Born in Brooklyn to Honduran immigrant parents, raised in a Brownsville housing project, Brian Flores grew up rooting for the New York Giants. He was 5 when the boys in blue, coached by Bill Parcells, routed Dan Reeves’ Broncos 39-20 to win it all, and 9 when Parcells’ team beat Marv Levy’s Bills 20-19 in a Super Bowl for the ages.
Those aforementioned coaches are white. Flores is Black. As a damning lawsuit he just filed in Manhattan federal court details, only one of the NFL’s 32 teams currently employs a Black head coach.
Yet despite that glaring lack of diversity in a league where 70% of players are Black, despite a Rooney Rule adopted in 2003 and amended in 2021 to require every team to interview at least two external minority candidates for open head coaching positions, despite Flores having won four Super Bowls with Bill Belichick at the Patriots and having just ended three seasons leading the Miami Dolphins including two with winning records, Flores says his interview for the vacancy with his hometown team was a sham. He learned three days before it that Brian Daboll had already been chosen for the job.
The Giants — and the Broncos, who also allegedly paid lip service to the rule — have explaining to do. So does New York billionaire and Dolphins owner Steve Ross, whom Flores says offered him $100,000 per loss in 2019 so the team could tank its way into a top draft position.
A fake coach on a fake team (also from Miami) in a real movie said “in either game — life or football — the margin for error is so small.” How on Earth will real executives recover from alleged transgressions this big?
