{"id":565752,"date":"2026-03-28T03:35:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T03:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/565752\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T03:35:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T03:35:07","slug":"art-rooney-on-rooney-rule-the-environment-has-changed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/565752\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Rooney on Rooney Rule: “The environment has changed”"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Florida attorney James Uthmeier posted a video on Wednesday demanding that the NFL suspend the Rooney Rule, the team owned by the man after whom the rule is named had no comment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Friday, Steelers owner Art Rooney II \u2014 the son of Dan Rooney, the namesake of the Rooney Rule \u2014 had a comment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no question that the environment has changed in recent years<\/a>,\u201d Rooney told Kalyn Kahler of ESPN. \u201cWe do have an obligation to make sure that our policies comply with the laws, whatever the law is, and whatever the changes in law might be. We\u2019ve got to look at that and make sure we\u2019re in compliance. . . . That\u2019s just the environment we\u2019re existing in today.\u201d<\/p>\n

The laws haven\u2019t changed. The attitude toward them has. No state attorney general has ever investigated the NFL for decades of questionable hiring practices when it comes to race. Now, out of the blue, a red-state attorney general is attacking the Rooney Rule as being discriminatory on the basis of race.<\/p>\n

Rooney\u2019s comments have relevance far beyond Florida. They explain the NFL\u2019s tiptoeing through the DEI minefield, dumping the Accelerator program last year before bringing it back in 2026 and expanding it to include white candidates.<\/p>\n

The NFL has tried to strike the balance between saying all the right things and doing as little as possible. Now, the league is faced with a dilemma. Paying lip service to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts has invited an attack from Florida. What the NFL does from here could invite a social-media assault from one specific location in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

It also could spark an effort by a blue-state attorney general or two to pluck low-hanging fruit that has been hanging there for decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Florida attorney James Uthmeier posted a video on Wednesday demanding that the NFL suspend the Rooney Rule,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[436],"tags":[49,48,514,82],"class_list":["post-565752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}