Covering the Rooney Rule: An Exploratory Study of Print Coverage of NFL Head Coaching Searches

Abstract

This content analysis uses media framing theory to explore and compare the rate at which NFL beat writers discussed race in their coverage of the 2020 and 2021 NFL head coach hiring cycles, a perennial process that has historically maintained the statistical overrepresentation of white men among the league’s head coaches. The study of the articles (N = 374) found significant year over year increases in 2021 in both the percentage of all sampled articles overall that mentioned race and in the percentage of stories that mentioned race after a team’s head coach was hired. This study’s findings suggest that, while NFL beat writers are unsurprisingly likely to avoid using race to frame their coaching search stories, their willingness to include race in their reporting may be increasing. Given increased calls for the NFL to address its lack of Black head coaches, sportswriters’ (un)willingness to include race in their reporting of coaching searches has become increasingly relevant. Given this study’s results, we therefore call for further qualitative and longitudinal quantitative studies to more definitively investigate these results as a sustained (and sustainable) phenomenon.