UCF diversity institute grades league

UCF’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport gave the NFL a combined B grade in its 2016 NFL Racial and Gender Report Card, which was released Wednesday.

The NFL received an A for its racial hiring practices, its score of 91.1 percent slightly lower than its alltime-high mark, 93.1, last year. The league got a C+ for gender hiring practices, with its score of 76 a percentage point higher than in 2015.

“Teams are businesses, and you want to be at peak performance at all times,’’ said the institute’s director, Dr. Richard Lapchick. “Any time you are below where you’ve been, it should be an encouragement to do better.’’

Six NFL teams have minority head coaches in 2016, the same number as last year and below the all-time record of eight in 2011, according to the report.

Lapchick wants the NFL to expand the Rooney Rule, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for head-coaching and some senior positions, to include coordinator openings. He advocated for colleges to adopt a version of the Rooney Rule, called the Eddie Robinson Rule after the late Grambling coach, for head-coaching and some other leadership vacancies.

“For the first years after the Rooney Rule, people who had played for and coached under Tony Dungy, the Dungy coaching tree, had opportunities to be head coaches,’’ Lapchick said. “Since he hasn’t been in the game for a while, that tree has pretty much stagnated.’’

Women in league management positions reached 31.6 percent, the highest in the report’s history. Lapchick commended the NFL for hiring former Washington, D.C., police chief Cathy Lanier as its first female senior vice president of security.

The percentage of senior administrative positions on NFL teams held by women dipped slightly.

“A C+ [for gender hiring] is still not a great grade, so there is plenty of room for improvement,’’ Lapchick said. Also in the report: The number of NFL assistant coaches of color dropped sharply, and the number of minority general managers slipped from seven to five.

No Latinos and only one Latina was a team vice president. Gabrielle Valdez Dow is vice president of marketing and fan engagement for the Green Bay Packers.

The Buffalo Bills hired the league’s first full-time female assistant coach (Kathryn Smith) this year.