John Riordan: Coaches rise in anger as racial reckoning looms larger for NFL

Brian Flores’ allegations against owners of several American Football teams sent shockwaves ahead of next week’s Super Bowl

Brian Flores’ allegations against owners of several American Football teams sent shockwaves ahead of next week’s Super Bowl. Picture: Kathryn Riley/Getty Images

The Lunar New Year ushered in the Year of the Tiger on Tuesday, just over 24 hours after the Cincinnati Bengals shocked the Kansas City Chiefs - and the NFL as a whole - with a thrilling overtime victory in the AFC Championship.

As I explained to my parents during a Sunday FaceTime call which coincided with the first quarter and some of the second, the AFC Championship is sort of like an All-Ireland semi-final for the Super Bowl (except your winning owner gets a trophy for watching and paying his players to win) and the first and second quarter format pre-existed and will now outlast the GAA’s water break. And yes, it can also kill momentum. Or offer a chance to go grab a beer.

The Super Bowl takes place next weekend in Los Angeles and the ingredients for a dream finale were almost too perfect; right up until the world fell apart for the NFL on Tuesday, the Year of the Tiger, the first day of Black History Month.

Two playoff weekends in a row had delivered drama of the most astonishing degree. Out of it emerged the Bengals and, on the other side in the NFC, the LA Rams, who beat their fellow Californians, the San Francisco 49ers.

In nine days, the Rams will get to play in the big show at their own big, new, shiny venue, the SoFi Stadium, and the half-time show will feature LA rap legends like Dre, Snoop and Kendrick Lamar.

At the height of this long dreary winter, we need this.

The NFL needed it, too, after a decade of managing cases of player abuse, cases in which the players suffered as victims and acted as perpetrators. Executives had ridden multiple public relations storms, settling two critical lawsuits out of court: one to do with retired players enduring the long term impact of concussion and another to do with former 49er Colin Kaepernick’s inability to find a team that would hire him. It was pretty obvious that the quarterback was blacklisted for being the most prominent player to kneel during the national anthem in protest at police brutality against black people all across the US. The path of least resistance in both situations was to write large cheques.

Suddenly the playoffs fixed everything and we all descended into a stupor, incredulous that football could deliver so much chaos and entertainment.

Just as suddenly, the Tuesday afternoon release of a damning set of legal papers opened up an old, deep wound which could well end up being the biggest battle the NFL will ever encounter.

On January 10, Brian Flores was fired by the Miami Dolphins. There was probably an argument to retain Flores after he had led his players to a pair of relatively successful seasons - success being defined as more wins than losses for an outfit that has been the pits for years.

In a league in which 70% of the players are black, the firing of Flores meant that we returned to just one of the 32 coaches that looked like the majority of the NFL’s most vital constituency.

But nobody could have believed the degree to which Flores was ready to drop the hammer on his former boss and the league as a whole.

There are 58 pages in his lawsuit but the easiest bombshells to zero in on involved a text message exchange between Flores and New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, the grandaddy of all coaches and the most successful of all time. In the cringeworthy conversation, Belichick figures out he is texting the wrong Brian when he was intending on congratulating Brian Daboll for being hired as the next New York Giants coach. And Flores figures out that since he hadn’t yet been interviewed by the Giants, then he is simply there to make up the numbers in the interview process so that the hiring team are compliant with the Rooney Rule.

The Rooney Rule is the imperfect solution to the NFL’s impossible situation. Flores would be the first to tell you the Giants ownership should not be forced to hire him. But he shouldn’t be expected to accept that being added to an interview process as a token gesture is what the Rooney Rule intended.

Almost as damning but potentially creating more legal jeopardy for the accused was the other allegation which earned equal billing.

This time, Flores’ charge was against his own owner at the Dolphins, Steven Ross, who had incentivised him to lose games with the aim of earning better picks in the annual player draft. Remarkably, the bounty on offer per loss was $100,000.

The thinking behind ‘tanking’ is widely accepted as beneficial. If Flores hadn’t refused, Ross and the Dolphins would have possibly recruited Joe Burrow in the 2019 draft. Instead Burrow went to Cincinnati, convinced the Bengals to also draft his college teammate and fellow National Champion at LSU, wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase, and the rest could be history next week at the Super Bowl.

Flores’s decision to turn the money down is beyond admirable but it was also driven by an understandable sense of self-preservation. A black coach with a losing record won’t last long at the highest level of the game, whether or not it’s a bribe that gets him there.

But in turn, his decision to go public and fight for what’s right is a sure fire way of potentially rendering him toxic in the eyes of all 32 owners across the league. You’d like to think that maybe one of them will seize the moment now but they didn’t do it before when Kaepernick was clearly more talented than at least half of the employed quarterbacks plying their trade in the NFL.

Just over 20 years ago, infamous OJ Simpson attorney Johnny Cochran set his sights on the NFL after two of the largest workplace race discrimination cases in history, involving Texaco and Coca-Cola. Eventually the Rooney Rule was the band aid which was deployed to help black coaches get a fairer chance.

But up until this week, never was there such blatant evidence that a coach was going into an interview for a job he had no chance of winning until Belichick’s clumsy texting exposed the entire ruse.

As we’ve seen before, the NFL hates to be in court where discovery can unearth more damning details. As bad as it is for them, it’s difficult to see how Miami Dolphins owner Ross can possibly overcome the scenario he has created for himself. Fans and gamblers alike are cheated out of money when owners like him seek to impact a result, not to mention the players and coaches set up for failure and all the knock-on impact which that entails.

The gambling angle might be self-serving to many but it’s nonetheless fascinating as legal barriers drop away. Betting on games is now achieved with the aid and abetting of the teams and the league, creating the potential for a dizzying implosion for all concerned.

The Bengals were very recently very bad and they benefited well from a good system that allows the worst teams to draft the best prospects. But that, of course, pulls out bad actions from bad actors.

Another black coach, Hue Jackson, wanted to stand beside Flores and spoke up Wednesday. “I know what our men go through,” he told ESPN, detailing his own experience of a four-year plan instituted by his higher-ups at the Cleveland Browns that approximated the all-out bribery attempted by Ross. “They talked about things that had nothing to do with winning: Aggregated age, number of draft picks. It did not talk about winning or losing until year three and four.”

Only at the back end of the plan was Jackson expected to win the requisite number of games to achieve a run at the playoffs. He was promised bonuses for anything but winning. He was handed a team that wouldn’t win.

“I tried to sound this alarm a while back,” he revealed, “but nobody wanted to listen because the record was so bad. So you didn’t have a chance to make a point because the narrative was ‘well, he’s just a bad coach’.

“I sat there in an office with (Browns owner) Jimmy Haslam and his wife and my agent and my wife and (Haslam) said ‘I feel bad about what I did to you’ because I had told him ‘you have killed my career’. That’s when I was given a contract extension.”

Weeks later he was fired. The Browns reacted swiftly Wednesday describing his allegations as “categorically false”.

It’s exhausting and did I mention that Tom Brady retired and that the Washington Football Team completed their long awaited nickname change from Redskins to Commanders.

Oh and there’s a Super Bowl next week.

- @JohnWRiordan