'It Doesn't Need To Be That Way,' Pittsburgh Steelers President Art Rooney II Says Changes Could Be Made To Rooney Rule

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- After a lack of minority hires during the last NFL head coaching carousel, changes are reportedly coming to the "Rooney Rule."

Steelers President Art Rooney II is not happy with the way the rule is being used and implemented throughout the league.

In the past cycle, only one out of the five head coaching positions were filled by a minority and that was Ron Rivera who is now the head man for the Washington Redskins.

"If Ron Rivera is the only minority HC hired in this cycle, that would be a total of three in the last three cycles. NFL would have just four minority HCs this season. And that is a bad trend. Owners/league office have to figure out how to make Rooney Rule really work."

Rooney spoke with the NFL Network, saying the NFL's Diversity Workplace committee will look into changes for the rule.

"I think in general, when you look at this year's process, there just weren't many minorities in the process at all this year," Rooney said. "I'm not sure why that is, it doesn't need to be that way. We have about one-third of the coaches in the National Football League are from minority communities. That's really not a bad pipe line. The question is: Why aren't more of those people getting interviews? Why aren't more of those people advancing through the process. There is a lot of pieces that we have to look at, and we have a lot of work to do that."

"Pittsburgh @steelers President Art Rooney II discusses the rule that bears his family name and was designed to improve diversity hiring but has seen its effectiveness diminish @nflnetwork"

"I think we need to look at what's happening really at all the levels of our coaching positions and understand what's happening," Rooney said. "There are some who have said that there aren't enough minority coaches on the offensive side of the ball and we're going through a trend now where offensive coaches are being hired. I don't know how much that really is a factor here. I think it's probably somewhat of a factor. One of the things we didn't to address that recently is to create a new fellowship program where about half of the teams in the league participated in that this year, where we created a minority coaching fellowship position specifically for the offensive side of the ball. We would like to see that expanded throughout the whole league this coming season and make sure that every team has such a position. There are things like that at the lower levels that we need to look at to see that people are receiving opportunities at all levels of the hiring tree."

The Rooney Rule requires league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs.

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