Brian Flores, former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, has filed a 58-page class-action lawsuit  against the National Football League (NFL) and all 32 teams, alleging racial discrimination in their hiring practice.

Flores, who is Black, coached the Dolphins for three years. The team had a winning record in two of those years. In the 2021 season, he coached the team to eight victories in their last nine games, including a victory over last year’s Super Bowl champion, Tampa Bay. But after the season ended, Flores was fired with two years remaining on his contract.

Flores’s lawsuit against the NFL states:

While racial barriers have been eroded in many areas, Defendant the National Football League (“NFL” or the “League”) lives in a time of the past. As described throughout this Class Action Complaint, the NFL remains rife with racism, particularly when it comes to the hiring and retention of Black Head Coaches, Coordinators and General Managers.

Further, the suit states:

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.

The statistics tell the story of this racism in the hiring (or, more accurately, the non-hiring) of Black NFL coaches. Of the 32 teams in a league where, as Flores’s suit points out, almost three-quarters of the players are Black, there is one Black head coach. This discrimination against Black people is apparent in other coaching and front office positions around the NFL: only four Black offensive coordinators, 11 Black defensive coordinators, eight Black special teams coordinators, three Black quarterback coaches, and six Black general managers.

At the end of the 2021 season, there were eight NFL head coaching vacancies. So, far five have been hired—all white. During the last three cycles of head coach searches, out of the 17 hired, only one was Black.

Flores was scheduled to interview for the head coaching job of the New York Giants when the head coach of another team mistakenly texted him that the Giants had already picked their new head coach, who is white. Flores went to his interview with the Giants knowing that he was not going to be hired. The lawsuit alleges that the Giants only went through the motions of interviewing Flores because of an official NFL policy adopted 20 years ago, known as the “Rooney Rule,” requiring that teams looking to hire head coaches interview at least two minority candidates. The lawsuit alleges that the rule clearly has not worked to achieve the supposed goal of diversifying the ranks of the coaches and other top positions, given the actual statistics.¹

The history of racism in the NFL has been well chronicled.

• In the mid-1930s, George Preston Marshall moved his Boston Braves football team to Washington and renamed them the Washington Redskins. Marshall, a notorious racist said, "We'll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites."² And despite years of protest by many people that the name “Redskins” was racist and part of a long history of treating Native American people as subhuman, the owners of the team only changed the name in 2020.
• From 1933 to 1946, there was a ban on Black players in the NFL. During the 1950s there were unwritten quotas that restricted the number of Black players for years.³
• Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, was blackballed from the NFL for leading a movement of players to refuse to stand for the national anthem in protest of police murder and brutality.⁴ The NFL settled Kaepernick’s lawsuit, basically admitting they blackballed him.
• It was recently discovered that the NFL applied different standards for Black players who filed claims for funds from the settlement in the class-action lawsuit that resulted in the NFL’s agreeing to payments to ex-players who suffered brain injuries from the time they were active players. The applying of different standards resulted in Black players’ claims being denied, while white players’ claims were accepted for having the same cognitive impairment scores as those Black players who were denied.⁵
• The NFL instituted a penalty to stop the players from “excessive celebration” on the field. In my opinion, this was to stop Black players from expressing joy during the game. Black people expressing joy has always been criminalized in this country.⁶ (For instance, Black people have been arrested for cheering during their child’s graduation.⁷)⁸
• During this past year, racist emails between Jon Gruden, former coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, and Bruce Allen, general manager of the Washington Football Team, surfaced during the league’s investigation into the sexual misconduct allegation of the Washington team’s owner and other executives. In an email to Allen, Gruden described the NFL Players Association executive director, DeMaurice Smith, who is Black, as "Dumboriss Smith has lips the size of michellin (sic) tires.”⁹ At the time of the disclosure of these emails, Gruden was the head coach of the Raiders. He was forced to resign.

The systematic oppression of Black people in this country started with slavery and continues today, deeply woven into the fabric of all aspects of society. If you can understand that, then you should not be surprised with Flores’s allegations, which are another example of the shit Black players have faced and continue to face in the NFL. Sport is an important part of the societal relations that exist under this capitalist-imperialist system. In the NFL, the team owners are part of a “good old boy” network. Many of them are Trump supporters. They are wealthy, entitled, and arrogant, and they view their players as property. And they expect the coaches to be like the overseers during slavery who did the bidding of the slave owners.¹⁰

In an interview, Flores said that he might be blackballed from the NFL because of the lawsuit. He said that even if he does get a coaching job, he will not drop the suit. Flores said, "I understand the risks, and yes, it was a difficult decision. I went back and forth. I love coaching. I do. It's something that I'm passionate about. It brings me joy…. But this is bigger than that… If I never coach again but there's a significant change, it'll be worth it."¹¹