NFL hits brakes on diversity accelerator program but promises it will be back soon — with needed improvements

Since 2022, the NFL has held its spring league meetings in conjunction with the coaching accelerator program. It’s a concept designed to provide the best minority coaching talent in the assistant ranks with facetime and development opportunities alongside NFL team decision-makers.

But the accelerator program will not be taking place next week at the meetings in Minneapolis, a league executive tells CBS Sports. In an effort to revamp the accelerator program — both for head coach and general manager candidates — NFL EVP and chief administrative officer Dasha Smith says the league will take the next year to reimagine the league’s top diversity program.

“One of the things that we’re really, really trying to focus on here at the league is, how do we attract, retain and develop the best talent in the world,” Smith tells CBS Sports. “And as we think about ourselves as aspiring to be a premier global sports organization, it’s becoming more important than ever just to make sure that we have the absolute best talent in the NFL. And so we’re doubling down on really making sure that we can continue to meet that goal.”

I have covered all six of the league’s accelerator programs since 2022. I have heard from many of the dozens of participants about the program’s successes and failures — most notably how only one coach and one GM from the combined groups has ever been hired for a top job. 

To hear that a diversity program would take a break in the current political climate initially made me shutter. President Donald Trump has said his administration “will terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government,” and that has been seen across the country at public and private levels. In March, Major League Baseball removed all references to “diversity” from its careers page and is reconsidering its own program.

But the NFL has stated publicly, multiple times since Trump’s inauguration, that it will continue its diversity efforts. And I’ve been assured that even though the coaching accelerator won’t happen next week, nor will the front office accelerator take place during December’s meetings, the NFL is still committed to this specific program and to the overall goal.

Over the next several months, league executives will work to put together an accelerator program for next May’s meetings that will likely combine head coach and GM candidates.

“Part of the feedback that we got was that there’s a lot of benefit to having the two groups together, mostly for their own networking with each other,” Smith says, “which makes sense in sort of understanding what their world looks like, and the head coach candidates and the GM candidates, really having that opportunity to network with each other.”

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It is impossible to see this news and not relate it to the DEI rollbacks across the country. Major American companies have been under fire in recent years for their diversity programs, many in the wake of the 2023 Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action, according to CBS News. 

But to the league’s credit, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has been clear throated in his support of the league’s policies. Even when I wrote in January the league should abolish the Rooney Rule for reasons unrelated to these rollbacks, the NFL has stuck to its mission.

“We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League,” Goodell said at his annual Super Bowl press conference, “and we’re going to continue those efforts because we’ve not only convinced ourselves, I think we’ve proven 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, as I said previously. And we see that. We see how it’s benefited the National Football League. And so, I think we’ll continue those efforts. I think it’s also clearly a reflection of our fan base and our communities and our players.”

The league has had to walk a tightrope in the past year. When 49ers pass rusher Nick Bosa wore a Make America Great Again hat in a postgame interview, the league waited longer than the usual one-week period to fine Bosa. The extra time (coincidentally) allowed for the election to take place in the meantime.

At the May 2024 league meetings, team owners heard from league office executives about how to handle the upcoming political season and landscape. The NFL views itself as a “great convening force” in this nation. The message was to be intentional about whatever messaging teams and ownership put out there.

One source who was in the room for the presentation told CBS Sports then, “We don’t want to be used as a political football, pun intended.”

But last week, Goodell stood in the Oval Office beside Trump and Commanders owner Josh Harris as Trump announced that Washington, D.C., would host the 2027 NFL Draft. Trump was presented with a Commanders No. 47 jersey and a football that read “In recognition of President Donald J. Trump Bringing the 2027 NFL Draft to Nation’s Capital.”

There it sat on the Resolute desk — a literal political football.

But the idea to tinker with the accelerator program was in the works well before the White House visit. 

“Irrespective of what president is in office, it was a big deal to be able to have a White House press conference to announce something that is as consequential as having a draft in Washington D.C.,” Smith says. “This accelerator program that we’ve been thinking through and how to make it better and bring head coaching and front office folks together in one program where they have more networking opportunities, where they have more one-on-one development, has been something that we’ve been thinking about for several months, well before this election on how do we make it better. 

