NEW ORLEANS — The nation’s most popular and prosperous professional sports league arrived at its signature event vowing to stick by its diversity initiatives, which once were widely copied by other businesses. But the landscape that the NFL confronts at this Super Bowl week has changed.

President Donald Trump’s administration is targeting such hiring measures and the federal employees who have been involved in them, while some of the country’s most prominent businesses are retreating from their own diversity initiatives. The NFL, meanwhile, has failed to build on its year-old minority hiring gains during the current cycle, which has seen six teams choose new head coaches since the end of the regular season. The league is poised to have fewer minority head coaches next season than it did this season.

Commissioner Roger Goodell said Monday that the NFL was “not in this because it’s a trend,” adding that it would continue to abide by its minority hiring programs and guidelines because those “efforts are fundamental.” That message has been reinforced in recent months by other league leaders and team owners.

The NFL has an uneven history with diversity in its coaching and leadership ranks. Black coaches often have had a difficult time advancing to head coaching jobs. In 2022, former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the league and teams. But the NFL has stood by its minority interviewing requirement for key positions, known widely as the Rooney Rule.

Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin, right, on the sideline during the first half of an NFL football game against the Cincinnati Bengals in Pittsburgh on Jan. 4. AP Photo

That puts it at odds with Trump’s moves toward having federal agencies eliminate all positions related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump ordered all federal employees whose work is focused on DEI initiatives to be placed on leave, and he revoked a 60-year-old executive order banning discrimination by federal contractors.

Companies such as Amazon, Target, Walmart, Meta, McDonald’s and Ford have announced they would end or modify their DEI initiatives. (Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.) Others, such as Apple and Costco, have remained committed to their DEI programs.

“We’re all certainly hoping that the league continues with this focus on providing fair, open and competitive hiring practices,” said Rod Graves, the executive director of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, the diversity group that works with the NFL on minority hiring. “I very much assume that they will. I think that it’s still a high value and priority of the league as a whole.”

White House officials did not respond Monday to a request for comment about the NFL’s diversity policies. The NFL has been at odds with Trump previously. Trump sparked a national controversy in 2017 by suggesting at a campaign rally that NFL owners should fire any player — referred to as a “son of a bitch” by Trump — who protested by kneeling during the national anthem.

Goodell said Monday at his annual news conference during Super Bowl week that the league would not change its approach.

“I believe that our diversity efforts have led to making the NFL better,” he said. “It’s attracted better talent. We think we’re better if we get different perspectives, people with different backgrounds, whether they’re women or men or people of color. We make ourselves stronger and we make ourselves better when we have that. It’s something that I think will have a tremendous impact on this league for many, many years. We win on the field with the best talent and the best coaching. And I think the same is true off the field.”

NFL rules require each team with a vacancy at a key position such as head coach or general manager to conduct in-person interviews with at least two minority candidates from outside the organization.

Last year, those rules helped produce minority hiring gains, including in the high-profile ranks of the league’s head coaches. NFL teams hired four minority head coaches, including three Black men, among eight vacancies last year. That gave the league nine minority head coaches, including six Black head coaches, among its 32 teams at the outset of the 2024 season.

In October, the New York Jets dismissed Robert Saleh, who is of Lebanese descent. Two Black coaches were fired by their teams last month after the regular season: Jerod Mayo by the New England Patriots and Antonio Pierce by the Las Vegas Raiders. Mayo, the first Black head coach in Patriots history, lasted just one season as the successor to six-time Super Bowl-winning coach Bill Belichick. Pierce was fired by the Raiders after one season as the full-time coach, following a stint as the team’s interim coach during the 2023 season.

This offseason, six of the seven teams with coaching vacancies have made their hires. The New Orleans Saints continue their search. The only minority head coach hired thus far is Aaron Glenn, the former defensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions who was hired by the Jets. The Lions will be awarded a pair of third-round draft picks, one in each of the next two drafts, under the NFL program that rewards teams that develop minority head coaching and general manager candidates hired by other franchises.

