The headline is not great, but it is ultimately going to be true.
Yesterday, former Miami Dolphins coach Brain Flores filed a 58-page lawsuit against the league alleging racist hiring practices. He pulled a pin on a grenade and tossed it with precision. He knows this, and said he understands he may never coach in the league again — honestly, this is the kind of bridge burning from which few careers in any profession typically recover.
He doesn’t care. That is to be commended.
Unfortunately his main point of his thesis is going to go unheard.
He filed:
“Its 32 owners — none of whom are black — profit substantially from the labor of NFL players, 70 percent of whom are black,” the Flores suit states. “The owners watch the game 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.”
All of that might be true. None of that proves anything.
What does is the second rocket he launched. The one where the Dolphins owner was willing to pay him an extra $100K per LOSS.
Flores claimed in his lawsuit that owner Steven Ross told him “that he would pay him $100,000 for every loss, and the team’s general manager, Chris Grier, told Mr. Flores that ‘Steve’ was ‘mad’ that Mr. Flores’ success in winning games that year was ‘compromising [the team’s] draft position.’”
The quotation marks are intentional around the words “Steve” and “mad”? They suggest Flores has an email, voicemail, text or other documentation from Grier relaying that message.
That is a smoking gun, if he does.
It is something that another Black former head coach co-signed with.
Hue Jackson took a lot of lumps during his time as the Cleveland Browns head man.
In another tweet, Kimberley Diemert (the executive director of Jackson’s foundation) added that they have records that would support Flores’ case. She added that Jackson and team executives Sashi Brown, Paul DePodesta, and Andrew Berry — who is now the team’s General Manager — were all paid bonus money to tank in 2016 and 2017.
Jackson replied by saying he “can back up every word I’m saying.”
The NFL has been able to wade its way through a myriad of controversies of late… SpyGate… DeflateGate… BountyGate… a long history of racial hiring practices. If it is proven that owners were paying out bonus’ to NOT WIN the repercussions will be extreme.
It will be expounded by the partnerships to gambling sites, expansion into live bets, and other ‘integrity of the game’ questions.
The question will not be who replaces Flores in Miami… it will be who replaces the owner.
