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Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell on Wednesday imploring the league to repeal its Rooney rule.
The rule requires NFL organizations to interview at least two minority candidates for major positions before pulling out of a hire.
Uthmeier called the Rooney rule “illegal” and “blatant racial and gender discrimination.”
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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell speaks during his State of the NFL news conference Feb. 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 managers and coaches, flagrantly violates Florida law. As do the NFL’s related ‘diversity’ initiatives,” Uthmeier wrote in the letter.
“Florida Civil Rights Act Prohibits Employers from ‘Failure'[ing] or decline[ing] to employ any person’; ‘limit[ing]separate[ing]or classify[ing] employees or applicants for employment in any manner that would deprive or tend to deprive a person of employment opportunities’; and ‘discriminatory[ing] against any person with respect to compensation, terms, conditions or privileges of employment,’ because of ‘the individual’s race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, disability or marital status,’ the letter continued.
“The law also prohibits employers from discriminating based on the same characteristics “in admission to … any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.” The Rooney Rule and its offshoots require exactly what the Florida law prohibits.
“They require teams to limit, segregate, and classify applicants for certain employment and training opportunities based on race and gender. And they do so in a way that tends to deprive applicants of opportunities for employment.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier speaks at a campaign rally for Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears at Buckland Farm Market on October 29, 2025 in New Baltimore, Va. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
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“The NFL’s own Executive Vice President of NFL 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, stop discriminating based on race. Stop discriminating based on gender. Interview, hire and train based on merit.
“If merit-based employment were to 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 don’t care what colors their coach wears — and that those colors win on the football field.”
Uthmeier then asked Goodell to “confirm by May 1, 2026, that the NFL will no longer enforce the Rooney Rule, or any variation or extension thereof—requiring consideration of race, gender or any other prohibited classification—on teams in Florida. 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 its enactment, three NFL head coaches are black, and none were hired in the offseason, although several were hired for coordinator positions.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell addresses the media at the NFL Annual League Meeting at The Breakers on April 1, 2025. (Jim Rassol-Imagn Photos)
Brian Flores, Steve Wilks and Ray Horton have a discrimination lawsuit against the NFL, with Flores saying the league was “riddled with racism” in its hiring practices for coaches.
