The National Football League is quite serious about having minority representation in the league when it comes to coaches.
All 32 NFL teams will hire a minority offensive assistant coach for the 2022 season, part of a series of policy enhancements announced Monday. The coach can be “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority,” according to the policy adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting, and will be paid from a league-wide fund.
The league announced teams must hire this individual as an offensive assistant, and the candidate must have a minimum of three years of collegiate or professional coaching experience, and will have “regular and direct contact with the head coach,” as well as the other offensive coaches.
The news comes as the NFL announced it is putting together a committee to analyze its diversity hiring practices among the league and its teams.
It was back in 2003 when the NFL introduced the “Rooney Rule,” which requires NFL teams to conduct at least one in-person interview with a minority candidate for all head-coaching vacancies. In the years since, most teams could get around that rule by just interviewing a minority candidate with no intentions of ever hiring them.
Now the NFL appears to be taking a more serious step in mandating more diverse hiring practices.
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“It’s a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions,” said Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney II, the chairman of the NFL Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee. “We clearly have a trend where coaches are coming from the offensive side of the ball in recent years, and we clearly do not have as many minorities in the offensive coordinator [job].”
In 2016, Kathryn Smith became the first woman to become a full-time NFL coach when the Buffalo Bills hired her to be its special teams quality-control coach. By 2021, there were 12 women that had coaching jobs in the NFL.
