Former Miami Dolphins Head Coach Brian Flores can proceed with a lawsuit accusing the National Football League and several of its teams of racial bias in hiring for coaching and front-office positions.
(Bloomberg) — Former Miami Dolphins Head Coach Brian Flores can proceed with a lawsuit accusing the National Football League and several of its teams of racial bias in hiring for coaching and front-office positions.
A federal judge in Manhattan on Wednesday rejected the NFL’s move to force Flores to arbitrate his claims against the league, the Denver Broncos, the New York Giants and the Houston Texans because he had no contracts with those teams.
But Flores — now a defensive coordinator with the Minnesota Vikings — did have a contract with the Dolphins, requiring any claims against that team to be heard in an out-of-court process overseen by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell., US District Judge Valerie Caproni said.
Flores, who is Black, sued the league in February 2022, alleging teams used sham interviews to circumvent the league’s so-called Rooney Rule, which requires the consideration of minority candidates for coaching and executive jobs. According to Flores, the Giants interviewed him for their vacant head coaching position despite the fact that Brian Daboll, who is White, had already been selected for the job.
In his suit, Flores says he learned before his Giants interview that the job was already filled because New England Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick inadvertently told him in a series of congratulatory text messages intended for Daboll.
‘Incredibly Troubling’
NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the decision. The league and the Giants have previously denied Flores’s account of his interview.
Thought more than 70% of NFL players are Black, the suit drew widespread attention to the lack of diversity in the NFL’s coaching and executive ranks, a fact which Caproni noted.
“Plaintiffs’ descriptions of their experiences of racial discrimination — which allegedly are only the most recent chapter in the NFL’s long history of systematic discrimination toward Black players, coaches, and managers — are incredibly troubling,” Caproni wrote in her decision. “Given the number of Black men who play and coach football, it is difficult to understand how it could be that, at the time plaintiffs initiated this lawsuit, ‘the NFL had only one Black head coach.’”
Former Arizona Cardinals head coach Steve Wilks and onetime Tennessee Titans defensive coordinator Ray Horton joined the case as co-plaintiffs in April, but Caproni ruled that those two Black coaches’ claims would have to be arbitrated.
Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer for the coaches, said in a statement that he was pleased with the ruling for Flores but disappointed that any of the claims were going to arbitration. He called on Goodell to appoint “a truly neutral arbitrator as a matter of fundamental fairness.”
‘Worrisome’ Arbitration
Flores claims he also experienced a sham Rooney-Rule interview in 2019 when he pursued the Denver Broncos’ head coaching job, and was removed from a list of potential candidates for the Texans’ top coaching job as retaliation for his lawsuit. Both teams have denied his claims.
The NFL had sought to push the claims into arbitration, saying the coaches’ contracts with their teams and the league all required that such disputes be handled by arbitration rather than through a lawsuit.
The coaches had argued that the arbitration clauses were void because Goodell couldn’t as an NFL employee with a financial stake in the litigation. Caproni said the NFL’s arbitration structure was “worrisome” but not unenforceable.
Flores also alleged in his suit he was fired from the Dolphins for refusing to follow directives from Dolphins team owner Stephen Ross that he believed were wrong, including an order to “tank” games to win a first-round pick in the following season’s draft and pressure to recruit a “prominent quarterback” in violation of league tampering rules.
The NFL investigated Flores’s tanking allegations against Ross and cleared him of wrongdoing.
The case is Flores v. NFL, 22-cv-00871, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
(Updates with background starting in fourth paragraph.)
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