NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced the week before Super Bowl 50 that the league would be instituting a new hiring practice that opened the door for more women to be interviewed for executive positions.
That rule has been implemented and already has shown results, according to the NFL.
League spokesman Brian McCarthy told Shutdown Corner that the rule — modeled after the NFL’s “Rooney Rule,” which requires that franchise interview at least one minority candidate for each vacant head coaching and top front-office position — has been implemented already.
The league announced the hiring of Natalie Ravitz in May to the role of senior vice president of communications, the process of which was conducted under the new hiring guidelines.
The difference with this rule is that it applies, for now, only to the league offices, not to the member clubs. That was unclear from Goodell’s initial statements, and even NFL.com initially misreported this fact. It's unclear if the rule will expand to cover executive positions on all 32 teams, as the "Rooney Rule" blankets. There currently is one open executive position in the league of real note — Cynthia Hogan left the NFL for Apple in the spring after serving most recently as the league’s executive vice president for government affairs. The position Hogan left required her to put out fires in D.C. related to everything from the rising concerns about head trauma and player safety in the NFL to the slew of domestic-violence cases that rocked the league in 2014.
Amy Trask, a football analyst for CBS Sports and longtime CEO of the Oakland Raiders under former owner Al Davis, remains a bit ambivalent about the idea of this new NFL hiring practice for women — as well as the current “Rooney Rule” for minorities.
“When I learned that the NFL was instituting a ‘Rooney Rule’ for women, my immediate thought and response was that it should be called the ‘Al Davis Rule,’” Trask wrote Shutdown Corner in an email on Monday. “I both like and respect Dan Rooney, and I enjoyed a terrific working relationship with him for decades, so my response was not a denigration of Dan but a recognition of Al.
“It both angers and saddens me that there is a need for a Rooney Rule of any sort, as everyone — every business — should hire [and fire] without regard to race, religion, ethnicity or gender, just as Al did for decades. Businesses that don’t do so deserve to fail as they are both wrong and dumb."
Trask makes the point that jobs in the NFL should be meritorious — based not on sex or race but on skill, qualifications, experience and talent related to the position in question. After all, she was hired by Davis before such a rule ever was dreamed up.
Trask was part of a wave of influential women in prominent positions in the NFL on the club level that included Dawn Aponte, the current executive vice president of football administration for the Miami Dolphins, Katie Blackburn, the executive vice president of the Cincinnati Bengals, and Charlotte Jones Anderson, the executive vice president and chief brand officer for the Dallas Cowboys.
Dozens more — including San Diego Chargers executive vice president and CFO Jeanne M. Bonk, Jacksonville Jaguars senior vice president and CFO Kelly Flanagan, San Francisco 49ers CFO Cipora Herman, Tennessee Titans vice president and CFO Jenneen Kaufman, Houston Texans vice president Marilan Logan, New York Giants senior vice president and CFO Christine Procops, Seattle Seahawks CFO Karen Spencer and others — occupy significant front-office and executive positions on NFL teams.
The league also has other prominent women, such as senior vice president and chief litigation officer Anastasia Danias, chief marketing officer Dawn Hudson and chief health and medical advisor Betsy Nabel, in major roles. In Trask’s mind, those women earned their jobs without the need of any token assistance.
“Do I believe that the NFL or any business should hire a woman simply because she is a woman? No,” Trask wrote. “A woman should no more be hired because of her gender than not hired because of her gender. We should all — no matter our race, ethnicity, religion or gender — be judged on the merits. That’s what Al did. I was a beneficiary of his vision.”
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