Mixture of optimism and skepticism as NFL rolls out latest effort to improve diversity hiring | Opinion

In its latest attempt to facilitate improved diversity hiring practices in the coaching and front office ranks, the NFL will host a summit intended to create education and networking opportunities between prospective candidates and team owners and presidents.

The inaugural NFL Coach and Front Office Accelerator Program will take place Monday and Tuesday during the spring league meetings in Atlanta. Each club nominated rising prospects from their coaching staffs and front offices and will send them to the two-day program. Leadership and development sessions will be offered, as well as windows of opportunity for the aspiring head coaches and general managers to have face-to-face meetings with the team officials with hiring power.

Diversity hiring practices have long been a problem in the NFL. The last two hiring cycles have seen improvement when it comes to general managers as the number of lead talent evaluators increased to seven following the hiring of Kwesi Adofo-Mensah in Minnesota and Ryan Poles in Chicago.

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However, the number of minority head coaches remains at a feeble total of five in a league whose player body is roughly 75% Black.

NFL officials have worked to address the problem by expanding the Rooney Rule, which is designed to ensure people of color receive fair opportunities to interview for top positions in organizations, and they also have created incentive programs that would reward teams for developing future head coaches and general mangers.

The owners have signed off on such initiatives, however, they remain hesitant to give people of color the power to run their organizations, often hiring white counterparts with lesser qualifications.

So, the highest-ranking NFL officials hope that improved familiarity and relationships between owners and prospective candidates of color will lead to greater balance. That’s where this Accelerator program comes in.

A total of 61 people of color (some coaches, some scouts or assistant general mangers) will attend the summit. Some of them, like Kansas City offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy and Tampa Bay offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich already interviewed for head coaching positions in previous offseasons only to get passed over. The same goes for general manager prospects like Cleveland’s Glenn Cook, Indianapolis’ Morocco Brown, San Francisco’s Ran Carthon, among others. Meanwhile, other names, like assistant coaches Chris Horton (Baltimore), Randy Jordan (Washington), Thomas Brown (L.A. Rams) and scouts Jeff Scott (Philadelphia) and Tim Terry (Kansas City) to name a few, remain lesser known. But the NFL hopes that this week’s two-day program helps change that.

"The NFL is committed to diversity and inclusion and this program is the latest in a series of steps designed to improve our hiring practices and creating opportunities for advancement," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.

He later added, "The program helps ensure that clubs receive exposure to high-performing, up-and-coming NFL talent and candidates get a chance to learn the business on a working level from team owners and executives."

There’s a mixture of optimism and skepticism among the aspiring coaches and general managers slated to attend. On one hand, they feel jaded because year after year, the NFL’s hiring cycle comes and goes, and well-qualified candidates interview for jobs and still get passed over as their bodies of work are ignored. But on the other hand, they fully understand that right or wrong, owners and team presidents tend to favor candidates they already know over those that they do not. So, they hope that at the very least, the next two days will help ensure their faces are connected to their names, and that this facetime with owners and team presidents can lead to the cultivation of relationships that eventually pay off when the interview cycle rolls around again.

So, an intentional approach is necessary over the next two days, not only on the parts of the prospective coaches and general managers, but also the owners and team presidents.

You know the age-old adage: You can lead a horse to water, but can’t make it drink. And that certainly applies to the NFL’s diversity hiring problem. The league can implement all kinds of interview policies and hiring incentives. But unless owners truly desire to improve on this front, and unless they enter this week with the goal of truly learning more about the hard-working, talented and highly-qualified people of color working in the shadows, they will not take much away from the Accelerator program, and nothing will change next offseason when teams fill coach and general manager vacancies.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: NFL hosting summit for personnel of color to improve diversity hiring