Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier blasted an “illegal” rule in the NFL organization that he called out as “blatant race and sex discrimination.”
In a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, the Republican AG addressed the league’s Rooney Rule, which went into effect in 2003 and requires that at least two minority candidates be interviewed for top positions before hiring decisions are made.
“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’s letter stated.
(Video Credit: WPBF)
“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,’” Uthmeier wrote.
“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,” the letter continued.
“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 AG told Goodell.
Professional sports are a visible example of a merit-based system, but through the Rooney Rule, the NFL requires its teams to use race-based hiring practices.
We are putting Commissioner Roger Goodell on notice: the Rooney Rule violates Florida law, and it must stop. pic.twitter.com/g8La6TzUZw
— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) March 25, 2026
“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,” Uthmeier urged.
“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,” he added.
He concluded, asking 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.”
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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida. Powers also contributes to BizPac Review.
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