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Dan Rooney’s son reflects on father and current state of Rooney Rule
Jim Rooney’s first Steelers-related memory isn’t exactly related to a specific football game.
“I remember being in Miami for a game when I was about four years old,” Jim says. “Someone asked me for tickets and my mother grabbed my hand and gave the person a hard time.”
Soon after that, Franco Harris had a date with Destiny.
“I was six during the Immaculate Reception,” Jim says. “My mother didn’t take us to the games because the youngest kids were too annoying during the games. Those days have changed, but my mother didn’t put up with that. So I remember the look and the smile and the experience. There was just this jubilance when my mother and my brother Dan first came in and they hugged me. Then my dad, who always went to the game separately got home about an hour after everyone else. My dad was a guy who enjoyed things, but he enjoyed the work and would usually move on. When something was completed, he moved on to the next thing. But I will never forget just the powerful experience of us all being together that night. It was something special.”
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Jim wrote a book about his father called “A Different Way to Win: Dan Rooney’s Story from the Super Bowl to the Rooney Rule.” It’s now in audiobook form which includes exclusive conversations with Roger Goodell, Mike Tomlin, Bill Cowher, and more. Jim says it fills in the details since his father’s 2007 self-titled memoir.
“In the physical book, we talked a lot about his time in Ireland,” Jim says. “That’s not in the audiobook yet. We’re talking to a couple of Irish studies programs for that part of the story. And the Rooney Rule wasn’t in his book, because it hadn’t been established yet. We wanted to talk about my father’s work as a commitment towards trying to find fairness, equity, and opportunity for folks as he did throughout his career. Like the bedrock of the Steelers’ success, you can have the highest standards possible and still do something that has a real impact on the people involved, whether it’s individuals or a larger community. Both were sort of the priority for my father in his approach to business. We felt that adding the Rooney Rule to that story was essential.”
Photo by Aude Guerrucci-Pool/Getty Images
Dan Rooney’s leadership is credited with transforming the ‘Same Old Steelers’ into a dynasty and a global sports brand. Jim says there were subtle differences between his father and grandfather that explain the evolution.
“(My grandfather) didn’t really grow up in football. He grew up in baseball. He was a really good baseball player and he grew up in boxing,” Jim says. “So all of the things that he did in the sports industry, which I think are important, didn’t require the same operational expertise. You know, when you promote an event, there’s project management. There’s a whole lot of skill in terms of who would have an interest in that. But for a football team to be successful, it is a 24/7 type of operation and now it’s 24/7/365. My father had the discipline. My grandfather went to college, but he was more of a student-athlete. My father played sports at Duquesne, but he was a student and understood economics. They both understood sports, my father grew up in a football locker room and my grandfather grew up as a boxer. And I think there is a difference there.”
Dan Rooney didn’t just guide the Steelers into a new era, he played a big role in transforming the economics of the NFL by helping to introduce a salary cap and revenue sharing.
“We’d all like to say it’s brilliance, but I think there was some real vision there between my father and Pete Rozelle, Wellington Mara, who owned the Giants, and a whole host of other folks,” Jim says. “What Pete Rozelle understood is we have to create a differentiator. He sold everyone on the idea that if we go in on a league-wide package with television, that will allow us to be stronger across the board than baseball. My father, along with Vince Lombardi, was the tag team that went and convinced the Maras that this made sense.”
The Rooney Rule was enacted in 2003, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching positions. Jim says its creation was partly inspired by his father’s experiences with one of the Steelers coaches.
“He just wanted to make sure that folks who weren’t getting a chance to get in the room could get in there,” Jim says. “That was based on his experience with Tony Dungy. He felt that Tony was a better coach than folks were recognizing and that he was getting so few interviews, and that’s why he wasn’t getting the jobs. So my father looked at that and said, ‘Okay, what’s a way that we can have an impact, but it doesn’t change someone’s right to make an individual decision?’ And so that’s what the Rooney Rule is on a high level.
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Today, Jim works with the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which acts as a sort of watchdog to ensure that teams are following the spirit of the Rooney Rule. He says there is still some box-checking from teams that are not serious about opening up their leadership positions to all candidates.
“I think that to some degree there are folks that don’t want the face of their franchise to be someone that looks different. So I think that’s real, and I’m not going to back down from that argument,” Jim says. “We can look historically at the prevention of black men becoming quarterbacks. But I think we’re moving past that in a really strong and significant way. And I hope that results in more opportunities at the quarterback coaching position, which leads to more offensive coordinators. And so if I look at where the pipeline has a problem, it’s at the offensive coordinator level. There have been fewer folks, you know, from a minority experience in the offensive coordinator and football is an offensive game now.”
In 2007, Dan Rooney showed the league firsthand how the Rooney Rule process could work in the job search that led to the hiring of Mike Tomlin.
“He took more time than everyone else,” Jim says. “He didn’t get worried about what folks were saying, and he followed through on the process. He started with a larger pool of candidates than anyone else with Mike (Tomlin). I believe it was 37 coaches. We got down to 12 and in that original number, we had a lot more minority candidates than other folks were looking at. We get down to 12 and then down to four. I think three of the final four coaches ended up being head coaches, and all three have been in Super Bowls or championship games. So I think having a thorough process and taking your time allows you to really get to know folks who have talent in a way. If you just jump after your guy who is in the media and you’re kind of falling for that, I don’t think that helps your system or your culture.”
Despite the recent years without a playoff win, Jim says fans should not expect the knee-jerk changes that guide other NFL teams in similar situations.
“The way the Steelers do business, and people can argue with us because we haven’t had a lot of success in the playoffs lately, but I think it is different than how other teams do business,” Jim says. “We see how good Omar (Khan) is doing as general manager, but several folks didn’t take the opportunity to hire him, which I think was a mistake on their part. We do things differently. And I don’t think folks always like the methodologies, the attention to detail, and the ways that things are slower, but there’s more continuity. I hear the criticism of fans about not winning playoff games, for sure. But I do think in the long run, the methods that my father set up are the best practices. They are counter to the way a lot of folks do things and they don’t hire our people which I think is a mistake on their part.”
The Steelers haven’t won a playoff game since Dan Rooney’s passing. Some fans think that’s no coincidence, an opinion Jim doesn’t share.
“I think my brother has done a fantastic job,” Jim says. “I don’t want to be making excuses, but there are real rationales (for the playoff losses). We went through a time where we had a lot of strong offensive players, but our defensive didn’t have the strength for a while and then the arc goes the other way. I think that most of the time the teams we lost to: Jacksonville, there’s two Hall of Famers and four all-pros on that defense that we lost to. You can say Peyton was old, but he was Peyton Manning in Denver. Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes. The Browns’ loss is certainly a struggle. The Browns loss was weird, though, that whole situation, but COVID just had such an impact. But I think in every other case, us getting to the playoffs with teams that I don’t know were as strong as the other playoff teams is an accomplishment versus the counterargument.”
Jim says if Dan Rooney was still with us today, he may find some parts of the NFL unrecognizable.
“Some would say he didn’t make sense with how much he warned us against money becoming our God,” Jim says. “That was the big thing he always talked about. ‘Don’t let money become your God.’ Some people would say he was a little too fundamentalist on that. But at the end of the day, there was some real wisdom in that. And I think Art carries that. But certainly, that was Dad’s number one view. It drove a lot of decisions that the way the NFL is built now would be in some conflict with that.”
Listen to the entire interview with Jim Rooney on the latest episode of What Yinz Talkin’ Bout