the League, particularly with offensive minded and quarterback guru coaches being in such high demand for head coaching positions,” Mehri, then counsel for the Fritz Pollard Alliance, wrote to Gulliver in January 2014.

But the league rejected the idea.

“Year after year, the attitude was, ‘Well, let’s wait and see and collect more data,’ ” Mehri said.

Meanwhile, research piled up that suggested the NFL’s implementation of the policy was obsolete — including a 2016 study that suggested such rules could work against minority or female candidates when there was only one of them.

Protests of racial inequality and police brutality, inspired by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, caught the ire of President Donald Trump, who used the term “son of a bitch” to describe players who knelt during the national anthem. Most NFL fans said they disapproved of the protests, and television ratings fell, all of it contributing to a perceived risk of alienating White fans.

Amid this scrutiny, the NFL declined to punish one of its teams for a hiring that some felt spelled the end of the Rooney Rule as a serious measure. In 2018, after Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis suggested he had decided to hire Jon Gruden before interviewing any minority candidates, Commissioner Roger Goodell found that the team hadn’t violated the policy.

“Clubs divine from that: ‘The league is not serious about the rule. Let’s just get this over with and get who we want,’ ” said Jeremi Duru, a professor of law at American University who has represented the Fritz Pollard Alliance.

[The Raiders believe they will be able to hire Jon Gruden. But what about the Rooney Rule?]

Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, acknowledged in a recent interview that the league stumbled during that period. “I think we hit a snag — actually, in 2018, I think the whole world hit a snag ... in particular after the ‘son of a bitch’ comment,” Vincent said. “That snag in 2017, 2018, we just haven’t recovered from it.”

Marvin Lewis was fired at the end of 2018 after 16 seasons as the Cincinnati Bengals' coach. (Frank Victores/AP) Hue Jackson had coaching stints with the Oakland Raiders and Cleveland Browns. (David Richard/AP) Todd Bowles was let go after four seasons with the New York Jets. (Rey Del Rio/Getty Images) Vance Joseph was given two seasons to lead the Denver Broncos. (Justin Edmonds/Getty Images) Steve Wilks was ousted after just one season with Arizona Cardinals. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)

Anderson, the former Falcons executive who helped craft the rule, said team owners doomed the policy. He has called for the rule to be renamed out of respect for Dan Rooney.

“I don’t think there was enough good faith and enough deliberateness on the part of the owners who were making these hires,” said Anderson, now the athletic director at Arizona State University. “The numbers have gotten so embarrassingly low that I think Mr. Rooney would say, ‘Well, if we’re not going to be serious about the efforts that we talked about, then don’t use my name anymore.’ ”

The honeymoon ends

Across football, officials struggle to explain why the Rooney Rule stalled out, citing everything from Trump-era politics to Dan Rooney’s 2017 death to team owners’ recent obsession with offensive-minded “whiz kids.”

“It’s hard to explain,” Art Rooney II said.

But for some attorneys and researchers in the field of corporate diversity, the explanation is simple, if brutal: The Rooney Rule and initiatives like it don’t work — at least not without more effective methods propping them up.

Attorney Linda Friedman, who has filed racial discrimination lawsuits against major financial firms, said companies in those legal crosshairs often go on a diversity hiring spree without tending to the culture that led to the crisis in the first place.

“We call it the honeymoon period,” Friedman said. “But we don’t see any increase in representation across the board because, even where the hiring spikes, people don’t survive if they’re placed in an environment that doesn’t want them.”

[Perspective: NFL’s coaching-hire disparity goes beyond what Rooney Rule can address]

Among her clients is Lance Slaughter, a Black financial adviser who had 20 years of experience when he was hired by Wells Fargo in 2005. Slaughter had hopes for upward mobility at the company. But once he got there, he said, he saw no Black faces in management and discovered there was an even more insidious impediment to success. Black employees, he said, were rarely if ever recruited to teams of brokers who pool clients — a lucrative arrangement he said would typically guarantee success for those involved.

