Florida AG Hammers NFL’s Rooney Rule As ‘Discrimination,’ Threatens Legal Warfare In Roger Goodell Letter

This is why I love being from Florida … nobody does it better than us.

James Uthmeier, who is the state’s attorney general, issued a letter Wednesday to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, urging the league to get rid of their Rooney Rule.

NFL franchises are required by the rule to have at least two interviews with minorities for high-profile jobs prior to making a decision on hiring

The Florida AG blasted the Rooney Rule as “blatant race and sex discrimination” and “illegal.”

“As applied in Florida, the NFL’s ‘Rooney Rule,’ which governs the hiring of certain team executives and coaches, brazenly violates Florida law. So, too, do the NFL’s related ‘diversity’ initiatives,” wrote Uthmeier in the letter to Goodell. (RELATED: Woman Sues Rams’ Puka Nacua For Allegedly Biting Her)

“The Florida Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from ‘fail[ing] or refus[ing] to hire any individual’; ‘limit[ing], segregate[ing], or classify[ing] employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities’; and ‘discriminat[ing] against any individual with respect to compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,’ because of the ‘individual’s race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, handicap, or marital status,’” continued the letter.

“The Act also prohibits employers from discriminating based on those same characteristics ‘in admission to … any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.’ The Rooney Rule and its offshoots require precisely what Florida law forbids. They require teams to limit, segregate, and classify applicants for certain employment and training opportunities because of race and sex. And they do so in a way that tends to deprive applicants of opportunities for employment.

“The NFL’s own Executive Vice President of NFL Operations (Troy Vincent Sr.) has acknowledged that the NFL should create ‘a workplace culture that doesn’t require mandates to interview people of color and minorities.’ If that is so, then stop discriminating based on race. Stop discriminating based on sex. Interview, hire, and train based on merit. If merit-based employment should exist anywhere (and it should exist everywhere), it is in the NFL. NFL fans in Florida don’t care what color their coach’s skin is. They care what colors their coach is wearing—and that those colors are winning on the football field.”

Then, Uthmeier requested Goodell to “please confirm no later than May 1, 2026, that the NFL will no longer enforce the Rooney Rule or any variation or extension thereof—which requires consideration of race, sex, or any other prohibited classification—on teams in Florida. Failure to provide such confirmation may result in a civil rights enforcement action.”

Professional sports are a visible example of a merit-based system, but through the Rooney Rule, the NFL requires its teams to use race-based hiring practices.

We are putting Commissioner Roger Goodell on notice: the Rooney Rule violates Florida law, and it must stop. pic.twitter.com/g8La6TzUZw

— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) March 25, 2026

The heat is on, Goodell … make a move.