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Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on Wednesday imploring the league to reject the Rooney rule.
The rule requires NFL organizations to interview at least two minority candidates for top positions before pulling the trigger on hiring.
Uthmeier called the Rooney Rule “illegal” and “blatant racial and sexual discrimination.”
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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell speaks during his State of the NFL press conference on February 2, 2026 in San Jose, California. (AP Photo/Matt York)
“As applied in Florida, the NFL’s ‘Rooney Rule,’ which governs the hiring of certain team executives and coaches, blatantly violates Florida law. So do the NFL’s related ‘diversity’ initiatives,” Uthmeier wrote in the letter.
“The Florida Civil Rights Law prohibits employers from ‘failing[ing] or reject[ing] hire any individual’; ‘limit[ing]segregate[ing]or classify[ing] employees or applicants for employment in any manner that deprives or tends to deprive any individual of employment opportunities; and ‘discriminat[ing] “against any individual with respect to compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,” due to “the individual’s race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, disability, or marital status,” the letter continued.
“The Act also prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of those same characteristics ‘in admission to… any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.’ The Rooney Rule and its derivatives require precisely what Florida law prohibits.
“They require teams to limit, segregate and classify applicants for certain jobs and training opportunities because of their race and sex. And they do so in a way that tends to deprive applicants of employment opportunities.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier speaks at a campaign rally for Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears at the Buckland Farm Market on October 29, 2025, in New Baltimore, Virginia. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
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“The NFL’s own executive vice president of operations (Troy Vincent Sr.) has acknowledged that the NFL should create ‘a workplace culture that does not require mandates to interview people of color and minorities.’ If so, then stop discriminating on the basis of race. Stop discriminating on the basis of sex. Interview, hire and train based on merit.
“If merit-based employment should exist anywhere (and it should exist everywhere), it’s in the NFL. NFL fans in Florida don’t care what color their coach’s skin is. They care what colors their coach wears, and that those colors win on the football field.”
Uthmeier then asked 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 Florida teams. Failure to provide such confirmation may result in a civil rights enforcement action.”
The NFL did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Rooney Rule went into effect in 2003. As of this writing, three NFL head coaches are black and none were hired this offseason, although several were hired for coordinator positions.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell addresses the media at the NFL’s annual league meeting at The Breakers on April 1, 2025. (Images by Jim Rassol-Imagn)
Brian Flores, Steve Wilks and Ray Horton have a discrimination case against the NFL, and Flores said the league was “riddled with racism” in its coaching hiring practices.
