Brian Francisco Flores is an American football coach in the National Football League. He began his NFL career with the New England Patriots, where he served as an assistant coach from 2008 to 2018.
Brian Flores: Reaction| Contract salary| Attorney| Lawyer| Suing
Reaction:
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.
Contract Salary:
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.”
Attorney:
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”.
Lawyer:
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.
Suing:
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.
