Oh No. Not Football.

I love football. College football, mostly, but I watch the NFL too.

The more football I watch, the better I understand a very complex game. 

But even with just a rudimentary knowledge of the game, I know one thing: The goal of every team is to win.

How do you build a winning team? By getting the most talented players on the field and hiring the best coaches to coach them.

But a new wrinkle in the NFL’s “Rooney Rule” requires all 32 teams to hire at least one offensive coach who’s either female or a member of a racial or ethnic minority by the beginning of the 2022 season.

Oh, please. Not football. They’re going to wreck the game.

Whatever happened to simply hiring the best coach? Will winning games give way to virtue signaling?

Sure looks like it.

The 2003 Rooney Rule, which requires NFL teams to interview minority candidates when filling head coaching jobs, makes sense. The league is made up of about 60 percent African-American players and there have traditionally been few black coaches. Presently there are just five.

Teams ought to give minority coaches a serious look when filling top spots.

Quotas would be a mistake, though.

Frankly, as a woman I am very proud of the 12 females who coach in the National Football League. I reckon they’re uncommonly talented because they beat out men to get their jobs in a highly competitive field. The Browns and Buccaneers have three women coaches each and the Washington Whatchamacallits have two.

Next season? When all teams are forced to hire females or minority offensive coaches? Some will always suspect that those coaches were affirmative action picks rather than the best women or men for the job.

That’s always the problem with quotas.

Diversity hiring and quotas are common in academia. Shoot, Elizabeth Warren landed her lucrative $400,000 a year teaching job at Harvard in part by claiming to be Native American.

Who cares if Harvard wants to waste its money on a woman whose grandmother had high cheekbones?

Football matters, however.

Twelve years ago former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell lamented what he called “the wussification” of football because the Eagles postponed a game against the Vikings after a foot of snow had fallen in the city of Brotherly Love.

"The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game?” Rendell railed at the time. "The people would have been marching down to the stadium. They would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on their way down."

“This is football! Good lord, Vince Lombardi would be spinning in his grave that we canceled the football game for the snow."

"We've become a nation of wusses.'“

One can only guess what Rendell thinks about teams being forced to hire female coaches.

The racial make-up of the teams was the reason behind the Rooney Rule. But in a league with no women players, why mandate any female coaches?

Then again, if the NFL is serious about diversity it shouldn’t stop with the coaching staff.

Let’s see them mandate female players on the field.