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

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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"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 applicants for certain employment and training opportunities because of race and sex. And they do so in a way that tends to deprive applicants of opportunities for employment.

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"The NFL’s own Executive Vice President of NFL Operations (Troy Vincent Sr.) has acknowledged that the NFL should create ‘a workplace culture that doesn’t require mandates to interview people of color and minorities.’ If that is so, then stop discriminating based on race. Stop discriminating based on sex. Interview, hire, and train based on merit. 

"If merit-based employment should exist anywhere (and it should exist everywhere), it is in the NFL. NFL fans in Florida don’t care what color their coach’s skin is. They care what colors their coach is wearing — and that those colors are winning on the football field."

Uthmeier then asked Goodell to "please confirm no later than May 1, 2026, that the NFL will no longer enforce the Rooney Rule or any variation or extension thereof — which requires consideration of race, sex, or any other prohibited classification — on teams in Florida. Failure to provide such confirmation may result in a civil rights enforcement action."

The NFL did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Rooney Rule went into effect in 2003. As of publication, three NFL head coaches are Black, and none were hired this offseason, although several were hired for coordinator positions.

Brian Flores, Steve Wilks and Ray Horton have a discrimination case against the NFL, with Flores saying the league was "rife with racism" in its hiring practices for coaches.

Fox News' Ryan Gaydos contributed to this report.

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