Brian Flores’ Lawsuit Exposes The Absurdity Of NFL Racial Quotas Like The ‘Rooney Rule’
Race obsessed-leftists want it both ways: force the NFL to have fewer white coaches and owners, while still signing NFL players based on their performance.Race obsessed-leftists want it both ways: force the NFL to have fewer white coaches and owners, while still signing NFL players based on their performance.
Whitlock: NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is football’s Joe Biden, a political operative using race and racism to empower the matriarchy
The National Football League is no different from the rest of America. It is suffering from a lack of bold, masculine, ethical leadership. It’s led by longtime political grifters, men whose love of the game’s financial rewards dwarfs their respect for the traditions and customs that made the league a television juggernaut.
Commissioner Roger Goodell is pro football’s “Let’s go, Brandon” inspiration, and his executive vice president, Troy Vincent, is the sloppy seconds the NFL Players Association discarded more than a decade ago.
Goodell and Vincent are paid as handsomely as the game’s top players. Their primary responsibility is to protect the Shield, the once-pristine brand legendary NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle cultivated in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
What Goodell and Vincent have done in the past decade is cover their asses, protect their salaries, and acquiesce to every demand issued by football’s left-wing, anti-masculinity enemies.
Early last week, disgruntled former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a class-action lawsuit against the league and three of its individual teams, claiming racial discrimination. His 58-page lawsuit ironically leans heavily on quotes from Vincent that accuse the league of racism. Not to be outdone by his vice president, on Saturday Goodell fired off a memo to ownership chastising his bosses for not hiring enough black coaches.
“Racism and any form of discrimination is contrary to the NFL’s values,” Goodell wrote. “We have made significant efforts to promote diversity and adopted numerous policies and programs which have produced positive change in many areas, however we must acknowledge that particularly with respect to head coaches the results have been unacceptable …
“We understand the concerns expressed by Coach Flores and others this week.”
In his lawsuit, Brian Flores stated the NFL is run much like a slave plantation. The commissioner of the NFL, the man who runs a league and industry that have produced more black male millionaires than any other American industry, basically co-signed Flores’ ridiculous analogy.
Goodell should be fired. Immediately. He’s paid more than $50 million a year to defend the league. He can’t muster the courage to do it because he lacks the backbone and intellectual heft to recognize and articulate what ESPN, Fox Sports, the New York Times, and Big Tech’s social media apps have done to the NFL.
Professional football is not remotely run like an antebellum Southern plantation. It’s never been that. For a time, the league was the closest thing America had to a true meritocracy, an industry that attempted to reward ability and hard work. The NFL was not perfect; no human invention is. But Pete Rozelle’s league was better than anything else on the planet. Racial progress was steady and predictable. Football treated black men far more fairly than the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest of corporate media.
Drunk on and spoiled by the success he inherited, Goodell has spent his 16 years as commissioner chasing the affection and approval of the league’s enemies and well-intentioned critics. A year into his tenure, the media convinced Goodell that the league was overrun by lawless players and that his legacy depended on being the face of player conduct. He appointed himself sheriff and/or attorney general of the NFL. It quickly turned into a boondoggle that made the players despise him.
From brain injuries to Deflategate to Bountygate to Colin Kaepernick, corporate media dictates where Goodell focuses his energy. He never leads. He always reacts.
Diversity, inclusion, and equity – D.I.E. – is the latest media-driven assignment handed to Goodell. D.I.E. is the death of the NFL meritocracy. A league that had a single mission of rewarding the ability and hard work of men is now obsessed with meeting race, gender, and sexuality quotas.
It’s a madness that leads to chaos, undermines innovation, and produces mediocrity.
Diversity, inclusion, and equity is why the Houston Texans fired 66-year-old head coach David Culley after one season and appear to be poised to replace him with his 63-year-old associate head coach Lovie Smith. Culley and Smith are both black. Culley was hired a year ago at the end of the 2021 coaching cycle, when the league needed a black hire to satiate the ESPN talking heads who take their talking points from Troy Vincent.
The Texans didn’t really want to hire Culley. That’s why they fired him after one season. The Texans want to hire longtime journeyman quarterback Josh McCown, who is white. It would be an unprecedented move in the NFL. But going all the way back to Bill Russell, it’s somewhat commonplace for NBA players to quickly transition to NBA head coach.
