The Coaching Carousel

One of the things we hear mentioned this time of year is the Rooney Rule, which requires an NFL team making a head coaching change to interview at least one minority candidate for that vacancy. The exceptions are if you hire an assistant coach with a guaranteed succession clause in his contract and that provision is the basis of the bargain in that coach coming to or staying with a franchise. Already Jim Mora, Jr. has been elevated under one of these provisions in Seattle. Jim Caldwell may yet be elevated, should Tony Dungy decide to step aside in Indianapolis. But the Rooney Rule requires a mandatory interview of a minority candidate and already Winston Moss, Jerry Gray, Todd Bowles, Raheem Morris and Mel Tucker have interviewed for vacant head coaching positions and Terry Robiskie, Les Frazier and Ron Meeks may have interviewed by the time this column posts. But the Rooney Rule offers some opportunities for owners and candidates alike that should not be overlooked. What follows are some suggestions on safely navigating the potentially rocky shores of the Rooney Rule and who has done the best job of it this season.

Memo to Owners-Making the Rooney Rule Work for You

There is this thing called the Rooney Rule that requires your team to interview a minority head coaching candidate with a key decision maker (most probably you) or else you can be fined or penalized. So how do you manage the Rooney Rule, make it something more than a chore and perhaps gain valuable insight from the process? Well, it isn’t to find somebody, anybody who will consent to interview with you after you’ve chased Bill Cowher and Mike Shanahan.

So here are a couple solutions to make the Rooney Rule work for you rather than against you. Hold your Rooney Rule compliance interviews first. Have multiple Rooney Rule candidates and announce them first to the media and ask the interviewees for their honest assessment of your organization. Perhaps you won’t expect much from these interviews, which is what makes them perfect opportunities for you to learn. Even if you plan to hire a Cowher or Carroll, a Shanahan or Stoops, chances are you won’t learn much about your organization from them other than what they plan to do and how much it will cost you to get them to do it and figure on negotiations with any of them to start around 8 seasons for an average $8 million or $64 million dollars, guaranteed. You are asking them to impose themselves on your franchise, not really come to work for you. But a Jerry Gray (Washington’s DB coach, former Buffalo defensive coordinator) or Ron Meeks (Indianapolis’ defensive coordinator) may tell you something you didn’t know about your players or the perception of your franchise and you may be surprised to hear it. If you have to do something, you should make it count and interviewing is no exception. Interviewing is one of the most painful things an organization can do, but it also offers an invaluable opportunity to learn about your franchise and possibly discover some hidden human capital along the way. Perhaps complying with the Rooney Rule will prove more valuable if you look at it that way.

Mike Shanahan will not be upset you complied with the Rooney Rule before agreeing to hire him. In fact he might be more upset if he’s without a draft pick because you failed to comply. But remember that the real purpose of the Rooney Rule isn’t to get minority candidates interviews, but to have you, as an owner, meet minority candidates you wouldn’t meet and that might include a future coordinator or head coach even if not this time around.  But more importantly, it can give you information about your franchise that the people currently on your payroll will rarely tell you.

Memo to Minority Coaches-How to Interview with the Owner

The Rooney Rule means that you have a chance to get head coaching interviews with a variety of teams earlier in your career than some non-minority candidates (although Jason Garrett isn’t doing badly since he’s been a coach what, like 3 years?). What does that mean? It means you have to be ready to go into an interview and win the job perhaps before you are truly ready or else risk being stigmatized as a “career assistant.”

So what do you need? You need an agent, early in your career, who specializes in getting pro jobs: Bob LaMonte (Reid, Gruden, Fox, Singletary); Neil Cornrich (Belichick); Jimmy Sexton (Parcells); Gary O’Hagan (Coughlin) and newer kids on the block Gary Uberstine and Bob Lattinville (Carroll) come most quickly to mind. It is not because you need a great contract. If you get hired you will likely make something more than $2 million dollars for three, four or five years. Negotiating NFL head coaching contracts are easy. Getting the job is hard. LaMonte, in particular, has seemed to specialize in getting his clients hired and had a run of getting at least one client hired as a head coach every year for ten straight years. Jim Mora, Jr. and Mike Singletary are his clients, so he’s already had two new head coaches hired this year. It is not a coincidence and LaMonte is doing something unique to prepare his clients for the interview season. Even if you choose someone else it pays to learn from what LaMonte is doing.

For a young minority coach getting an interview under the Rooney Rule, the most critical preparation is be ready to convince and inspire an owner that you have the skills and talent to be the chief operating officer (COO) and be public face of his franchise, his billion dollar pride and joy. The best agents should prepare you to both meet these interview challenges and negotiate good contracts. But inspiring an owner is about more than running “a will-blitz package on third and long.” The interview room has unique challenges because you have an owner needing to like and want to follow the person who will be head coach, the player personnel guy will need to trust the head coach and the GM will need to know they can work with the head coach.  So having a successful interview requires versatility and readiness to handle a variety of questions and relationships.

