re: Falcons officially announce Fontenot as their GM

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This is the way I look at it. I work for a company that is based in Baton Rouge, and I am from Eunice. Baton Rouge population is 221,599 and Eunice is 9,989.
If we had an opportunity for a management position and they had a rule stating that they had to interview candidates from Eunice or other smaller towns simply because we had a population of less than 10k, I'd take that as an insult because they are basically saying all those simple country Eunice folk know is how to farm rice & crawfish or work offshore.

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While i don't disagree that notions like this and the Rooney rule are...ham-fisted executions of an idea at best, i guess it's notable that they are trying to address what is a sort of odd issue.

To your point: Using that same analogy - Say the company based in Baton Rouge had, for their entire 50+ year history, only really hired candidates from the local BR area (whether for convenience, proximity, cost - regardless) and had never even LOOKED in Eunice for candidates. Over those 5 decades, perhaps it wasn't the case that the higher-ups thought that people in Eunice were simple country folk - maybe they'd just always only been looking in BR because that's where they were located, they'd always had a supply of applicants, whatever the case - but could the assumption be made that they were hiring the best candidates in all of Louisiana even though they never looked in Eunice until they had a reason to do so?

Going a step further....without having a reason to do so, in that scenario, why would they even look to Eunice for candidates, when they had been finding managers just fine in BR for the last 50 years? That's kinda what the NFL is dealing with. This idea that when openings happen, searches automatically include ALL qualified candidates rather than orgs just looking in the same places they've looked before more or less for the last century or so.

Your choosing to take that kind of action as an insult speaks to being fortunate enough to not really have to worry about being overlooked under normal circumstances. While the NFL should be a meritocracy and the whole 'picks for blacks' thing has so many issues (like, is it all minorities? What if a coach is only like 1/6th Native American or something - does that count? But i digress ), it seems like they're trying to correct for a *systemic* issue, which is gonna lead to some dumb efforts nearly every time.