Whatever the case, the Texans’ coaching search has been a clusterf--k. Brian Flores is the other finalist. He’s not an ideal candidate. He’s suing the league, and his lawsuit analogizes the NFL to a slave plantation. If I’m running a business, I don’t give a high-profile job to a candidate who believes I’m a slave owner. I’m weird like that.
In an effort to score D.I.E. points, the Texans leaked that Flores was a finalist. That leak boxed the franchise in. If they hire McCown, ESPN’s horde of race-baiters will say the franchise is racist. That’s why the organization has turned to Lovie Smith. This will be his third NFL head-coaching assignment. He had a successful nine-year run in Chicago, including three playoff appearances and a Super Bowl appearance. He was fired in Tampa after two seasons. Most recently, he failed in a five-year run at the University of Illinois. Last year, he was an assistant for Culley.
The Texans are going to replace Culley with his top assistant? This is how corporations D.I.E.
The Texans are following the orders of the NFL’s alleged “leaders,” Goodell and Vincent. Goodell and Vincent take their leadership cues from the LGBTQ chief diversity officers overseeing corporate America’s human resources departments. The gatekeepers of employment sound the same and fit a profile.
“We will reevaluate and examine all policies, guidelines and initiatives relating to diversity, equity and inclusion, including as they relate to gender,” Goodell said in his statement. “In particular, we recognize the need to understand the lived experiences of diverse members of the NFL family to ensure that everyone has access to opportunity and is treated with respect and dignity.”
The values that made the NFL great revolved around recognizing and rewarding ability and hard work. Pete Rozelle did not talk about “lived experiences” and diversity, inclusion, and equity. In pursuit of D.I.E., the NFL has prioritized creating assistant coaching positions for women, particularly LGBTQ women.
A true meritocracy in sports has a long-standing history of working quite well for black men. Diversity, inclusion, and equity works for women. The enemies of football, the patriarchy, and masculinity have packaged their D.I.E. strategy as justice for black coaches. That’s not the real agenda. Same as Black Lives Matter isn’t about protecting black men. It’s about disrupting the nuclear family and the patriarchy.
Weak men are weak leaders. Their lone concern is protecting their paychecks and their power. Goodell and Vincent are not advocates for the league that employs them. They’re public defenders cutting a series of plea deals with the opponents of strong male leadership.
We should not be surprised. America has an unprecedented leadership crisis that is accentuated by an absence of morals. The NFL is a reflection of our descent into Babylon. A collection of lyrical pornographers – Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar – highlight this season’s Super Bowl halftime show. In the name of diversity, inclusion, and equity, a gaggle of gangsta rappers will wax poetic about bitches, hoes, weed, and killing n---as.
“Black Twitter” and its white allies will celebrate the Jay Z-produced circus as a sign of racial progress. Meanwhile, away from the noise, buffoonery, and claims of plantation-style oppression, Goodell and Vincent will continue to oversee the creation of additional coaching opportunities for women.
Let’s go, Roger!Brian Flores’ Lawsuit Against The NFL Will Only Damage Black Head Coaches
Flores’ unfounded accusations against the NFL of ‘systemic racism’ will set back the relationship between owners and black coaching talent.Squires: Brian Flores’ despicable NFL-plantation analogy reveals the weakness of his complaint and his backbone
Only time will tell the long-term impact of the lawsuit Brian Flores recently filed against the NFL. Flores could end up permanently destroying his coaching career, or he could open doors for black coaches, general managers, and team owners.
The part of Flores’ lawsuit that immediately stood out to me was his description of the relationship between the league’s owners and players.
“In certain critical ways, the NFL is racially segregated and is managed much like a plantation. 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.”
This type of hyperbole is to be expected from activists, journalists, and disgruntled athletes. It is unheard of from a head coach. Unfortunately, it fits a familiar pattern.
Brian Flores is the latest black public figure to invoke the horrors of slavery and racial violence as a rhetorical device for his own personal benefit.
He was asked why he chose that comparison during an interview on CBS. He had no answer. That tells me this wasn’t a revelation after a period of deep reflection. It was a cynical ploy to play on the emotions of his supporters in the court of public opinion, not members of a jury who would have to consider real evidence.
