By Joseph M. Hanna and S. Philip Unwin
The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (the “Institute”) issues annual grades for diversity hiring for the National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, Women’s National Basketball Association, Major League Soccer and college sports. http://web.bus.ucf.edu/sportbusiness/?page=1445. On Sept. 29, 2010, the Institute issued its 2010 Racial and Gender Report Card (“RGRC”) for the National Football League (“NFL” or the “League”), scoring the League an A for its racial hiring practices and a C for its gender hiring practices, resulting in an overall grade of B. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=5629111. The A was the NFL’s highest grade ever received from the Institute for its hiring practices.
Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute, credited the “Rooney Rule” in part for the NFL’s high grade. The Rooney Rule was adopted by the NFL in 2003 and mandates that teams must interview at least one minority candidate when hiring for a head coaching position. http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs06/news/story?id=2750645. In 2009, the rule was expanded to include all senior football operations positions. The numbers prove the Rooney Rule has had an impact: in 2002, 65 percent of NFL players were African-American, compared to just 6 percent of head coaches. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3812/is_200203/ai_n9035782/. In 2009, 67 percent of players were African-American, but the number of African-American head coaches had risen to 19 percent. http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010-NFL-Racial-and-Gender-Report-Card.pdf. Twenty-five percent of personnel in management positions in the League were minorities (8.7 percent African-American, 4.7 percent Latino, 9.4 percent Asian, 0.2 percent Native American, and 1.8 percent miscellaneous).
Lapchick also credited the fact that minority coaches have been quite successful in recent years. Three of the last four Super Bowls have featured an African-American head coach, with the 2007 Super Bowl featuring both the Indianapolis Colts’ Tony Dungy and the Chicago Bears’ Lovie Smith. Furthermore, five of the league’s 32 general managers are African-American, including Jerry Reese, who was the architect of the 2008 Super Bowl Champion New York Giants. All in all, six of the last eight Super Bowl teams have had either an African-American head coach or general manager.
The NFL’s hiring of women in the league office has been fairly constant from 1996 forward, as has the number of majority owners, and team executives. http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010-NFL-Racial-and-Gender-Report-Card.pdf, p. 16-17, 21-23. There has been more variance in the number of senior administrators, which rose from 12 percent in 1994, up to 34 percent in 1997, dropped to 19 percent in 1999, before climbing back up to 31 percent in 2003, and remaining steady between 28 percent and 34 percent thereafter. http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010-NFL-Racial-and-Gender-Report-Card.pdf, p. 24. There are no female coaches or general managers in the NFL.
Because head coaches and general managers are typically the public faces of a franchise, the attention has been focused on those positions, as opposed to administrative roles. The NFL’s policy, either deliberately or coincidentally, reflects this as the Rooney Rule only mandates that a team must interview a minority candidate for a head coaching position or a senior football operations position. There is no such requirement that a minority be considered for an assistant coaching or other organizational position, nor is there a requirement that a female be interviewed for an organizational position.
Despite its solid marks on the RGRC, the NFL still trails Major League Baseball (“MLB”) and the National Basketball Association (“NBA”) in the overall rankings. http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010_NBA_RGRC.pdf and http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010_MLB_RGRC.pdf. MLB received an A for race and a B for gender, for an overall 2010 grade of B+. Id. MLB features the most ethnically diverse player pool of the three sports: 61.7 percent Caucasian, 27 percent Hispanic, 9 percent African-American and 2.3 percent Asian. At the beginning of the 2010 season, 30 percent of managers and 32 percent of the coaching staffs were minorities. Five general managers (16.7 percent) and six assistant general managers (20 percent) were minorities, as were over 17 percent of vice presidents, 16 percent of senior team administrators and 15 percent of people holding professional positions. MLB has one minority who is the primary owner of a team: Arturo Moreno of the Los Angeles Angels. Id. at 3.
As with the NFL, there are no women managers or assistants, but MLB has a significantly higher number of women in executive positions. Pam Gardner of the Houston Astros is the President of Business Operations for that team, and is the only female CEO or team president in MLB. Id. at 4. Twenty-one different MLB teams have at least one woman in a team vice president role – averaging over 19 percent overall. Nineteen percent of senior administrators and 31 percent of professional positions are occupied by women. Id. at 27-28.
