Former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores is suing three NFL teams and the league itself, which he claims “is racially segregated and is managed much like a plantation”.
Flores, who is Black, was surprisingly fired by the Dolphins last month despite leading the team to back-to-back winning seasons for the first time since 2003. The lawsuit, which was filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, seeks unspecified damages.
In the lawsuit, Flores also depicts a Dolphins team with a troubling culture. He alleges he was offered a $100,000 bonus for every game his team lost during the 2019 season in order to secure a higher position in the 2020 NFL draft. When the team won games towards the end of the season, Flores says he was told Dolphins owner Stephen Ross was “mad” that the victories were “compromising [Miami’s] draft position.” The suit also says Flores refused to recruit a “prominent quarterback” at the end of the 2019 season as it would have broken the league’s tampering rules. Flores says afterwards he was “treated with disdain and held out as someone who was noncompliant and difficult to work with” and was subsequently cast as an “an angry Black man”.
The NFL has long been criticised for a lack of diversity in its coaching ranks. There is currently only one Black head coach in the NFL – the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin – despite more than two-thirds of its players being Black. The lawsuit also highlights the fact that only 12% of offensive coordinators are Black, 34% of defensive coordinators and 19% of general managers.
The Denver Broncos and New York Giants, who recently hired white candidates with no head coaching experience, are also named in the lawsuit. It alleges that both teams met with Flores to fulfill the Rooney Rule, which states teams must interview at least one minority candidate for head coaching vacancies, but had no intention of employing him. Flores claims two Broncos executives, including Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway, turned up an hour late for a 2019 interview and “looked completely disheveled, and it was obvious they had been drinking heavily the night before”.
Flores’s lawsuit claims the Giants interviewed him despite already knowing they would appoint a white candidate. As evidence Flores includes a text message from the New England Patriots head coach, Bill Belichick. In a text to Flores, Belichick congratulated him on getting the New York Giants job.
Belichick later texted: “Sorry – I fucked this up. I double checked and misread the text. I think they are naming Brian Daboll. I’m sorry about that.” Two days later Daboll was named the new Giants head coach.
“We are pleased and confident with the process that resulted in the hiring of Brian Daboll. We interviewed an impressive and diverse group of candidates. The fact of the matter is, Brian Flores was in the conversation to be our head coach until the eleventh hour,” the Giants said in a statement on Tuesday. “Ultimately, we hired the individual we felt was most qualified to be our next head coach.”
In a statement issued by Wigdor LLP and Elefterakis, Elefterakis & Panek, the law firms representing him, Flores said he hoped the suit would bring wider change. “God has gifted me with a special talent to coach the game of football, but the need for change is bigger than my personal goals,” he said. “In making the decision to file the class action complaint today, I understand that I may be risking coaching the game that I love and that has done so much for my family and me. My sincere hope is that by standing up against systemic racism in the NFL, others will join me to ensure that positive change is made for generations to come.”
The lawsuit also alluded to the power balance of the NFL, in which white owners and coaches profit from a violent and physically damaging sport in which the majority of the players are Black. The only person of colour to own an NFL team outright is the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Shahid Khan, who is Pakistani-American. Kim Pegula, who is Asian American, is a part-owner of the Buffalo Bills.
“In certain critical ways, the NFL is racially segregated and is managed much like a plantation,’’ the lawsuit says. “Its 32 owners – none of whom are Black – profit substantially from the labor of NFL players, 70% of whom are Black. The owners watch the games from atop NFL stadiums in their luxury boxes, while their majority-Black workforce put their bodies on the line every Sunday, taking vicious hits and suffering debilitating injuries to their bodies and their brains while the NFL and its owners reap billions of dollars.”
