Two More Black Coaches Join Brian Flores’s Racial Discrimination Suit Against the NFL. The Filing also Includes New Evidence the Miami Dolphins’ Owner Asked Him to Lose Games on Purpose

From [HERE] Two additional coaches joined Brian Flores’s racial discrimination lawsuit against the National Football League, expanding a case involving two sensitive issues—race and tanking—roiling the sport. 

Steve Wilks and Ray Horton are now part of Flores’s proposed class action lawsuit, which alleges that the league and teams discriminate against Black coaches in their pursuit of head coaching opportunities. Wilks, currently an assistant with the Carolina Panthers, was the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals for one season in 2018. Horton, a longtime defensive assistant, has never been a head coach. 

The amended suit also includes new evidence related to one of Flores’s related claims. As part of his original suit, Flores accused Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross of offering to pay him in order to lose games when Flores was the team’s coach. 

An addition to the suit now says that Flores wrote a memo in 2019 to Dolphins executives that documented Ross’s desire to lose games. The Dolphins gave that letter to the NFL weeks ago amid the NFL’s probe of the situation, a person familiar with the investigation said. 

Ross has previously said Flores’s allegations are “false, malicious and defamatory.” The NFL has said his lawsuit is meritless, although commissioner Roger Goodell has acknowledged that the league has room to improve its diversity in top posts. The league is running an investigation into Flores’s tanking allegations. 

An NFL spokesman declined further comment. 

Flores’s lawsuit, originally filed in February in the U.S. Southern District Court of New York, shined a newfound spotlight on what has long been one of the NFL’s thorniest issues. For years, the league has been criticized for its dearth of minority coaches and executives and it has made numerous attempts to spur change by changing and rewriting rules surrounding the interview and hiring process. 

Following the recent retirement of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Bruce Arians, the ascension of Todd Bowles into the top post, there are six Black head coaches in the NFL. More than half of the league’s players are Black. 

The allegations from Flores, who was Miami’s coach from 2019 through 2021, expand beyond the Dolphins. He accused two other clubs, the New York Giants and Denver Broncos, of giving him sham interviews in order to satisfy the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview minority candidates for roles such as head coach or general manager. Both teams denied the allegations and said the interviews were legitimate. 

His accusation that Ross, the Dolphins owner, offered to pay him in order to lose games in 2019—thereby tanking in order to secure a better draft pick—has drawn equal if not more attention. His lawsuit says Ross offered to pay him $100,000 per loss and that Ross was upset after Flores declined and the team won a handful of games. If the accusation proves true, it could land Ross in severe trouble with the NFL for violating the game’s competitive integrity and perhaps even legal authorities under anti-sports-bribery laws. 

Wilks was the Cardinals coach for just one season in 2018 before he was fired. He alleges that he wasn’t given a fair opportunity to coach a team that drafted a rookie quarterback, Josh Rosen, who struggled and was ultimately just used as a “bridge” coach who was meant to keep the seat warm until the team was ready to succeed. The suit contrasts Wilks’s firing with the retention of general manager Steve Keim, who is white, and was arrested for driving under the influence that year. The team suspended Keim for five games and fined him at the time. 

“The decisions we made after the 2018 season were very difficult ones,” the Cardinals said in a statement. “But as we said at the time, they were entirely driven by what was in the best interests of our organization and necessary for team improvement. We are confident that the facts reflect that and demonstrate that these allegations are untrue.”

Horton, who has been the defensive coordinator for numerous teams including the Pittsburgh Steelers and Detroit Lions, accuses the Titans of giving him an illegitimate interview, in order to satisfy the Rooney Rule or make the process appear nondiscriminatory, when the team had already settled on another candidate. A spokesman for the Titans did not immediately respond to a request for comment