Historically, the percentage of team professional administration roles filled by women has remained fairly stable; fluctuating from 32 percent in 2000 through 31 percent in 2009, only dipping below 25 percent twice during that period, with a low of 22 percent in 2001. The percentage of senior administrators has followed a fairly similar pattern, generally holding in the 20 percent range, with a low of 14 percent in 2004 and a high of 24 percent in both 2000 and 2001.
The percentage of MLB team vice presidents, however, has steadily risen from 5 percent in 2000 to over 19 percent in 2009. There has also been an increase in minorities in these roles, with the growth primarily occurring between 2008 and 2009, when the number of minority VPs rose from 10 percent to 17.5 percent. It is noteworthy, however, that the overall number of team vice presidents in MLB nearly doubled in that same timeframe (2000 to 2009) from 123 to 235. Id. at 26.
The NBA received an A for race and an A- for gender, for an overall grade of A. http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010_NBA_RGRC.pdf. The NBA has, by far, the highest percentage of minority players of any sports league: 82 percent, of whom 77 percent are African-American. http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010_NBA_RGRC.pdf at 3. Thirty percent of head coaches and 41 percent of assistants are African-American. Michael Jordan of the Charlotte Bobcats remains the only African-American majority owner in pro sports, having succeeded Bob Johnson, the first African-American majority owner in pro sports history. Id.
At of the beginning of the 2009-10 season, there were four African American team presidents in the NBA (representing 12 percent of total team presidents). Twenty-seven percent of team professional administrators were minorities, as were 21 percent of team senior administrative positions, and 36 percent of the professional staff positions at the NBA League office. Id.
Once again, as in the NFL and MLB, there are no women coaches, but 44 percent of the professional positions in the NBA League office are held by women and there are 34 women in vice-president positions in the NBA League office. Women hold 39 percent of team professional administrative positions and the NBA employs the only female referee in major professional sports. It is also noteworthy that six women have majority ownership of NBA franchises. Women occupy 18 percent of team vice-president positions, a number that has held steady for the last three years after increasing steadily from 1993 to 2005. http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010_NBA_RGRC.pdf, p.26.
To determine why the NFL trails behind the NBA and MLB in its overall score, we need to look at the diversity hiring initiatives for each league. As noted, the NFL’s most prominent diversity hiring initiative is the Rooney Rule. Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburg Steelers, credits the rule for the hiring of the Steelers head coach, Mike Tomlin. Rooney stated “to be honest with you, before the interview, he was just another guy who was an assistant coach. Once we interviewed him the first time, he just came through and we thought it was great. We brought him back and talked to him on the phone and went through the process that we do, and he ended up winning the job,” Tomlin stated. “I think it has given me an opportunity to present myself maybe in some situations that I wouldn’t have had.” http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs06/new/story?id=2750645.
The Rooney Rule was a product of the NFL’s Diversity Council (the “Council”), established in 2002 and was named after the Council’s chairman – Dan Rooney. The Council’s mission was to collaborate with the Commissioner and NFL executives on designing and implementing programs to build diversity awareness in the League and to foster an inclusive work environment. Among these programs, in 2003, the NFL introduced a formal mentoring program designed to support employee retention, career development and advancement initiatives. It is a structured program in which experienced executive share their business insights and experiences with newer professionals. The League also has a number of other programs designed at enhancing employee learning and development, including NFL Special Teams – created by the Diversity Council to provide a unique opportunity for NFL employees to build their skills and advance their careers; the Junior Rotational Program, which was designed to build a strong entry-level pipeline for the League to attract top undergraduates to the NFL by allowing them to rotate through several business areas in a condensed period of time; an internship program for college seniors; an NFL talent review where the league executives identify and review top performing employees at the director level and above who have the potential for creating responsibilities; and an executive training program.
The NBA conducts training regarding diversity and respect in the workplace for all league employees and mandates that it be completed by all new hires within their first three months of employment. Since 2006, the NBA has provided all league and team employees with access to Globe Smart, a web-based tool that provides information on countries and peoples from around the world in an effort to increase individual awareness of different cultures. The NBA also has comprehensive anti-discrimination and anti-harassment procedures. In terms of recruiting, the NBA uses on-line job postings at a number of diversity websites and actively recruits at historically black colleges and universities, particularly for entry-level associate and intern programs. The NBA, in turn, uses these associate and intern programs as a feeder pool for diverse candidates: the 2009 associate class was 33 percent minority and 66 percent female, while the intern class was 23 percent minority and 42 percent female. http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010_NBA_RGRC.pdf, p.33.