The argument being made by Flores and his attorneys is based on Ibram Kendi’s contention that disparities between black and white people in social outcomes are due to racist policies. That view is now accepted as a cultural truism. This is why virtually every sports media outlet believes “systemic racism” is to blame whenever black representation in a given field isn’t somewhere between 13% and the percentage of black people in that field. Somehow this argument is never made in reverse. The dearth of black quarterbacks used to be attributed to racism, but no one asks why there are no white cornerbacks and very few white running backs.
Flores is not the first black man in football to do this. Colin Kaepernick caused controversy when he compared the NFL Combine to a slave auction during the first episode of his Netflix series. In one scene, the former quarterback turned activist showed players walking off the field back in time, where their athletic shorts were traded for tattered pants and shackles.
The message was clear: Young men who trained their entire lives for the opportunity to make millions are no different from slaves being traded at an auction. It was a gripping visual, but the comparison completely falls apart once you realize hockey players also go through athletic drills at the NHL Combine.
Other black elites have shown they are also oppressed.
Sean “Diddy” Combs did the same thing in a letter to General Motors demanding more money for black media companies. The letter starts with a quote about injustice from Bishop Desmond Tutu, the late anti-apartheid leader. The next line directly invoked the murder of George Floyd.
“The same feet these companies use to stand with us in solidarity are the same feet they use to stand on our necks.”
Combs chastised corporate America for manipulating the black community with incremental changes in its business practices, but he had no problem using Georges Floyd’s death to extort white business executives. His passive-aggressive shakedown strategy was punctuated by one of his final lines: “If you love us, pay us!”
Justin Fairfax, former lieutenant governor of Virginia, also invoked George Floyd when describing how he was treated by the media and his political peers after two women accused him of sexual assault. Fairfax even went a step further by saying he was treated like Emmett Till because he was denied due process. In his mind, having other self-interested politicians say they believe your accusers is the same as being beaten so badly that your mother can’t recognize your face.
Americans have become accustomed to this behavior from elected officials who use terms like “Jim Crow 2.0” to describe state voting laws they oppose. We expect politicians to do and say whatever they think will advance their own political interests.
I have much higher expectations for black people who complain that our history is being sanitized and silenced to comfort white people who can’t handle honest conversations about race.
The truth is that nothing diminishes historical injustice more than ripping it out of context and casually invoking it for personal gain. It is shameful, despicable behavior. Black millionaires who treat the history of their ancestors as a trump card in political fights or business deals do much more damage to how we understand the past than parents accused of opposing CRT.
It is especially disheartening to see black men like Brian Flores engage in this type of behavior. It makes the speaker look weak and unable to stand on the merits of his argument. It’s a play for sympathy and solidarity with people on social media who will repost the message with black fist emojis for emphasis.
Men who behave that way have too much jelly in their legs and not enough steel in their spines. Some may accomplish their short-term goals, but you can’t put a price tag on dignity and self-respect.Whitlock: ESPN race-baiters will not tell you that Brian Flores is actually hurting black coaches
Let’s ask the obvious question as it relates to Brian Flores’ discrimination lawsuit against the NFL, the New York Giants, Denver Broncos, and Miami Dolphins:
Has Flores damaged the job prospects and work relationships of his black coaching peers?
No doubt, Flores is a hero to Nate Burleson, Mike Greenberg, Stephen A. Smith, Elle Duncan, Ryan Clark, Shannon Sharpe, and countless other blue-check sports media figures whose job is to goad and then celebrate emotional and non-strategic behavior from black men.
Flores is following in the footsteps of Colin Kaepernick, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake. He’s acting as an emotional trigger, a justification for chaos, animus, and protest. On Thursday, former NBA star Chris Bosh vowed to quit watching NFL games until the league hires more black coaches and general managers.
Will they?
Dolphins owner Stephen Ross ran the “blackest” organization in the NFL. At one time, his head coach, general manager, assistant general manager, defensive coordinator, and several members of his ownership group were all black.
Brian Flores’ accusations against Ross could get Ross removed from NFL ownership. Flores claims Ross offered him money to lose games in 2019 and that Ross tried to arrange an illegal meeting with a veteran quarterback under contract to another team.
Flores is a snitch. He snitched on the owner who followed the social justice/Black Lives Matter playbook.
Flores also seemingly betrayed the mentor, Bill Belichick, who put him in position to rise to head coach. Belichick’s accidental text messages seem to be the foundation for Flores’ claim that the Giants treated him in a discriminatory fashion. Flores worked for one organization — the Patriots — before landing the head job with the Dolphins. In 2004, he landed a job as a scouting assistant with New England. He spent 15 years working for Belichick.
