NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell: ‘It’s Clear we Need to Change and Do Something Different’

Change is inevitable. And there definitely needs to be a big change in the National Football League. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell recognizes the recent uproar of teams not hiring qualified black coaches, which he acknowledged at a recent Super Bowl press conference, according to ESPN.

With the lack of hiring black head coaches in the league, there have been recent grumblings among people that the NFL is not doing enough to give qualified black coaches the chance to lead an NFL team.

Which leads us to The Rooney Rule, as recently explained in a recent article on

BLACK ENTERPRISE. “The purpose of the NFL’s Rooney Rule, first implemented in 2003, was to diversify its 100%, historically white, executive and head-coaching ranks, by requiring teams to interview at least one nonwhite candidate for each senior football operations and head-coaching opening. In practice, the observance of that rule has been reduced to merely “checking the box”—interviewing black candidates as a formality before moving on to candidates the teams are actually serious about hiring.”

Related: Despite The Rooney Rule, Off The Field, The NFL Is The Not-For-Blacks League

“Yes, it’s clear we are not where we want to be on this level. We have a lot of work that’s gone into not only the Rooney Rule but our policies overall. It’s clear we need to change and do something different, says Goodell. “There’s no reason to expect that we’re going to have a different outcome next year without those kinds of changes,

tom-banner ampforwp-incontent-ad3"> and we’ve already begun engaging in those changes, not just with our diversity committee, not just with the Fritz Pollard Alliance, but others and trying to figure out what steps we can take next that would lead to better outcomes.”

He went on to say, “It’s clear we’re all committed to doing that and we have to make those changes. We will have a series of meetings which we’ve already scheduled, clearly, over the next month to get that kind of dialogue going, to continue the dialogue and try to determine what are the solutions so we can have those better outcomes.”

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The league recently completed its latest hiring cycle and not one single black head coach was hired, 0%. With the Cleveland Browns hiring Andrew Berry this week for their vacant general manager position, it leaves the NFL with a total of two minority GMs in the NFL.