One of the very best communications experts is a man named Bill Graham, president of Graham Corporate Communications. One of Bill’s central tenants in training corporate executives in communication skills, “is that it isn’t enough to be a good manager anymore, in order to be effective today a manager must have the skills of a leader.” Translated, it isn’t enough to be an effective X and O coach anymore, Woody Johnson praised Eric Mangini for being just that while firing him. You have to convince an owner you have the maturity, confidence and knowledge for him to follow you into battle and that takes work. Life experience gives you some of that but if you are young, you have to work especially hard to develop those areas quickly in addition to being an effective coach. So get a good agent. Get a good tailor. Work with a communications expert and be ready because “your close-up” could be coming faster than you may think.

Rooney Rule Grades

So which team with an opening has handled or appears to be handling the Rooney Rule best?

Cleveland- Appears to have complied by interviewing defensive coordinator Mel Tucker in New York. Owner Randy Lerner held the interview in New York where Lerner lives. Tucker could give Lerner a reasonable post-mortem on the past but he doesn’t offer a great deal of outside insight. Grade: C+

Denver- Complied by interviewing Tampa’s newly named defensive coordinator Raheem Morris. Not sure what Morris, who is very bright but has not coached against the Broncos with any regularity and whose NFL experience is limited to the Bucs, could tell owner Pat Bowlen about his organization.

Grade C-

Detroit- Complied when they interviewed Jerry Gray, after meeting with Giants defensive coordinator Steve Spagnulo. Gray, who has coached in Buffalo and Washington and played a decade in the NFL, has the kind of varied perspective President Tom Lewand and GM Martin Mayhew lack. Even if Gray isn’t hired, the interview may have proven valuable. Miami Assistant Head Coach Todd Bowles, a former teammate of Mayhew’s with the Redskins, is also due to interview now that his team has been eliminated.  He brings Parcells-based experience with him.

Grade B+

NY Jets- Have not conducted a Rooney Rule interview to date, despite interviewing a number of candidates already. Reportedly, Vikings defensive coordinator Les Frazier, San Diego’s Ron Rivera and Indy defensive coordinator Ron Meeks are to be interviewed, but as time passes the harder it becomes to get good minority coaches to take interviews that are viewed merely to comply with the rule. The Jeff Jagodzinski saga and Russ Grimm plans don’t help on this account. Another twist is that owner Woody Johnson was not in the country during any of the interviews, so if a front runner emerged and Johnson meets with that candidate, he may also be required to meet with a minority candidate too because the interviews to comply with the rule must be the same for the minority candidates as the non-minority candidates.

Grade Incomplete

Oakland- Will comply by interviewing former Raider player and assistant Terry Robiskie who is Tampa’s wide receivers coach. He may already have interviewed internal candidate James Lofton. The Raiders are also rumored to be considering Hall of Famer Mike Haynes for a front office post. Say what you will about Al Davis but the man who re-opened the NFL head coaching color barrier by hiring Art Shell has been a champion of minority hiring.

Grade: B

St. Louis- Complied by bringing Green Bay assistant head coach Winston Moss. Moss was the first to interview last Saturday. New GM Billy Devaney needs information about what he has and what he needs and hopefully he got some of that from Moss. The Rams seem to be surpassing what the rule mandates as Dallas wide receivers coach Ray Sherman, Les Frazier and Todd Bowles are also expected to interview.

Grade A

Progress in the College Ranks

Perhaps shamed by an off-season that saw a number of schools fire African-American head coaches, the news has been better of late in the colleges. UCLA’s highly respected defensive coordinator DeWayne Walker accepted the top job at New Mexico. He probably deserved a PAC-10 job. Michael Hayward, Charlie Weis’ maligned offensive coordinator at Notre Dame, capped off a strong victory in the Hawaii Bowl where the Irish looked like a contending team by being named head coach at Miami of Ohio. That one is surprising just because of the number of candidates who had prior ties to the school including Oklahoma offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson. Now Yale is reportedly set to name Jacksonville Jaguar assistant and former Stanford standout Tom Williams, as the Ivies second African-American head coach. Yale isn’t a Bowl Subdivision school anymore but it is a big paying and historically prestigious job, which generated a lot of interest from coaches. One oddity, Williams has no prior Ivy experience.

Coaches should be judged not on the color of their skin but the content of their character, as Martin Luther King said so eloquently, but colleges had been doing so poorly it was clear that they weren’t looking deeply enough for that character. Hopefully, things will continue to improve from here.

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