Major League Baseball has, since 1995, aggressively addressed workplace diversity primarily through its human resources practices in both the Commissioner’s Office and at the individual team level. The industry is staffed throughout by professional HR practitioners who contribute to MLB’s benchmark reports that profile all levels of employment within the baseball organizations. This serves as a management tool for a strategic planning and performance management. MLB has also introduced the Diversity Economic Impact Engagement Initiative (“DEIE”), one of its newest initiatives to advance the level of MLB’s current workforce and supplier diversity efforts as well as create methodologies for cultural assessments, diversity economic platforms and industry wide diversity training. The internal consultant model approach will be developed to the industries’ central office, member clubs and, eventually, the minor leagues. Since 1999, MLB has mandated that teams must interview a minority for any managerial opening. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/10/major_league_baseballs_strateg.html.
All three leagues have a supplier diversity program in which they seek out opportunities with women and minority owned businesses. Thus, on their face, each of these three major sports leagues has what appears to be an adequate program for diversity hiring in place. In order to discover the source of the discrepancy in their rankings, it is then necessary to consider the possibility that history has played a role in the development of each league’s diversity hiring practices. It is here that the NBA and MLB have a significant advantage over the NFL. Jackie Robinson’s breaking of baseballs’ color barrier in 1947 is one of the watershed events in sports history. However, only the most knowledgeable NFL fans are aware that the first African American player in the modern era was Kenny Washington of the LA Rams in 1946, a year before Robinson. The NBA was the last to break the color barrier in 1950 when the NY Knicks signed Sweetwater Clifton; but then, the NBA had only been in existence for five years, compared to much longer head starts for both the NFL and MLB. Indeed, the NBA was the first league to have an African American coach – Bill Russell, who coached (and starred for) the 1968-69 Boston Celtics. MLB was not far behind when the Cleveland Indians hired Frank Robinson as manager in 1975. All of this was well before Art Shell finally broke through the NFL’s head coaching color barrier when he was hired by the Oakland Raiders in 1989. Both the MLB and NBA had seen numerous minority coaches and managers by the time the Raiders hired Shell.
If one takes as a starting point the presumption that former players are often best positioned for coaching and managing jobs then it further stands to reason that a diverse league should lead to diverse coaching staffs. This has traditionally been the case in the NBA, which is the league with the highest percentage of minorities and also the highest percentage of minority coaches. However, the NFL is also a league with an extremely high percentage of minority players, yet has not traditionally had as much success in placing those former players into management roles.
If one accounts for nationality as a measure of diversity, the NFL is light years behind its counter parts. The NBA has had success that outstrips the NFL and MLB in terms of attracting players from outside the United States. Indeed, the NBA has players from each of the six populated continents on its rosters. MLB has an extremely high number of players who were born outside the United States, primarily from the Caribbean, Central and South America and East Asia. In the NFL, all but a small handful of players were born in the United States. The NFL has tried to market its brand overseas without great success – the failed attempt to make a league succeed in Europe being one such example.
Ultimately, the NFL has continued to improve its track record of diversity hiring, but the League still has far to go in many key areas and is not yet in a position to challenge MLB or the NBA in this area. However, progress should not be discounted as change does not happen overnight. The NFL’s first A for its racial hiring practices on the Institute for Diversity in Sport’s 2010 Racial and Gender Report Card is a major sign of improvement and should hopefully lead to a higher score overall in the future.
Joseph M. Hanna is a Partner at Goldberg Segalla LLP. He is the Chair of the firm’s Sports and Entertainment Law Practice Group and Chair of Goldberg Segalla LLP’s Diversity Taskforce. Mr. Hanna is the current President of the Minority Bar Association of Western New York. He is the Founder and President of a charity called Bunkers in Baghdad. Bunkers collects and ships golf equipment to our soldiers overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan and wounded warriors across the United States. The charity has collected and shipped more than 2 million golf balls and 50 thousand golf clubs to our brave men and women.
S. Philip Unwin is an associate at Goldberg Segalla, LLP and works out of the firm’s Rochester, New York office. He is a 2002 graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School and has defended workers compensation insurance carriers and employers since 2005.
