Tony Dungy’s letter to the NFL: How to improve the head coach hiring process

To Commissioner Goodell and NFL Owners,

The current system for hiring head coaches is broken. It’s not producing good results. Two-thirds of the league changing hands every three years is not the model of stability we should be striving for.  The minority hiring record, which I wrote about this time last year, is very poor as well. None of this is good for business.  But what can we do to fix these problems?

The league faced this issue with minority hiring 20 years ago. Dennis Green and I were fired after the 2001 season, leaving one African American coach at the time, Herm Edwards. Prominent civil rights attorneys Johnnie Cochran and Cyrus Mehri came to the NFL asking to work together to get answers to the problem. They advised the league that litigation was certain to follow if things didn’t change.

After meeting with Cochran and Mehri, the league set up a subcommittee to work on diversity and inclusion and Dan Rooney made some suggestions on how to help the head coaching/GM searches. He suggested a process and the league adopted what was called the Rooney Rule.

But the rule was only a small part of the process. We have followed the rule but by and large have ignored the process. And now 20 years later, it’s been deja vu. At the end of the 2021 season, two African American coaches were fired, leaving only one in position at the time.  Many of the same problems still exist, and the litigation did come with Brian Flores’ lawsuit.

Dan’s hope was that decision makers would follow this process and it would lead to successful outcomes—that is, choosing the best candidate for each franchise. Here was the process he followed, which was very successful for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

For Dan, it was a defensive-minded coach who