Slaughter said Wells Fargo refused to make sure the teams were racially equitable, one of several ways he alleged that the company set up Black employees to fail — even as it touted hiring them as a win for diversity. “So guys will figure it out: ‘Okay, I hire these folks, and I meet my objective,’ ” Slaughter, who still works for Wells Fargo, said of the mind-set of his supervisors. “ ‘And whether or not it’s successful, it doesn’t matter.’ ”

Slaughter’s colleague Erika Williams was recruited to Wells Fargo in 2012. She said she was “treated as a hollow diversity hire,” echoing Slaughter’s allegation that Black advisers were shut out of opportunities and forced to work harder for less.

“We had to find our own everything,” Williams said. “If you don’t get out and get it, you will starve. We just weren’t privy to any of the successes. We had to do everything on our own.”

LEFT: “We had to find our own everything,” Erika Williams said of her time working for Wells Fargo. (Sandy Huffaker for The Washington Post) RIGHT: Lance Slaughter filed a class-action lawsuit that ended with a settlement in 2017. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)

In 2013, Slaughter filed a class-action lawsuit against Wells Fargo; Williams and more than 300 other Black employees soon joined the suit. In 2017, the company, which denied wrongdoing, settled for $35.5 million.

Amid the legal fight, in 2016, Wells Fargo adopted a policy aimed at increasing diversity for senior leadership. Then-CEO Timothy Sloan touted that policy during testimony to Congress in 2019 when being questioned about the company’s role in several consumer scandals.

“I instituted the Wells Fargo equivalent of the Rooney Rule,” Sloan said, adding that the company has “made progress both in terms of the number of women and diverse leaders.”

In June, Wells Fargo temporarily suspended the policy after the New York Times reported it had resulted in sham interviews of Black candidates. A Wells Fargo spokesperson told The Post that it “paused to reevaluate” the program, which it has since reactivated, but stood by its results, saying diverse hires were up nearly 30 percent since 2020.

But allegations of sham efforts and toothless enforcement have dogged other corollaries to the Rooney Rule, all of which received favorable press when they were implemented. Among them is MLB’s approach: Though roughly half of major league players are non-White, only five of the 30 managers are — and there is an even more pronounced dearth of people of color in front-office positions.

Dave Stewart, a former all-star pitcher and general manager, said that from the early days of the Selig Rule, he believed he was subjected to sham interviews. The situation has only become more hopeless, he said.

“My interviews, I felt, were just for the sake of doing the interviews,” Stewart said. “It’s just gotten to a point in baseball where, as a minority, your expectation of achieving those positions is almost zero.”

Last year, MLB changed its policy in an apparent attempt to reduce potential sham interviews, allowing internal promotions of “non-diverse” candidates but with the “expectation” that they be replaced by a person of color or a woman.

One state’s effort to diversify the university coaching ranks was met, on at least a few occasions, with a familiar lack of enforcement. In 2009, activist Sam Sachs succeeded in getting Oregon legislators to pass a law requiring state universities to interview at least one minority candidate when hiring coaches and athletic directors. But the law had no penalty attached if schools disregarded it, which they promptly did.

In 2013, Oregon State University hired a softball coach without interviewing a minority candidate. An OSU spokesperson said at the time: “We did not follow the state law regarding the hiring of head coaches, which was an oversight on our part.”

Sachs said the law he helped forge has been ignored at least three times, though he pointed to the repeated hiring of minority candidates to top athletic positions as evidence of the law’s effectiveness. Sachs has been involved in successful efforts to have similar rules implemented by the governments of Portland and the surrounding county.

“I think it’s bulls--- when people say the Rooney Rule doesn’t work,” Sachs said. “We’ve shown here in Oregon ... that it works, but you have to be committed to it.”

But such rules are often credited with progress that would’ve occurred regardless, said Paola Cecchi DiMeglio, a data scientist at Harvard Law School who studied a policy known as the legal community’s answer to the Rooney Rule.

The Mansfield Rule, adopted by major law firms since 2017, measures whether firms have considered at least 30 percent people of color, women or those from underrepresented groups when filling high-level positions. It has been credited with improving firms’ diversity, but Cecchi DiMeglio said the rule “has had no effect.” The improved numbers, she found, were tied to shifting national demographics. She called the Mansfield Rule an “easy solution avoiding the hard work of modifying the real root cause” of racial inequity.

In an analysis that could apply to the NFL as easily as the law firms she studied, Cecchi DiMeglio said the key for companies implementing such rules is for them to “be quick in seeing if they have the effect you are intending to have, and to otherwise quickly shift. … Because otherwise, you keep creating over and over the same loop.”

