INGLEWOOD, Calif. Under a scorching California sun, Roger Goodell knew the heat would come.
At his annual Super Bowl news conference on Wednesday, the NFL commissioner was grilled on two hot topics that have received particular attention from the league: racism and hiring discrimination. There have been other issues that don’t shine a positive light on professional football, including the browbeat to the integrity of the sport and the misconduct of players and managers.
A week after former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores, who’s black?, filed a lawsuit alleging both racism in the league and team owner Stephen Ross’ offer to offer Tank games, Goodell vowed to act on several fronts.
“We DO NOT tolerate racism. We will not tolerate any discrimination,” Goodell said. “I found all the accusations, whether based on racism, discrimination or the integrity of our game, very disturbing to me. They are very important to us at all levels and we have to make sure we get to the bottom of it.”
It starts with the NFL’s poor record in hiring minorities as head coaches. While the league has made strides with other jobs, from general managers to coordinators, the most visible representative of a Franchise is the coach. There are five minority head coaches on the 32 teams, two black, one Biracial, one Hispanic and one Lebanese.
When asked if the process is flawed, how interviews are conducted, to whom they might be conducted, Goodell said the League is already looking into that — whether it’s changes to Rooney’s rule, which requires interviews with minority candidates for coaching and leadership jobs, or a new rule altogether.
“I think that’s the core of the message that we talked about here, OK, we don’t have the success that we want with head coaches,” he noted. “How do we develop this rule or should we have a new one? Do we need to find another way to achieve this result? And I think we’re not going to rest until we find that and we have those kind of results that I think are mandatory for us. It has to be just the way we move forward to be inclusive.”
The league, with the help of an independent company, has been putting in place for several months a series of guidelines that will be available to teams in the spring. They hope it will lead to an “optimization of the hiring process,” said Jonathan Beane, Director of Diversity and Inclusion.
“And if we know what those facts are and what their impact is on our game, we’re going to take them very seriously,” Goodell said.
What could have been a brilliant, cloudless afternoon meeting, with the SoFi Stadium in the background and the Super Bowl back in the Los Angeles area for the first time in 29 years were instead full of penetrating questions on a variety of topics.
– Goodell defended the league with an oral report from an external investigator into the work culture at the Washington Football Club, now the Commanders. He did not answer whether the results of a new investigation into the behavior of team owner Dan Snyder will be released in a written report.
He also said the League had not reached an agreement with Snyder to get his consent for the release of new information.
– New Orleans Running back Alvin Kamara is now out of jail after being arrested over the weekend for an offense in which he claims to have overcome and injured a person at a Las Vegas nightclub after the Pro Bowl. Goodell said the NFL’s security team was contacted by Las Vegas police just before the game. The police wanted to meet Kamara after the game and the security team made sure that this happened.
Goodell and other league officials met with media mogul Byron Allen about his interest in buying the Denver Broncos and diversity. The NFL has no black majority owners and only two minority owners with Shad Khan in Jacksonville and Kim Pegula, who owns the bills with her husband, Terry.
