Exactly a year prior, Steelers team president Art Rooney II surrendered the Rooney Rule didn’t function as expected in the 2020 hiring cycle and required tweaking. Rinse. Repeat.
Rooney has comparative considerations on the hiring process in 2021 notwithstanding extension of the standard.
“There’s still work to be done in this area, no question about it,” Rooney said this week, via the Associated Press.
The seven NFL teams with openings this cycle talked with 11 minorities and 16 whites and just two of the jobs were filled by minorities. The Jets hired Robert Saleh, who is of Lebanese descent, and the Texans hired David Culley, who is Black.
Quite, Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy again didn’t find a head coaching job.
Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin, Miami’s Brian Flores and Washington’s Ron Rivera are the solitary other minority head coaches.
“We didn’t make as much progress on the head-coaching side as we would have liked,” Rooney said. “But I would say we did make some progress on the General Manager side, which is encouraging. And then we’ll have to look on the coordinator side to see how much progress we make on that front.
“There are a lot of pieces to it that we’re going to have to sit down when it’s all said and done and really analyze what happened, and are there things we can do to strengthen the opportunities for minority coaches. I think last year we did take a number of steps that I think over time are going to pay dividends, but that’s not to say we can’t do more, and we’ll take another strong look at it this offseason.”
Minorities filled two of the seven General Manager vacancies, with Terry Fontenot going to Atlanta and Brad Holmes to Detroit. Cleveland’s Andrew Berry and Miami’s Chris Grier are the other Black General Managers in the league.