The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is an example of affirmative action, even though before 2022 there was no hiring quota or hiring preference given to minorities, only an interviewing quota. The first actual hiring quota was established before the 2022 season, mandating that at least one member of each team's offensive coaching staff must be either an ethnic minority or a woman. The Rooney Rule was established in 2003, and variations of the rule are now in place in other industries. History and origin The rule is named after Dan Rooney, the former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and former chairman of the league's diversity committee. It was created as a reaction to the 2002 firings of head coaches Tony Dungy of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Dennis Green of the Minnesota Vikings, at a time when Dungy had a winning record and Green had just had his first losing season in ten years. Shortly afterwards, U.S. civil rights attorneys Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran released a study showing that black head coaches, despite winning a higher percentage of games, were less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired than their white counterparts. Former NFL players Kellen Winslow and John Wooten then put together an affinity group of minority scouts, coaches, and front-office personnel, to advocate for the rule's creation. This rule was also heavily pressured by the NFL players, since most players in the NFL are African American. Its purpose was to ensure that minority coaches, especially African Americans, would be considered for high-level coaching positions. Fritz Pollard was the first minority head coach in NFL history (which was during the league's early years in the 1920s) and by the time the rule was implemented, only Tom Flores, Art Shell, Dennis Green, Ray Rhodes, Tony Dungy, and Herman Edwards had ever held head coaching jobs. (Only Dungy and Edwards were actively head coaching at the time of the rule's implementation, though Shell and Green would later return to head coaching.) Dungy in particular had struggled for years before getting a head coaching job; he was often promoted as a head coaching candidate by Chuck Noll when Dungy was an assistant under Noll in the 1980s with the Steelers, but he would not become a head