The NFL has announced a requirement for all of its 32 teams to hire a female or minority offensive assistant coach for the 2022 season.
The league’s diversity, equity and inclusion committee shared that under the new policy the coaching hires must work closely with their teams’ head coaches and offensive staffs, saying the goal of the mandate is to increase minority participation within coaching staffs and produce future head-coaching candidates.
Coaches hired through the new initiative will be paid through a league-wide fund for two years.
League Chief Administrative Officer Dasha Smith told ESPN that several teams already have coaching staffers that count toward the new program.
“It’s a recognition that at the moment, when you look at stepping stones for a head coach, they are the coordinator positions,” committee chairman Art Rooney II, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, said during Monday’s league meeting, at which NFL owners adopted the new policy.
“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].”
The league also adjusted the language of its Rooney Rule mandate to include women, now saying that they can satisfy team requirements to interview two minorities for top positions such as head coaching and front office roles.
“The truth of the matter is that as of today, at least, there aren’t many women in the pool in terms of head coach,” Rooney said, per ESPN. “We hope that is going to change over the years, but for that reason we didn’t see it as inhibiting the number of interviews for racial minorities at this point in time. Obviously, we can address that as time goes on, but for now we didn’t see that as an issue.”
This comes as NBC Sports reported that two new plaintiffs will join Steelers senior defensive assistant coach Brian Flores’s lawsuit against the league and three teams, the Miami Dolphins, New York Giants and Denver Broncos, in which he alleges racial discrimination in hiring practices.
The NFL hired former Attorney General Loretta Lynch last month as counsel to defend it and the teams against Flores’s lawsuit.