Art Rooney II: NFL must do more to improve Rooney’s rule

Getty Images

Almost exactly a year ago, Steelers team president Art Rooney II admitted that the Rooney Rule had not worked as intended in the 2020 recruiting cycle and needed some tweaking. Rinse. Repeat.

Rooney has similar views on the recruiting process in 2021 despite the rule’s extension.

“There is still work to be done in this area, no doubt about it,” Rooney said this week, via the Associated press.

The seven NFL teams with openings this round interviewed 11 minorities and 16 whites and only two of the jobs were held by minorities. The Jets hired Robert Saleh, who is of Lebanese descent, and the Texans hired David Culley, who is black.

Notably, Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy has yet to secure a head coach position.

Mike Tomlin of Pittsburgh, Brian Flores of Miami and Ron Rivera of Washington are the only other head coaches in the minority.

“We haven’t made as much headway on the head coaching side as we would have liked,” Rooney said. “But I would say we’ve made progress on the GM side, which is encouraging. And then we’ll have to look at the coordinators to see the progress we’re making on this front.

“There’s a lot of things we’re going to have to sit down on when all is said and done and really analyze what happened, and are there things we can do to strengthen the opportunities for them. minority coaches. I think over the past year we took a number of steps that I think over time will pay off, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do more, and we’ll come back to that again for a while. the off-season.

Minorities have occupied two of the seven vacant CEO positions, Terry Fontenot going to Atlanta and Brad Holmes to Detroit. Andrew Berry of Cleveland and Chris Grier of Miami are the other black general managers in the league.