Black History Month Kicks Off with a Righteous Lawsuit Aimed at the NFL’s Racism.
The sports world got an invitation to an earth-shaking history lesson on February 1, when former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a class action lawsuit against the NFL and three teams — the Dolphins, the Broncos and the Giants — alleging they have engaged in racist and discriminatory practices against Black coaches.
Fifty eight pages of the filing document are filled with the kind of history Republicans are working so hard to ban from classrooms and libraries. The lawsuit alleges that the league has discriminated against Flores and other Black coaches for racial reasons, denying them positions as head coaches, offensive and defensive coordinators and quarterbacks coaches, as well as general managers.
Allegations in the suit include Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offering to pay Flores an extra $100,000 per loss during the 2019 season to tank the team for a better draft day position.
Following Flores refusal to deliberately lose games, the Miami owner pressured Flores to recruit a prominent quarterback–said to be Tom Brady– in violation of the league’s tampering rules. When Flores refused, he was cast as the “angry Black man” who was difficult to work with.
The lawsuit also says the Giants scheduled a fake interview with Flores last week to comply with the Rooney Rule, which stipulates that teams must include minority candidates during senior management interviews.
After all, the league is composed of 70% Black players, but the mostly white management of teams remains intact nearly two decades after the policy was announced. From the lawsuit:.
Only 1 of the NFL’s 32 teams (3%) employs a Black Head Coach;
Only 4 of the NFL’s 32 teams (12%) employ a Black Offensive Coordinator;
Only 11 of the NFL’s 32 teams (34%) employ a Black Defensive Coordinator;
Only 8 of the NFL’s 32 teams (25%) employ a Black Special Teams Coordinator;
Only 3 of the NFL’s 32 teams (9%) employ a Black Quarterback Coach;
Only 6 of the NFL’s 32 teams (19%) employ a Black General Manager.
Flores learned that his interview was fake when his former boss, Patriots coach Bill Belichick, mistakenly texted him a congratulatory message, thinking that the Giants were going to hire him.
Woops, wrong Brian!
The New York Giants, instead, ended up hiring Brian Daboll.
Despite knowing he wasn’t going to get the job, Flores sat through two days of meetings with Joe Schoen, the Giant’s new General Manager. The lawsuit says the former Miami coach believes the sit-downs were held for no reason other than for the Giants to demonstrate falsely to League Commissioner Roger Goodell and the public at large that it was in compliance with the Rooney Rule.
Flores also said the Broncos put him through a similar interview three years ago, with no intention of considering him for the job. That 2019 meeting, according to Flores, involved then-Broncos general manager, John Elway, President Joe Ellis and others showing up an hour late.
“They looked completely disheveled, and it was obvious that they had been drinking heavily the night before,” the lawsuit said. “It was clear from the substance of the interview that Mr. Flores was interviewed only because of the Rooney Rule.”
The Broncos are already denying these allegations, perhaps a little too vigorously.
A dozen pages of the lawsuit are devoted to detailing the history of racial discrimination by the National Football League, starting with a 1933 “gentleman’s agreement” among the league’s owners led by the Washington Football Team’s owner George Preston Marshall to ban Black players entirely among the league’s owners in 1933.
As the banning of highly rated quarterback Colin Kaepernick after the 2016-17 season shows, according to the lawsuit, football’s owners are still all-in with the racism embedded in the MAGA movement.
In an October 2017 meeting among owners, players and League executives to address racial injustice protests by players, NFL owners effectively endorsed President Trump’s opinion that a player who protests racial injustice is a “Son of a Bitch” and a stated an unwillingness to act contrary to Trump’s directives
From Dealbook:
With variations of the rule now adopted in parts of corporate America, Flores’s lawsuit raises broader questions about the effectiveness of corporate diversity policies.
What is the Rooney Rule? Initially adopted by the N.F.L. in 2003, the rule, named for the former Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney, requires every team with a head coaching vacancy to interview at least one ethnic minority candidate. (It was later expanded to other positions, and a minimum of two minority candidates.) Big companies, including Amazon and major banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, followed suit.
Does it work? A 2016 Harvard Business School study found that if there is only one woman or minority candidate in the running for a top job, the odds of them being hired are nearly zero.
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At one point in my life, I was a passionate football fan. I worked at a DC sports bar that used satellite dishes to show every game that was broadcast. When the Washington Team made the Super Bowl, we closed the bar to the general public, offering a no-charge buffet for regulars, and predict-the-score pools with thousands of dollars in payoffs.
In recent years my interest has waned. The game’s reputation has gotten steadily more tarnished including the initial denial about players having long term issues from head injuries, and the racialized methodology used to deny Black players benefits based on what started out as slave owners beliefs that they were more tolerant of pain.
I moved to San Diego, where the Chargers took fans for granted and hosed the city righteously before trotting off to la-la land. The racism, the arrogance, the greed, and the widespread misogyny all factored into my declining interest.
I know I’m gonna catch crap for saying this –and I did see a couple games–, doesn’t it seem just a little odd that so many playoff games this year were decided in the last few seconds or in overtime? It’s made for great television, but maybe it’s too good to be true.
Given everything else we know about the league and what has been observed of a distinct (wealthy) class of Americans willing to flaunt common decency and the law, nothing surprises me these days.
I hope coach Brian Flores withstands the upcoming wave of denials and demonization headed his way and refuses to settle with the NFL. It could be a trial for the ages.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com