Brian Flores' lawsuit against the NFL combines the serious with the farcical in a way that generally agrees with my view of life on earth. Flores, who's Black, was the head coach of the Miami Dolphins until he was recently fired, even though his coaching record appears to have been, like the white children of Lake Woebegone, "above average." Every season, the league's overall winning percentage is .500, same number of wins as losses, but the Dolphins, in the ten seasons before Flores took over in 2019, had posted just one winning record. Then in Flores' first season they were 5-11 before rebounding to 10-6 in 2020 and 9-8 in the year just finished. They narrowly missed making the playoffs in both of the last two seasons and Flores was fired. Tough business! The Vikings just fired Mike Zimmer, who in eight seasons as the team's coach compiled a record of 72-56-1 while qualifying for the playoffs three times.
The precipitating event for Flores' suit, which claims racial discrimination, was the above text message exchange between him and Patriots' head coach Bill Belichick. It doesn't make a ton of sense without some context. Flores formerly worked for Belichick as an assistant and the two are apparently on good terms. The NFL has, at minimum, a "perception problem" arising from the fact that more than two-thirds of the players are Black but now, after the firing of Flores, only one Black head coach, Mike Tomlinson of the Steelers, remains. There are 32 teams, so about 3 percent of the head coaches, but about 70 percent of the players, are Black. While these numbers have gone up and down, moderately, from season to season, the league has recognized an ongoing problem, and to address it has adopted something called the Rooney Rule, which requires teams with coaching vacancies to interview minority candidates. The New York Giants just hired a new head coach, Brian Daboll, who is white. It seems that Belichick, thinking he was texting Brian Daboll, congratulated him on the (inside) news that Daboll had been selected. But he was actually texting a different Brian, Brian Flores, whose interview for the Giants' coaching position had not yet taken place. Flores was at first confused but then concluded that his upcoming interview was a sham, an exercise meant only to comply with the Rooney Rule. In due time, of course, the Giants announced that they had hired Daboll. Belichick's information was correct. Flores hired a lawyer.
There's been a lot of commentary about the case, because all the details of the complaint are known—the above screen shot of the text messages is from page 7 of 58 in the handiwork of Flores' lawyer, which is filed with the court and a public record. There's a lot more of interest besides Bill Belichick's inattention to detail when consulting his phone's contact list. For example, Flores alleges that during his first season his bosses in the Dolphins' front office offered to pay him extra to lose games on purpose in order to improve the team's position in the draft. When he declined, and the Dolphins won games the brass wanted to lose, he landed permanently on their bad side. Some lawyerly commentators have suggested that his case is incoherent. Is Flores saying he was discriminated against because of his race or that he lost his job because he coached to win? But this is not an argument the NFL is apt to find attractive—it's too much like, "At the time you say I was robbing a bank in Minneapolis I was actually trying to kill a guy in St. Paul."
There might be a strategy to the "incoherence." The NFL's recent record with Black troublemakers—I'm thinking of Colin Kaepernick—makes it likely that Flores won't work again in the NFL. He at least should consider that possibility, and maybe he doesn't care. He's pissed, he knows things, and he's going to put them out there. It could be the kind of a case that the defendants don't want to defend, even if they think they would prevail, and the result of that calculation could substantially enrich the plaintiff. The NFL has very deep pockets.
Some of the commentary critical of Flores tends to support this view of the case. "That the players are mostly Black and the head coaches almost all white doesn't prove anyone discriminated against Flores—or against anyone else, either." Right. But what would prove it? Most likely they aren't going to put on hoods and attend a KKK rally. They're saying that they don't discriminate, it's just that a Black guy is hardly ever best for the job, and oh, by the way, the purpose of the Rooney Rule is to make it look like good will is oozing from their every pore—actually, it's a complete sham. We know this because Bill Belichick seems to have fat fingered the Bs in his phone contacts.
Legendary Coach as chubby old guy overchallenged by his technology devices—a farce, like when Black guys are interviewed for head coaching jobs in the NFL.
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