Flores’ lawsuit could potentially force investigators to seek access to Belichick’s cell phone records.
Brian Flores’ sense of entitlement to an NFL head coaching job has taken precedence over any sense of gratitude and loyalty toward the people who helped him land the Dolphins job. Belichick and Ross were part of the solution for Flores until the moment Flores decided they were part of the problem.
Belichick and Ross are now enemies, and Flores’ allies are the two white liberal lawyers who crafted his Twitter-approved lawsuit.
As a white owner or head coach, would you be nervous about hiring the next Brian Flores?
Shahid Khan, the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, committed to hiring Doug Pederson yesterday. Khan can fire Pederson tomorrow without fear of being smeared as racist. The same is true for Raiders owner Mark Davis and his new coach Josh McDaniels. So far this off-season, the NFL has hired five new coaches. All of them are white.
Let me repeat: Stephen Ross ran the blackest organization in the NFL. Brian Flores is attempting to get Ross removed from the league. Stephen A. Smith, Ryan Clark, and the rest of ESPN’s BLM gang are assisting Flores in his effort to kick Ross out of the league.
Brian Flores is hurting black coaches.
The race-bait idiots at ESPN won’t say this. Flores makes their job easier. This is all just a re-enactment of Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem kneeling. Kaepernick’s protest did not advance the cause of black people. It simply heightened animosity toward police, promoted the counterproductive “defund the police” movement, and increased the racial divide. All of it led to elevated violent crime rates in black neighborhoods.
Whitlock: Dolphins owner Stephen Ross made the mistake of caring more about Brian Flores’ success than Flores and black players did
Black NFL players have made it quite clear they want to inspire change on behalf of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Jacob Blake, Rayshard Brooks, and other high-profile victims of alleged white criminal misconduct.
Black football players enthusiastically appointed themselves experts on criminal justice reform, systemic racism, housing discrimination, and pay inequality.
During televised commercial breaks, current NFL players preach about “where they’re from” and how people who look like them are over-policed and over-incarcerated and will earn $10,000 less than their white counterparts.
That’s why I expect the next batch of “inspire change” commercials to feature former Dolphins coach Brian Flores. Surely the courageous freedom fighters speaking on behalf of George Floyd will lift their voices in support of Brian “Harriet Tubman” Flores.
As qualified as football players are to speak on local policing issues, it pales in comparison to what they know about coaching football. As the New York Times, ESPN, and Flores’ white attorneys have repeatedly pointed out, 70% of NFL players are black. These black players are eyewitnesses to the racism endured by Flores and countless black assistant coaches.
If they’re willing to take a knee for George Floyd, I’m sure black Dolphins players would be more than happy to support Flores’ lawsuit.
And this is my problem with the Brian Flores controversy and the repeated allegations that NFL owners refuse to hire black head coaches. NFL owners will do pretty much anything the players demand they do. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones took a knee during the national anthem because the players demanded he do so. Jones’ billionaire peers across the league did the same thing.
The players control the league. The players forced the owners to hand over nearly $100 million to finance the “Players Coalition,” a vanity project for current and former players to build social media brands as social justice warriors.
If NFL players wanted more black head coaches, more black offensive coordinators, they would demand it and it would happen overnight.
Players create the hype and buzz around assistant coaches. When a talented and charismatic assistant coach reveals himself on a staff, it’s the players who start gossiping about his impact, his ability to connect, and his relentless work ethic.
Brian Flores doesn’t need a lawsuit to get a head coaching job. He needs the support of black NFL players. The same is true for Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy.
But black people have been taught to prefer the charity of white people over the support of their own. This preference for charity played a role in Flores getting fired. Dolphins owner Stephen Ross figured out that Flores isn’t ruthless enough to win at the highest level.
If you believe Flores’ narrative, Ross tried to forge an alliance between Flores and an established NFL quarterback. Multiple outlets have reported that the established quarterback was Tom Brady. Ross is a Michigan grad and one of the school’s top boosters. Ross has known Brady for years.
Flores refused the meeting because it would violate the NFL’s tampering policy. Flores’ refusal violated common sense. Flores reportedly did not like Miami QB Tua Tagovailoa. Ross was offering Flores a solution, a path to a proven franchise quarterback. Ross was trying to put his head coach in position to win immediately.
