How Long Can the NFL Get Away with Asking Future Employees if They're Gay?
Now that National Football League executives are asking players about their sexual orientation — not just wondering in the shadows about Manti Te'o but grilling them in job interviews — it may be time for the commissioner to do something. It may even be breaking the law.
Now that National Football League executives are asking players about their sexual orientation — not just wondering in the shadows about Manti Te'o but grilling them in job interviews — it may be time for the pro sport with the worst reputation about equality in the locker room to finally do something about its big gay problem. It may even be breaking the law.
University of Colorado tight end Nick Kasa, projected to go in the fourth or fifth round of the NFL Draft in April, said in an interview on Tuesday that NFL general managers had been asking more or less outright whether he was gay. "[Teams] ask you like, 'Do you have a girlfriend?' 'Are you married?' 'Do you like girls?'" Kasa told ESPN Radio Denver's CJ & Kreckman. "Those kinds of things, and you know it was just kind of weird. But they would ask you with a straight face, and it’s a pretty weird experience altogether."
This week at the NFL combine, the annual gathering of rookie prospects in advance of the draft in which teams evaluate players' talent, NBC News's Mike Florio reported on "the elephant in the room" for NFL GMs, who "want to know whether Manti Te'o is gay." That ignited a huge firestorm of criticism against the league, which has failed to speak out publicly despite its players making offensive comments about gays in the locker room — even before the fake-girlefriend scandal plagued rookie-to-be Te'o, who has denied that he is gay. But Florio stopped short of saying whether or not teams were explicitly asking Te'o if he's gay or not, and whether it was actually affecting their decisions — "I'm not saying anyone would take Manti Te'o off the board if they suspected he's gay or know he's gay," Florio said, though presumably Te'o might still move up and down the draft position board.
So it's up to the league to decide whether or not it is discriminatory to ask if a would-be employee likes girls, or to snoop around about a former Notre Dame student who had a made-up social-media girlfriend. But the collective-bargaining clause could also be seen as a provision of state law, which the NFL can't govern. The league has no policy on what kind of questions can be asked of players in combine interviews. According to the NFL, teams must adhere to their state's privacy laws. "Teams are expected to comply with the law in terms of any employment interview," NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told Yahoo! Sports yesterday. That sounds like the NFL is passing the buck to state legislation on sexual orientation discrimination, despite their own policy. By that logic, only 13 of 32 NFL teams are barred from asking about a player's sexual orientation, and the rest are free to practice possibly-homophobic hiring practices as the NFL commissioner looks the other way.
According to experts, the confusion over the interviews highlights a larger problem with who or what presides over the NFL combine interviews. "Most likely the company or the team would just have to abide by the laws of the state in which they are based," Western State University sports-law professor Dylan Malagrino told Yahoo! Sports. "Although it highlights the confusion that these gaps in the law can cause – a company from Georgia could ask questions of an interviewee in California that a Californian company could not."
And yet, a player's sexual orientation is still an issue. Whether or not the league will choose to act on their existing policy, or whether they will clarify what if off limits in combine interviews in the future, is probably up to Commissioner Goodell.
Update 6:29 p.m.: The NFL is now investigating which teams asked about Kasa or Te'o's sexuality and promises to punish them accordingly.