Two more coaches are joining Brian Flores’s lawsuit against the NFL, but their allegations of racism are as empty as his.
Steve Wilks, the former head coach of the Arizona Cardinals, and Ray Horton, a former defensive coordinator who interviewed for the Tennessee Titans head coach job, have jumped on Flores’s bandwagon.
Wilks claims he was “discriminatorily fired” after just one season. But white coaches, such as Mike Mularkey in 2012 and Rob Chudzinski in 2013, were also fired after just one season. These kinds of firings happen, as silly as they seem. Wilks alleges his replacement, Kliff Kingsbury, was given a longer leash with rookie quarterback Kyler Murray than Wilks was.
The complaint of Steve Wilks: pic.twitter.com/hYuatuXlhw
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) April 7, 2022
But Kingsbury likely landed the Cardinals job because he had coached Murray (whom they expected to draft) in college. Wilks’s rookie quarterback, Josh Rosen, was also a top-10 draft pick. The Cardinals chose Murray over Rosen, who is white, and by extension chose Kingsbury over Wilks, who went 3-13 in his one year on the job with a point differential of -200 — the fourth-worst in the Cardinals’ 103-year history.
Horton’s allegation has more substance, but it still doesn’t prove racism, as he and Flores would claim. Horton claims the Titans gave their head coaching job to Mularkey in 2016 before they interviewed him, in violation of the requirement (the Rooney Rule) that at least one black candidate be interviewed for all open head coaching jobs. Unlike Flores’s allegation that the Giants did the same, Horton has real evidence: In 2020, Mularkey admitted he was told he had the job before the interview process had finished.
The complaint of Ray Horton: pic.twitter.com/Htf0IbiP6v
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) April 7, 2022
This chiefly proves the Rooney Rule is a joke and encourages tokenism. It should be tossed, not reformed as the NFL wants. But most teams already know the one or two coaches they want for the job before they even begin the interview process. The Titans knew they wanted Mularkey over all of their interview candidates, not just Horton. Like Wilks and Flores, Horton’s only piece of evidence that racism is involved is that he is black and the coach who got hired is white.
Horton has a good case that the Titans broke the rules in their hiring process — as dumb as that rule may be. But neither he nor Flores and Wilks have any proof race was a factor. This is yet another embarrassing entry in a baseless racial narrative.
