Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier subpoenaed the NFL last week, ordering the league to turn over employment-related records by June 12 in a widening clash over how teams hire coaches and executives.
Uthmeier, who first warned the league in March that its race- and sex-based hiring policies “brazenly violate Florida law,” has now pressed for documents as he argues the NFL’s rules “require teams to limit, segregate and classify applicants for certain employment and training opportunities because of race and sex,” according to the subpoena and his earlier letter to commissioner Roger Goodell.
The move puts fresh legal pressure on a league already defending itself against Brian Flores’ allegations of race-based employment discrimination involving Black coaches, general managers and candidates for those roles. A 2023 ruling in Flores v. NFL noted that roughly 70% of NFL players are Black while only a tiny percentage of coaches are Black, a disparity that has long sat at the center of scrutiny over the league’s hiring practices.
The Rooney Rule was adopted in 2002 to address “the paucity of Black coaches” by requiring teams to interview at least one candidate who is a person of color for a head coaching job. It later expanded to require interviews of at least two external candidates who are persons of color or women, including for coordinator and general manager openings. The league also awards compensatory draft picks for teams that lose a person of color or a woman to another team.
Uthmeier has taken direct aim at that structure. In March, he said the NFL’s policies “brazenly violate Florida law” and objected to what he described as “guaranteeing” interviews for applicants “of certain approved races.” He has also used the words “diverse,” “non-diverse,” “segregate” and “classify” to attack the system, framing it as a set of race- and sex-based filters rather than a neutral hiring rule.
That criticism comes with a notable wrinkle: neither the Rooney Rule nor other NFL policies limit how many candidates a team may consider, and there is no league rule requiring a team to hire a candidate who is of color or a woman. The rule governs interviews, not final selections, even as its critics argue the process itself crosses a legal line.
The subpoena raises the stakes for a league that has spent years defending its diversity framework while facing outside attacks from both civil-rights litigation and state-level scrutiny. What happens next now turns on what the NFL turns over by June 12 and whether Florida is prepared to escalate beyond demands for records into a broader legal challenge.
