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In the run-up to the Super Bowl, the National Football League sought to send a statement about its engagement with issues around race and diversity. In fact, it ended up sending two statements—and together, they come off as conflicting messages.
On the one hand, commissioner Roger Goodell reaffirmed the league’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts aimed at goals such as increasing the number of non-white coaches, despite the recent wave of DEI pullbacks announced by businesses from Target to McDonald’s to Meta, not to mention the Trump administration’s noisy demonization of such policies.
“I believe that our diversity efforts have led to making the NFL better,” Goodell said at his Super Bowl news conference this week. “It’s attracted better talent. We think we’re better if we get different perspectives, people with different backgrounds, whether they’re women or men or people of color. We make ourselves stronger and we make ourselves better when we have that.”
And on the other hand, just one day later, The Athletic reported that the NFL would remove the “End Racism” messaging that has been stenciled over the back of the end zones in Super Bowl games since 2021. (This year, the end zone messages will be “It Takes All of Us” and “Choose Love.”) Even critics who acknowledge that an end zone stencil is little more than a gesture nevertheless complained that removing it was a capitulation designed to avoid the wrath of Trump, who is scheduled to attend the game.
The tension between these two messages isn’t a triviality for the NFL, a true mass brand that presides over one of the few remaining tentpole events in the U.S., regularly attracting an audience of 100 million or more. As both a brand and a business, the league has been grappling with issues of race and diversity long before the current DEI debate.
Some of the diversity efforts Goodell was talking about came about precisely because of a very notable dearth of Black coaches and general managers. Among other policies, the so-called Rooney Rule, implemented in 2003, requires teams to interview minority and female candidates for coaching and other positions. (It is named after Dan Rooney, the Pittsburgh Steelers owner who was head of the league’s diversity committee at the time.)
Opinions on the effectiveness of this and other NFL diversity efforts are mixed. The league says 53% of league and team staffs are women and minorities, and half of last year’s eight head-coach openings were filled by non-white candidates. But of seven more recent head-coach openings, only one is expected to be filled by a Black coach. And some minority-candidate interviews are viewed as basically performative gestures by teams who have already made a decision. A little more than a quarter of head coaches are minority males, compared to about 70% of players.
While that progress may be limited, the hiring rules at least acknowledged the legitimacy of the underlying issue. Similarly, when the league first used the “End Racism” stencil not long after the slaying of George Floyd, it may have been just a gesture, but it was one that acknowledged racism as an ongoing issue.
A few years earlier, then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to kneel during the national anthem—to protest exactly the kind of brutality that later took Floyd’s life—turning the NFL into a culture-war forum. (Trump famously said protesting players were SOBs who should be tossed off the field.) At a minimum, the league sought to project an image that embraced diversity.
On-field protests have faded, but the rhetorical attacks on public diversity efforts and messaging has only gotten louder. America First Legal, an organization founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, has pointed to the Rooney Rule as an example of anti-meritocratic “discrimination in the employment process.”
If we can take Goodell at his word, the NFL is unmoved by this argument. “We’re not in this because it’s a trend to get in or a trend to get out of it,” he said at the news conference this week, referring to the league’s DEI work. “Our efforts are fundamental in trying to attract the best possible talent into the National Football League, both on and off the field.”
Meanwhile, a league spokesman told The Athletic that the shift in the end zone messages is simply a response to “recent tragedies” including the California fires, New Orleans terror attack, and fatal Washington, D.C., air collision. But it’s hard not to see it as at least partly a response to the political climate (and, uh, notably, conservatives have baselessly implicated DEI policies in both the fires and the air collision). The upshot is a muddled message that seems less like a committed game plan, and more like a punt.
