A String of Slights Flout the Rooney Rule

If you fire Steve Mariucci and replace him with Dennis Erickson, there’s evidence both anecdotal and statistical that suggests the decision was just plain dumb. If in making that hire you take the position that Erickson is a better candidate to be head coach of a NFL team than, say, Dennis Green, it’s dumb and also smacks of something more offensive.

The Dan Rooney Rule requiring NFL teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching positions is something that for the most part has been treated as a joke. We expect 18-year-old LeBron James to follow the rules, but grown men who own and run pro football teams get a free pass when they make a mockery of rules?

The issue of the exclusion of black football coaches in the college and professional ranks isn’t going away just because Erickson was hired in San Francisco and Terry Donahue said the ultimate decision was based on a “gut instinct.” There are watchdogs now, in the persons of Johnnie Cochran and Washington, D.C., attorney Cyrus Mehri. Players who previously steered clear of taking a public stand on such a controversial and sensitive issue are starting to make rumblings. The city council in Detroit, on Wednesday night, passed a unanimous resolution condemning Lions owner William Ford and General Manager Matt Millen for not following the process set down in late December by the NFL.

“It was something that had to be done,” council member Alonzo Bates said in a phone conversation Thursday night. “I love sports. I’m a member of the Super Bowl 2005 host committee. But I’m also an activist.... It’s ridiculous we’re still dealing with this kind of issue in professional football.”

Bates’ frustration is less with an individual than with bottom-line results. Of the five NFL coaches recently hired, only the Bengals selected a black coach, Marvin Lewis. Of the 16 Division I-A head coaches hired for the 2002 season, only Notre Dame selected a black coach, Tyrone Willingham, only after much drama.

The 49ers hired Erickson, a man who never had a winning record in four NFL seasons in Seattle and whose teams never reached the playoffs, over Green whose Vikings teams made the playoffs eight times in 10 years and the NFC championship game twice. And Green is a product of the 49ers’ system.

Lewis, perhaps the best defensive coach in the sport in the last four years, did complete his epic, three-year march to the worst head coaching job in the league. Lewis coordinated what could be the best defense in NFL history, the 2001 Baltimore Ravens, and fielded a top-five defense each of the four seasons he was a coordinator. Jack Del Rio, on the other hand, had one good year as the defensive coordinator for a 7-9 Carolina Panthers team and now he’s the head coach at Jacksonville.

“The Rooney Rule is a good game plan,” Mehri said, “but there’s been poor implementation and execution.”

The agent of Jets defensive coordinator Ted Cottrell, one of the alleged finalists for the 49ers job, went further than that. If owner John York and Donahue conducted interviews with Cottrell and Bears defensive coordinator Greg Blache in good faith, fine. If they had Erickson in their sights all along and talked to Cottrell and Blache as a show, they violated both the letter and spirit of the Rooney rule, which would be a blatant circumvention of a league rule and send the message that they’d rather have a lesser coach, as long as he’s white.

“Was it a dog-and-pony show? Yes,” Joe Linta, Cottrell’s agent told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Did it give my client some visibility? Yes.... But if they’re parading these guys out there just to give them exposure ... then why not just say that. Because if they did that with them, why did they keep the [white candidates] a secret? Why lie about Erickson? Why like about [Rick] Neuheisel? Why pile lie on top of lie and misstatement on top of misstatement?”

Because, perhaps, like the other clubs they don’t feel like complying.

Let me say right here I know Matt Millen personally, like and respect him, and he’s anything but a bigot. And I’m loathe to criticize Jacksonville owner Wayne Weaver because even though there were clearly more qualified men to coach than Del Rio, fact is Weaver has hired black men for positions higher up than coach, like president and very recently, James Harris to run the personnel operation. Weaver has demonstrated time and again he’s open to hiring the best candidates.

But here’s the problem.

The sins of the fathers are now visiting the sons. Millen and Weaver didn’t create this problem, but they have to be part of the solution because they joined a fraternity that already had dirty hands. The NFL’s hiring practices, when it comes to coaches and executives, have been so exclusionary for so long, that today’s owners and executives have to pay up for the last 80 years. Everybody should be made to follow the rule or suffer serious consequences. The league now reaps what its old boy owners sowed. Is that fair?

It’s about as fair as Jim Anderson, one of the best assistant coaches the sorry Bengals have had for years and years, never being interviewed to be a coordinator even though for many years Anderson’s running backs are the only thing worth watching in Cincinnati.

Thursday night I asked an attorney with vast knowledge of labor and hiring issues if the NFL is behind most Fortune 500 companies when it comes to fairness in hiring at the managerial level, including head coach. “The NFL,” he said, “is pretty typical ... for the ones that haven’t been sued yet. They’ve been negligent on this issue. They’ve got their heads in the sand. They think that discrimination in hiring has to be overt, that they’re going to catch somebody on tape.”

The men who own and run teams aren’t that stupid and they’re not that evil. In more subtle ways, however, good football men with so much to offer teams and the league are being injured. If the owners and executives care to look and listen, they’ll see and hear the anger in Detroit and know that serious discontent is growing. Perhaps as never before.