Dianna Russini spent the moments before her appearance on Stugotz and Company yelling at someone about the Rooney Rule, and she wasn’t shy about explaining why once she got on air.
“OK, I got an update,” Russini said. “So what you heard me complaining/b*tching about was a very high-ranking source had told me that teams cannot hire a head coach until Jan 19. This is a high-ranking person who is in the hiring process, OK? So, don’t you think that’s like a solid piece of information they would know?”
The Athletic’s NFL insider had good reason to trust the information. When someone directly involved in the hiring process tells you there’s a firm deadline, you take that seriously. Except this time, the high-ranking source was completely wrong.
“This is what the league just told me: ‘Go back to your source. That is not true. There’s a Jan. 19 reference, but it’s not connected to when a team could hire someone. So that is false,'” Russini explained. “So, I now have to call this team and be like, ‘Oh, by the way, hire your coach! You don’t have to wait!'”
Russini made clear she’d be calling that source the second she got off the show to let them know they’d given her bad information.
The Jan. 19 confusion likely stems from Rooney Rule requirements around interviewing minority candidates, but those rules don’t actually prevent teams from hiring someone before that date if they’ve satisfied the interview requirements. How someone high up in a team’s hiring process doesn’t know that is beyond comprehension, but here we are.
Now, one of those teams — whichever organization gave Russini the bad information — has potentially been sitting around waiting for a deadline that doesn’t exist while the other eight remaining teams have been free to make moves. If they’ve completed their Rooney Rule requirements and haven’t hired anyone because someone in their front office doesn’t understand the rules, that’s organizational malpractice.
And now that team gets to enjoy a phone call from Dianna Russini explaining how the NFL’s hiring rules actually work.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.