That wasn’t racism. Ross was bending the rules to favor his black head coach. Proving again that no good deed goes unpunished.Whitlock: Firing of Brian Flores illustrates the outdatedness of evaluating NFL coaching decisions based on race
As is tradition, the NFL fired a bunch of coaches Monday morning, a day after its regular season concluded and ownership looked to blame someone for failing to meet expectations.
The Broncos kicked things off Sunday morning, dismissing Vic Fangio a day after Denver wrapped up its season with a loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. Twenty-four hours later, the Bears dumped Matt Nagy, the Vikings pink-slipped Mike Zimmer, and most surprisingly, the Dolphins discarded third-year coach Brian Flores.
The Flores firing will get the most attention. Miami finished with a winning record, 9-8, and ended its campaign with a victory over the Patriots. Plus, Flores is black. And we know how corporate media loves nothing more than to accuse NFL ownership of racism.
NFL owners are Trump supporters. What could be more racist than voting for Donald Trump over black icons Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden? NFL owners provided January 6 insurrectionists with the flagpoles and moose heads they used to try to overthrow our government and assassinate Nancy Pelosi.
Let me stop the sarcasm and make my serious point.
In the world of sports, there’s nothing more complicated and treacherous than NFL head-coaching decisions.
That’s why there’s nothing more bothersome than the simple-minded discussion of those decisions along black-white racial lines.
NFL owners want to win because winning further inflates their egos, celebrity, and feelings of masculinity. Skin color is no longer a driving force when it comes to serving an owner’s ego on a football field. He’s not picking a wife, a girlfriend, or a mistress.
He’s picking someone skilled at two things: 1) motivating young men with lots of discretionary money and free time; 2) managing a team of older men who assist the head coach in motivating young men.
The job requires tremendous savvy. Most of the people talking about the job on corporate media platforms, Twitter, and Facebook lack the kind of savvy necessary to be a successful football coach at any level.
That’s why the discussion of NFL head coaches is so stupid and fixates on race. There was a time when race played a major role in who could lead an NFL franchise. That time has passed. The same way there used to be a time when the skin color of the quarterback mattered, the skin color of the heavyweight boxing champion mattered, the skin color of the president and vice president mattered.
Things have changed here in America. Unfortunately, there are people who have built careers and social media brands pretending nothing has changed and we’re still locked in the 1920 and ’30s.
The truth is that the firing of Brian Flores proves how much things have changed.
Flores is out of a job today because the black general manager of the Miami Dolphins, Chris Grier, out-politicked Flores.
Miami-based ESPN NFL reporter Jeff Darlington tweeted the most pertinent information on the Flores firing.
“The decision to fire Flores can be summed up with one word: Relationships. His relationship with Grier and (quarterback) Tua (Tagovailoa) had deteriorated to a pretty bad place. Along with constant staff changes, owner Steve Ross no longer saw Flores as a healthy fit in Miami.”
Let me translate that for you. Grier has a better relationship with the Dolphins’ owner than Flores. A year ago, Grier stayed put at number five in the draft and selected Tagovailoa one spot ahead of Chargers star quarterback Justin Herbert. It was a risky pick. Tua is undersized and a bit injury-prone.
Grier tried to acquire the number-one overall pick from Cincinnati, presumably to select quarterback Joe Burrow. The Dolphins had three first-round picks in 2020. Whatever the trade package, it wasn’t enough to persuade the Bengals to relinquish Burrow.
Grier struck out on Burrow and Herbert. Tua is a disappointment.
Grier, like most people, is loyal to his decision. Grier and Tua are a package that Flores seemingly can’t enthusiastically support. Grier used his superior relationship with Stephen Ross to fire Flores, who has back-to-back winning seasons. Flores is the first Dolphins coach to record back-to-back winning seasons in nearly two decades.
What happened between Flores and Grier, two black men, is commonplace in the NFL. Relationships rule decision-making. At that altitude, relationships are often ruled by ego and personality, not race.
It’s a game of politics. Treacherous politics.
The prevailing sentiment is that Flores will get a second chance to lead an NFL team, perhaps as early as this off-season. NFL decision-makers can easily see what happened to Flores. The media will try to blind sports fans with race.Today's top stories
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