The weeks leading up to football’s biggest weekend – check that, professional sports biggest weekend – of the year, culminating with Super Bowl Sunday, are often a feasting ground for talking points, opinions and bizarre takes. With everybody and their brother gaining media access to players, coaches and NFL royalty, there is bound to be some weirdness.
But it is rarely the part of the NFL Commissioner to supply one of those bizarre talking points.
Amongst all the fevered debate swirling around league officiating during the regular season and the playoffs – and yes, NFL refs have been the Kansas City Chiefs’ 12th man helping the NFL secure the story line of a possible three-peat for Super Bowl Sunday – commissioner Roger Goodell’s comments at the annual commissioner’s Super Bowl press conference went largely unnoticed.
Yet they were proof positive that the NFL just still doesn’t get it. Commenting on the news that the tagline “End Racism” will be absent from the back of the end zones for the first time since 2021, Goodell took the opportunity to not just back his league’s recent stance on the topic of race and diversity, equity, and inclusion, but doubled down on the league’s policies writ large.
“We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League, and we’re going to continue those efforts, because we’re not only convinced ourselves, I think we’ve proven ourselves that it does make the NFL better,” Goodell told reporters.
“So we’re not in this because it’s a trend to get in it, or a trend to get out of it, our efforts are fundamental in trying to attract the best possible talent into the National Football League both on and off the field,” he added. “Whether they’re women or men or people of color, we make ourselves stronger and we make ourselves better when we have that.”
What makes Goodell’s comments so intriguing is not the statement itself or the sentiment. It really isn’t even the timing, at least not for the reason one might think. A casual observer might be tempted to believe this was just a conniving salesman using the magnitude of his biggest weekend spectacle to bump his product’s trendline and give the sports media some new fodder to boost ratings.
Instead, what makes the timing of Goodell’s statements interesting is that it comes on the heels of so many other corporations reading the tea leaves and backing down from their DEI initiatives. President Trump’s America seems to be one in which DEI is dying the death it so richly deserved. To name a few, Disney, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Target, Lowes, and even Google (residing in the mecca of leftist fantasyland, the Bay area) have either reduced or altogether dismantled their DEI initiatives and/or departments.
So what makes Goodell think that reinforcing these dreadful policies in the face of so much pushback and clear public disgust for DEI propaganda is a good idea?
Why is the NFL, of all companies and sports leagues, long held as a bastion of masculinity and ideals of grit, hard work, and fair play, suddenly mired in the Marxism of “equal distribution” and inclusivity? And why does it seem hell-bent on keeping itself there when all the public sentiment and change winds have given the NFL the opportunity to repent.
The surprising answer is that the NFL has been doing DEI since before it was cool.
The NFL’s sordid history with affirmative action and “diversity hires” goes back more than 20 years. It can trace its dalliance with these thoroughly un-American ideals to the introduction of the “Rooney Rule” put forward by Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney.
At first blush, the Rooney Rule seemed like an attempt to fix a perceived problem. In 2002, though the league’s players was more than 50% black, only two black men patrolled the sidelines on NFL Sunday as head coaches. Two out of 32 head coaches – Tampa Bay’s Tony Dungy and Dennis Green of the Minnesota Vikings – were men of color, and race activists amongst the media and in the league office bemoaned the fact that this percentage was unlikely to change in the coming years.
There were few if any black men waiting in the wings to get their crack at a head coaching job in the NFL in 2003.
To push the envelope and create some sort of nod toward “equality”, the NFL established a rule that at least one candidate for every head coaching vacancy was required to be black.
This most recent season, 2024-2025, was year 22 of this DEI-forward thought experiment. The question, then, has to be asked: has it worked?
ESPN commentator Ryan Clark, a former NFL defensive back, has been incredibly vocal in his support for not only DEI in football, but also the Rooney Rule and its aim.
“What it means is, previously you weren’t even giving the most qualified candidates opportunities. Right? Diversity, equity, inclusion policies were a form of necessity, right? Based on the way that this country was run, based on the allocation of wealth, there wasn’t enough representation to get you in the room, to get Fred in the room, to get me in the room. And we’re talking about a league in the NFL that’s 53% African-American.
Roger Goodell stood strong when asked if the NFL would halt diversity efforts amidst President Trump’s campaign against DEI. I appreciated the commissioner’s stance, & more importantly his reasoning. Having a diverse group of representation makes the NFL better!
— Ryan Clark (@Realrclark25) February 5, 2025
The NFL is 53%… pic.twitter.com/ifB2rrLA41
Yet rather than simply looking at the current percentage of black head coaches, fans need only look at the trend of ridiculous and derailed careers that have been the direct outcome of DEI hires.
Two of the most prominent examples of this are Brian Flores and Jarod Mayo. Flores, the former coach of the Miami Dolphins, had a middling three years at the helm, but after he was fired made headlines for his very public lawsuit against the NFL for, you guessed it, racial discrimination.
The embarrassing black-eye this brought to the NFL was an attempt to paint Flores’s firing as an act of retaliation by the Dolphins’ ownership, and was presumably because Flores is black. The Dolphins meanwhile contended that their decision was motivated by a quest to hire longtime successful head coach Sean Peyton.
Mayo, from this most recent regular season, meanwhile, was fired midway through his inaugural season as head coach of the New England Patriots because of poor play and supposed loss of the locker room. Mayo, by all accounts a standup guy and a hard worker from his days as an NFL linebacker, rather than being a spectacle like Flores instead became a sacrificial lamb for Patriots owner Bob Craft, who shortly thereafter went and hired Mike Vrabel, the man many in football thought was Craft’s target all along.
That trend is not limited to Mayo’s firing, but in line with Antonio Pierce, also a first year coach in Las Vegas, being fired. They seem meant only to fill a quota, nothing more.
The NFL appears in the midst of an identity crisis. Sporting legends such as Brett Favre, Jack Lambert, Lawrence Taylor, Mean Joe Greene, and Ray Lewis, professional football has long held the tradition of being modern-day gladiators. The toughness and sheer savagery of the game was on display week-in and week-out.
But those who have watched for decades have noticed a change in recent years, a softening of sorts that has taken away much of the equity the league has built through generations. Point to the rule changes that “prioritize player safety” or the reinforcement of policies to protect quarterbacks and wide receivers to jack up ratings through more scoring and boosted fantasy football numbers.
Those don’t tell the story though. Much like the NFL’s longstanding commitment to affirmative action, its current trajectory seems overtly feminine. Those of us who grew up with siblings know the tendency of many well-meaning and nurturing mothers. They want everyone to be safe, and they want everyone to get along and have fun.
That is today’s NFL. Doubt it? Look for the ponytails bouncing along the sidelines in the form of NFL referees. The league of brutal violence and men clawing their way for every inch to emerge victorious has been reduced to a DEI circus that tells the lie that women can beat the guys at their own game.
NFL ran this ad where a black girl takes on an entire team of male athletes: pic.twitter.com/MYlbAWwu9t
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 10, 2025
“Handing out jobs based on a color code and based on who’s sleeping with who, or who you’re sexually attracted to — show me that it works,” said Jason Whitlock on a recent airing of Fearless.
It doesn’t work, Jason, and the NFL has to start feeling the pain. An anesthetized fan base, long contended to feed on whatever slop they were given, has started to wake up. Like the rest of the country coming out of a DEI-induced coma, people are pushing back. And the NFL better take note.
