Florida AG blasts NFL Rooney Rule as ‘discrimination,’ threatens legal showdown in letter to Roger Goodell

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Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell Wednesday, imploring the league to nix its Rooney Rule.

The rule requires NFL organizations to interview at least two minority candidates for major positions before pulling the trigger on a hire.

Uthmeier called the Rooney Rule "illegal" and "blatant race and sex discrimination."

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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell speaks during his state of the NFL news conference Feb. 2, 2026, in San Jose, Calif. (AP Photo/Matt York)

"As applied in Florida, the NFL’s ‘Rooney Rule,’ which governs the hiring of certain team executives and coaches, brazenly violates Florida law. So, too, do the NFL’s related ‘diversity’ initiatives," Uthmeier wrote in the letter.

"The Florida Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from ‘fail[ing] or refus[ing] to hire any individual’; ‘limit[ing], segregate[ing], or classify[ing] employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities’; and ‘discriminat[ing] against any individual with respect to compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,’ because of the ‘individual’s race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, handicap, or marital status,’ the letter continued. 

"The Act also prohibits employers from discriminating based on those same characteristics ‘in admission to … any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.’ The Rooney Rule and its offshoots require precisely what Florida law forbids. 

"They require teams to limit, segregate, and classify