“For African American coaches and executives, this hiring cycle has probably produced more questions and concerns about where we’re headed with respect to those goals and objectives,” Graves said in a phone interview Sunday.

Questions have occasionally been raised about whether teams give serious consideration to minority candidates or merely perform the interviews to fulfill the NFL’s requirement. In this cycle, some observers criticized the Patriots for interviewing two Black coaches who were out of the NFL, Pep Hamilton and Byron Leftwich, before hiring Mike Vrabel. And eyebrows similarly were raised when the Jacksonville Jaguars interviewed a Black coach, Raiders defensive coordinator Patrick Graham, on the same day they moved toward hiring Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive coordinator Liam Coen as their coach. The Jaguars announced an agreement with Coen the following day.

Graves mentioned the NFL’s lack of minority offensive coordinators, the assistant position that is often the final stepping stone to head coaching opportunities.

“It makes you wonder whether teams are truly committed to the spirit of the Rooney Rule and what we were trying to accomplish with respect to diversity,” Graves said.

The NFL has five active Black head coaches, with Glenn joining the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, the Buccaneers’ Todd Bowles, the Houston Texans’ DeMeco Ryans and the Atlanta Falcons’ Raheem Morris. The league has seven active minority head coaches. That includes the Carolina Panthers’ Dave Canales, who is Mexican American, and the Dolphins’ Mike McDaniel, who is biracial.

Graves, formerly the general manager of the Arizona Cardinals, said there has been bigger-picture progress.

“We see a lot more diversity in terms of not only candidates of color but … experience,” he said. “It’s certainly more diverse in that area than it was five, certainly 10 years ago.”

The league has pointed to its minority hiring gains in other areas, such as with team presidents and general managers, and has said its diversity efforts extend to all levels of its franchises and within the league office. In December, the NFL said 53 percent of team employees and league staffers were minorities or women. In addition to its nine minority head coaches during the 2024 season, the league said it had five women as principal franchise owners, six minority team presidents and eight minority general managers. About two-thirds of the NFL’s players were minorities in the 2023 season, the most recent for which data is available, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.

“We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League,” Goodell said Monday. “And we’re going to continue those efforts because we’ve not only convinced ourselves but I think we’ve proven [to] ourselves that it does make the NFL better. So we’re not in this because it’s a trend to get in or a trend to get out of it. Our efforts are fundamental in trying to attract the best possible talent into the National Football League, both on and off the field.”

The league regularly conducts what it calls “accelerator” programs to provide professional training and networking opportunities with owners to minority general manager and head coaching candidates. It conducted a front-office accelerator at an NFL owners meeting in December.

“I’ve been in this league for 22 years,” Terrance Gray, the Buffalo Bills’ director of player personnel, said at that meeting. “And the greatest thing that we can be provided as you move up in this industry is access and opportunity. I feel like the accelerator program provides those two things, and I look forward to the continued growth with the program.”

Steelers owner Art Rooney II said then: “It’s always a great program. It gives ownership as well as the potential candidates an opportunity to get to know each other and network a little bit. So I think it’s been a good program. … I think it’s been a positive. And I think both the ownership and the participants have enjoyed it and look forward to continuing to do it in the years to come.”

Rooney is the chairman of the NFL’s diversity, equity and inclusion committee. The league’s minority interviewing rule is named for his late father, Dan Rooney, the longtime Steelers owner who was the chairman of what was then known as the workplace diversity committee.

“There are no quotas in our system,” Goodell said. “This is about opening that funnel and bringing the best talent into the NFL. And so we are confident with that.”

Jonathan Beane, an NFL senior vice president who is the league’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, said at the December meeting that the league’s focus was on attempting to bring transparency and clarity to the hiring process. The NFL has tweaked its interviewing rules in recent years to try to slow teams’ hiring decisions, encouraging franchises to conduct extensive searches with large and diverse pools of candidates.

“We remain committed to the work that we’re doing,” Beane said then. “We see it, whether it’s social justice work or whether it’s inclusion work … as something that’s extremely beneficial for our business. It supports our objectives to be a global brand. … We feel very confident with the work that we’re doing, and we’re committed to that.”