I usually don’t comment on sports issues in these political op-eds, but Mr. Flores dropped a bomb on the NFL. About time, I say!
Let’s consider the current situation in pro football. Before Mr. Flores was fired as the Dolphins’ head coach (certainly not for his winning seasons!), he was only the second black coach active in the NFL. (There are a few more now as Goodell and the NFL tries to save face.) On the other hand, about 70% of the players are black.
Brian in his lawsuit against the NFL and three of its teams, the Broncos, Dolphins, and Giants, I believe, states that the NFL is run like an old Southern plantation. I’d say the teams are run like multiple plantations! The NFL is an organization of white, obscenely rich owners—not one black among them, so let’s call them the slaveowners of the plantations—and they exploit black football players (and maybe white ones too, considering all players’ gladiator status), so they’re the plantations’ slaves.
Apparently the final straw for Mr. Flores was an errant text message sent to him by the Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick congratulating him for being selected as the Giants’ new head coach. Only Belichick was congratulating another Brian (both Brians once worked for that Patriots’ coach, I believe). Oops! In other words, the Giants were just checking off that Rooney-rule box that forces them to interview minorities for leadership jobs even though they had no intention of hiring Mr. Flores. Worse, Belichick knew the Giants had hired that other Brian three days before Brian Flores’s interview!
While I’m not sure that it’s part of the lawsuit, Mr. Flores also accused the Dolphins’ owner of offering to give him $100k per game he coached to lose. The idea was to give the Dolphins organization leverage in the NFL draft. I suspect that Brian’s refusal is = why he was fired. Think about that! If a pro football player throws a game, he’d be banned from the game for life at the very least. That Dolphins’ owner, one of the slaveowners of our story, mind you, isn’t held to that same standard. He should be! He should be barred from football and sent to jail. This double standard is unconscionable!
I also don’t know how this lawsuit will go for Mr. Flores. I suppose he might end up like Colin Kaepernick, that is blacklisted by the NFL and never able to coach again. You can bet the NFL’s fascist, white, and rich team owners will band together to fight this lawsuit to try to keep their plantations running like they want.
NFL team owners are all part of the fascist plutocracy in America. It’s time to revolt against them! Will it happen? I have my doubts. Fascism is on the march in America at many levels. But I know that any player who doesn’t recognize this as a problem is naive at best or part of the fascist conspiracy at worst. We can only hope that changes are made to end the corruption in this very popular national sport.