Recently fired Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores didn’t intend to, but he recently made the best case against the Rooney Rule.
Last week, Flores filed a class-action lawsuit against the NFL and all 32 teams, alleging that there is racial discrimination in the NFL’s coach hiring processes. While Flores makes some laughable demands — such as urging the NFL to give teams that hire racial minority coaches better draft picks and more cap space — he also made some legitimate accusations against the league that show why the Rooney Rule needs to go. The rule requires NFL teams to interview at least one minority candidate for every available head coaching job.
For the record, that wasn’t Flores’s intent. He thinks there should be more force used against NFL teams to ensure they hire more black head coaches. However, the allegations he made, if true, show how this type of affirmative action benefits neither side.
Texts Flores included in the lawsuit between him and New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick show that Belichick knew who the New York Giants were going to hire as the head coach before Flores was even interviewed for the position. That’s fine if the Giants knew who they wanted as the head coach and hired who they thought was the best person available for the job. However, it’s unfortunate that the team had to waste Flores’s time just to check a diversity box.
Flores also alleges that the Denver Broncos didn’t give him a serious interview for their head coaching job back in 2019. He said that the team’s general manager John Elway showed up hungover, disheveled, and late to the interview.
That’s a waste of time for everyone involved. If Elway had no interest in hiring Flores, then why should Elway have to do the interview? And why should the NFL, in pretending to be woke, have Flores fly out to Denver for a sham meeting?
Flores shouldn’t get special treatment because of his skin color, and teams also shouldn’t use him as a prop because of his skin color, either.
The easy solution for the NFL: Stop the nonsense and let teams hire the best available coaches. Having a better head coach helps a team win games and make money. Therefore, being racist is an illogical position for an NFL team to take. If a team wants to discriminate, it will suffer the consequences on the field.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