Diversity Lab, the company that certifies law firms based on their compliance with the Mansfield Rule, denounced Cecchi DiMeglio’s “flawed research” when contacted by The Post and distanced its rule from that of the NFL. “The only similarity between the Rooney Rule and the Mansfield Rule is the word ‘rule,’ ” CEO Caren Ulrich Stacy wrote.

That’s a new distinction. Diversity Lab previously said its policy was “inspired” by the “revolutionary” NFL policy and boasted that the Mansfield Rule was “the next generation of the Rooney Rule.” It removed references to the Rooney Rule from its website in 2020, The Post found.

When asked about that shift, Ulrich Stacy said Diversity Lab reworked the Mansfield Rule after observing “that approach wasn’t working as hoped in the NFL.”

In 2018, a debate over the effectiveness of the Rooney Rule boiled over between shareholders and employees at one of the world’s largest companies. A group of shareholders asked Amazon — which at the time had an all-White 10-person board of directors, three of whom were women — to “implement a ‘Rooney Rule’ ” in subsequent searches. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The company resisted, saying the rule would just formalize a practice already in place. In internal communications, a representative for the company reportedly argued the Rooney Rule risked a “check the box” approach, citing the study that shows having only one minority or female candidate has negative results. One of the study’s authors, Stefanie K. Johnson, then wrote that Amazon was misinterpreting her results. The company relented and implemented a version of the Rooney Rule. The company soon added two women of color to its board.

Johnson, director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University, said the Rooney Rule could deserve credit for helping to diversify Amazon’s top ranks but that it would be “really naive” to believe it was the only factor — and Amazon itself has said it “had long been in discussions with both candidates” before the implementation of the policy.

“Maybe the thing that changed is the pressure from activist investors or the public spotlight about it,” Johnson said. “Or I think it really takes commitment from top-level leaders to say, ‘Okay, fine, we’re going to do something.’ ”

Frank Dobbin, the Harvard professor, said a similar phenomenon may have explained the policy’s initial apparent success in the NFL.

“One possibility is it never really had any effect,” he said. “You just had this focus on the problem getting owners to pay more attention, and then once that went away, they just went back and started doing things the way they always had.”

Friedman, the lawyer who represented Slaughter and Williams in the Wells Fargo lawsuit, said that, when it comes to the financial industry and the NFL, she believes the Rooney Rule failed because it was no match for institutions with a long history of entrenched bias.

“It’s not the idea that failed — it’s the rollout,” she said. “If you’re going to roll it out to an institution that has no interest in changing, it doesn’t matter what you roll out. It’s not going to stick.”

The old playbook

In 2020, the NFL appeared to be coming to terms with the shortcomings of its implementation of the Rooney Rule.

In May of that year — before Floyd’s death — the league expanded the rule to include other coaching positions, including coordinators, six years after rejecting that idea from the Fritz Pollard Alliance. The NFL announced that it would require multiple minority interviews instead of just one in head coaching searches, also years after research showed that greatly increased the probability of minority hiring.

That November, in the most significant departure from previous policies, the league then said it would award draft picks to teams for developing minority coaches and executives hired away by other teams. That policy came into play this offseason when the Miami Dolphins hired Mike McDaniel, the biracial offensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers. The 49ers received two third-round picks.

Troy Vincent, the NFL executive, recently described the league’s current mind-set toward its diversity initiatives. “The Rooney Rule’s a tool,” he said. “Has the tool worked? To some degree yes, but it’s a tool. It complements all of the other things.”

But as the NFL moved away from its singular reliance on the Rooney Rule, Wall Street shareholders touted it like never before.

Regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission provide a window into the buzzwords of corporate life. They consist of documents in which companies boast of policies or shareholders demand them.

