God has gifted me with a special talent to coach the game of football, but the need for change is bigger than my personal goals. ---Brian Flores
As I wrote a few days ago, I was greatly dismayed at the announcement that three-year Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores was being fired following his second straight winning season...the first time that's happened with this franchise since 2003...and winning five games in 2019, a year the team was widely expected to go winless after it had deliberately divested itself of its star players. And it was that 2019 season that soured Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, an incredibly wealthy New York real estate magnate (~$70 billion), to prematurely end Flores' tenure. You see, Ross, who apparently holds no appreciation for the sanctity and dignity of the game and doesn't care about Dolphins ticket holders who shell out their money and attend games expecting a reasonable effort from their team, WANTED Miami to tank that year in order to pick up star quarterback Joe Burrow in the next year's draft. Earlier this week Flores announced he is suing the National Football League, the Miami Dolphins and two other NFL franchises for racial discrimination as well as what he alleges Ross offered him in 2019: $100,000 for each game he lost...Flores did NOT give in to this affront to the game's integrity and instead inspired his players to play beyond their talent level. The lawsuit is designed to be class-action, apparently intended for others to come forward with their own stories about racial bias and abuse with coaching in this league. One ex-coach, Hue Jackson, has already stepped forward, claiming that while coaching the Cleveland Browns that club's owner paid him the same hundred grand for losing games. Also, after Flores was fired, he applied for an open head coaching job for the New York Giants...they scheduled an interview but before that happened, he discovered that the team had already decided on another candidate and that HIS interview was only a cynical formality to comply with the 2003 Rooney Rule that mandated teams have at least one minority candidate interview for vacant coaching positions. Brian Flores alleges discrimination in NFL coaching hiring...the figures confirm his stance since the number of black head coaches in this 32-team league has dwindled in 18 years from 3 to just 1 while the vast majority of players in the league are African American. But noting disturbing trends and relating an unprovable conversation may not be enough to convince a civil court of one's allegations, however compelling they might be. Still, for my part I believe Brian Flores is a man of integrity...and Stephen Ross is quite the opposite. May the good guy win this time around...and that Flores will continue to be able to exercise his obvious coaching gifts in the future. But I don't think I'll ever again be willing to follow the Miami Dolphins while this amoral and manipulative owner is running things...
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