“… So I can say, hand on heart, that you should not draw any conclusions to the timing on all of this, because we’ve been talking about how we were going to improve the accelerator program, candidly, from the time we did the last accelerator program for coaches, which was last year this time.”

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The timing stinks for the NFL. This looks a way that the league does not desire. 

Combining head coaches and GMs, the NFL went minus-three in terms of minority talent at the positions from 2024 to 2025. And for the second year in a row, there are zero Black offensive coordinators in the NFL. Before 2024, the 1988 season was the last since that took place. 

But an easy way out for the league would have been to just go through the motions and hold the coaches accelerator next week as planned. This would have been the seventh iteration of the program, followed by an eighth in December. And on and on we would go.

I personally believe the accelerator program, on a binary scale, has been a failure for the league. If you had asked me after December’s program what to do with it, I would have said it needs a complete overhaul. Pressing pause to make sure you get it right would have been fine with me.

Ran Carthon is the only person to participate in the front office accelerator who was ultimately hired for a GM job. He met Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk there in December 2022 and was hired the following month to lead Tennessee. He’s now a coworker of mine at CBS Sports after being fired in January. 

Aaron Glenn is the only person to participate in the coaches accelerator who was ultimately hired for a head coaching job. Perhaps the tools he got in the two-day program helped equip him to be the head coach of the team that drafted him three decades prior. Perhaps, instead, he was hired because he was the charismatic, forward-thinking defensive coordinator on one of the NFL’s most successful teams. Either way, he’s the only head coach the program can hang its hat on.

It started as a joint program with coach and GM candidates before the league decided it needed to split up the groups. (And now they want to go back to the way it was.) Because of the NFL calendar, coaches can only go on a two-day career development tour in the offseason, so the May meetings got the coaches.

But the coaches come to the meetings and have to miss a few days of offseason workouts. Some of those coaches are on new staffs, or are new themselves, and don’t want to be away from the facilities during crucial offseason team-building time. Several participants will watch the previous day’s practice film before starting up the program. 

The front office personnel got the December meetings, but that had its challenges too. Teams that may have openings in the upcoming weeks wouldn’t want to be too openly flirtatious with their prospective new GM in front of their peers. 

The program had its pros: Participants always spoke well of the speakers the league would bring in. The peer-to-peer networking helped, too. Lessons learned in interview prep would be applied in future, real-life interviews.

But the drawbacks were several. The programming got redundant for any multi-time participant. Having three dozen-plus attendees meant there were usually people on different levels of their careers sitting through the same programming. And there was never, ever enough facetime with NFL team owners.

The formal sit-downs with team owners on one day of the meetings would feel like speed dating, sending three or four guys to one table every 20 or 30 minutes for an hour and a half. The informal cocktail reception on the first night was designed to make everyone comfortable, but ownership attendance wasn’t always great. 

At this past December’s meetings, the NFL planned for a 90-minute cocktail reception between NFL team owners and the accelerator participants. But the league’s annual labor seminar was also taking place that week, and dozens of (mostly white male) personnel executives joined without being told otherwise.

It got to the point where participants were privately telling me they would have a “scheduling conflict” if asked to attend the next year. 

The NFL will still hold GM Forum and Coaching Summit this summer, with both programs designed to help the next generation of minority NFL talent. And it plans to invest more in a gender and race-neutral program that takes place during the NFL Scouting Combine that offers individual development over a three-day period. Just because the accelerator program won’t be seen in 2025 doesn’t mean work isn’t being done.

“Since we’ve been in this current climate, we’ve continued with all of our programming and in fact have added additional programming,” Smith says, “including our senior women leadership program that we didn’t have before into our development programming menu.”

The pipeline of minority talent is not only there, but it is rich. For as long as I’ve been talking about race and this sport, the point must still be made that it is up to NFL team owners to decide how much they value diversity when determining who will lead their football program. 

The development programs have natural restrictions. The owners must make the hiring. But when a program like the accelerator is created to change a problem, and that problem still exists years later, it is appropriate to look at how effective that program can be.