Mentions of the Rooney Rule

in SEC filings by year

120

90

60

30

8

7

3

3

0

0

0

0

’13

’14

’15

’16

’17

’18

’19

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

Mentions of the Rooney Rule

in SEC filings by year

120

90

60

30

8

7

3

3

0

0

0

0

’13

’14

’15

’16

’17

’18

’19

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

Mentions of the Rooney Rule

in SEC filings by year

120

90

60

30

8

7

3

3

0

0

0

0

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

Mentions of the Rooney Rule

in SEC filings by year

120

90

60

30

27

8

7

3

3

0

0

0

0

’13

’14

’15

’16

’17

’18

’19

’20

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

Mentions of the Rooney Rule

in SEC filings by year

120

90

60

30

27

8

7

3

3

0

0

0

0

’13

’14

’15

’16

’17

’18

’19

’20

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

Mentions of the Rooney Rule

in SEC filings by year

120

90

60

30

27

8

7

3

3

0

0

0

0

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

Mentions of the Rooney Rule

in SEC filings by year

120

90

60

George Floyd’s death

May 25, 2020

48

21

30

27

8

7

3

3

0

0

0

0

’13

’14

’15

’16

’17

’18

’19

’20

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

Mentions of the Rooney Rule

in SEC filings by year

120

90

60

George Floyd’s death

May 25, 2020

48

21

30

27

8

7

3

3

0

0

0

0

’13

’14

’15

’16

’17

’18

’19

’20

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

Mentions of the Rooney Rule

in SEC filings by year

120

90

60

George Floyd’s death

May 25, 2020

48

21

30

27

8

7

3

3

0

0

0

0

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

Source: Securities and Exchange Commission

In the decades following the NFL’s adoption of the Rooney Rule, those filings — annual reports, prospectus materials, proxy statements and other forms — showed a small but growing number of mentions of the policy in documents concerning publicly traded companies.

In 2020, before Floyd’s murder May 25, there were 27 mentions, an uptick in part tied to New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer filing shareholder proposals for companies to adopt the policy.

After Floyd’s murder, the mentions stayed roughly at that pace through the end of the year as pressure ramped up on corporations to introduce racial equity measures.

In November 2020, Wall Street research firm Glass Lewis announced it would include in its reports “whether the board has adopted a policy requiring women and minorities to be included in the initial pool of candidates when selecting new director nominees (aka ‘Rooney Rule’).”

The following January, the country’s five biggest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp — publicly committed to versions of the Rooney Rule in response to proposals from the American Federation of Labor, the country’s largest labor group.

From the day of Floyd’s murder through this September, the Rooney Rule has been mentioned 268 times in regulatory filings.

Among the companies that touted their adoption of the Rooney Rule for the first time in filings following Floyd’s murder: Valero Energy, Avis Budget, Dollar General and Groupon.

In 2021, Activision Blizzard said it was committing to the Rooney Rule for all director and CEO searches — while still rejecting as an “unworkable encroachment” a shareholder proposal that the gaming company apply the policy to all open positions. Despite having previously adopted the rule for its board of directors, Amazon also rejected a proposal to take the policy companywide.

More than corporations turned to the rule in the wake of Floyd’s murder. In March 2021, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio decreed via executive order that the New York Police Department had to interview at least one applicant of color when filling positions higher than captain.

“That approach in professional sports has proven to be effective,” de Blasio said at a news conference. “There’s always more to do, but it’s really helped.”

Then-mayoral candidate Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain, derided the order at the time as one of “symbolic appearances, where worthy candidates merely get a ‘look.’ ” But with Adams now serving as mayor, the NYPD said it “continues to comply” with the order.

Cyrus Mehri still believes in the effectiveness of the policy he and Johnnie Cochran Jr. helped to create — if it’s not set up to fail.

He was both heartened and dismayed when, 18 years after he was told the league would never involve “football capital” in a diversity push, the NFL overhauled its policy to more closely resemble the ideas they pitched.

“You got to give them credit for what they did, but they missed opportunities to do more and do better,” Mehri said. “Now you’re kind of making up for two decades of lost time.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Art Modell as the owner of the Cleveland Browns in 2002. He owned the Baltimore Ravens at the time.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Stefanie K. Johnson as a professor at University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, she is currently the director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University.

About this story

Additional reporting by Alice Crites and Emily Giambalvo. Editing by Joe Tone. Copy editing by Michael Petre. Photo editing by Toni L. Sandys. Video editing by Jayne Orenstein, Joshua Carroll, Jorge Ribas and Justin Scuiletti. Design and development by Brianna Schroer and Joe Fox. Design editing by Virginia Singarayar. Project management by Wendy Galietta.