The NFL tells its teams who they can and cannot interview based on skin color.
Florida just told the league that's a civil rights violation.
Now NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has five weeks to prove he runs a football league – not a DEI bureaucracy.
Florida Targets NFL Rooney Rule as Illegal Race-Based Hiring
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a letter to Roger Goodell targeting the NFL's Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least two minority or female candidates for head coach, general manager, and coordinator vacancies before making any hire.
Florida hosts three NFL franchises – the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Miami Dolphins.
Every one of them is now subject to Florida's civil rights law.
Uthmeier didn't mince words: the Rooney Rule "brazenly violates Florida law" and must stop.
He invoked the Florida Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from making hiring decisions based on race or sex.
"The Rooney Rule and its offshoots require precisely what Florida law forbids," Uthmeier wrote. "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."
The legal teeth here are real.
Under the Rooney Rule as currently written, applicants of "approved races" are guaranteed at least two interview opportunities – while applicants of "disapproved races" are not.
Uthmeier called that what it is: blatant discrimination.
The NFL's own executive vice president of football operations, Troy Vincent Sr., once acknowledged the league should build a workplace culture that doesn't "require mandates to interview people of color and minorities."
Uthmeier cited that admission directly and asked Goodell the obvious question: if the mandates are unnecessary, why are you still enforcing them?
NFL DEI Hiring Policy Has a 23-Year Record of Broken Promises
This isn't the first time the Rooney Rule has come under legal fire – it's just the first time a state attorney general has drawn a hard deadline.
In February 2024, America First Legal filed a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging the rule violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The Heritage Foundation documented the same problem in a 2025 report, calling the Rooney Rule "blatant racial and gender discrimination" and noting that the Justice Department had shown zero interest in enforcement.
Florida is now filling that void.
The rule's own track record hands Uthmeier additional ammunition.
The Rooney Rule has been in place since 2003 – over two decades – and the NFL had the same number of Black head coaches in 2020 as it did the year the rule launched: three.
The rule produced sham interviews, not real opportunity.
Former Dolphins coach Brian Flores made that case in a 2022 lawsuit, alleging teams went through the motions of Rooney Rule interviews while the hire was already decided.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August 2025 that Flores could pursue those claims in federal court.
The walls are closing in on Goodell from every direction.
Roger Goodell Faces May 1 Deadline or Civil Rights Enforcement Action
The legal logic Florida is running is straightforward and powerful.
The Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard didn't just end race-conscious admissions in higher education – it put race-based selection processes across every industry on notice.
EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas wrote at the time that the decision could implicate employer practices of "selecting interviewees partially due to diverse candidate slate policies" – a description that fits the Rooney Rule exactly.
Every other business operating in Florida has to follow the Florida Civil Rights Act.
The NFL doesn't get a carve-out because it puts a helmet on the product.
Uthmeier made that point with the bluntness this story deserves: "If merit-based employment should exist anywhere, 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."
Goodell has until May 1 to confirm in writing that the Rooney Rule is dead in Florida.
The NFL hasn't responded.
Sources:
- Shawn Fleetwood, "Florida Tells NFL To Abandon 'Race-And-Sex-Based Hiring Policies' Or Face Legal Action," The Federalist, March 25, 2026.
- Charles Creitz, "Florida AG warns NFL's Goodell to drop Rooney Rule or face legal action," Fox News, March 25, 2026.
- "Florida AG Blasts NFL Rooney Rule As 'Discrimination,' Threatens Legal Showdown In Letter To Roger Goodell," OutKick, March 25, 2026.
- Hans A. von Spakovsky and Sarah Parshall Perry, "NFL Becomes 'Woke,' Discriminatory, Anti-American Institution," The Heritage Foundation, 2025.
- Simone R.D. Francis et al., "DEI Under Scrutiny, Part VII: Re-examining the Implementation of 'Rooney Rule' Diverse Slate Initiatives," Ogletree Deakins, February 29, 2024.
