The Rooney Rule has been part of NFL hiring policy for 23 years. Its stated goal is to ensure minority candidates are considered for leadership positions. Its mechanism is to require that teams interview specific candidates based on their race. That distinction matters.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has issued an investigative subpoena to the NFL, arguing that requiring teams to interview candidates based on racial criteria raises serious concerns under Florida civil rights law. His office is requesting years of NFL demographic hiring data to examine whether the league's practices constitute discrimination.

The NFL maintains that "hiring decisions for NFL teams are made by the individual clubs, not the League, and those decisions are based on merit." If that is true, full transparency about those hiring outcomes should not be a problem.

Race-neutral hiring means every candidate, regardless of background, is evaluated on qualifications, experience, and ability alone. When a policy requires that candidates of a specific race must be interviewed, it introduces a racial criterion into the process, even if the final hiring decision is merit-based. That is a meaningful legal and ethical question that deserves a serious public answer.

Whatever position one takes on the Rooney Rule's intent, the demographic data the subpoena requests, including coaching census data and diversity reports from 2017 to the present, should be publicly available. NFL teams benefit from public stadiums, public financing, and the public's attention. Their hiring practices should not be a closed book.

We are calling on the NFL to fully cooperate with the subpoena, release its complete hiring demographic data to the public, and commit to a merit-based hiring framework that does not use race as a criterion for who receives an interview.

Every candidate deserves to be judged on what they can do, not what they look like.