Does the NFL Have a Race Problem?

Former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a class-action lawsuit against the NFL and three of its teams this week alleging racist hiring practices against Black coaches. The 40-year-old was fired last month after three years despite coming off the Dolphins’ first back-to-back winning seasons since 2003.

⚖️ The deets: The federal lawsuit alleges the league has discriminated against Flores and dozens of other Black candidates for racial reasons, denying them positions as head coaches, offensive and defensive coordinators, and general managers.

• It includes screenshots of a text conversation between Flores and Patriots head coach Bill Belichick that seemingly prove the New York Giants had already chosen their head coach before interviewing Flores.

Both the NFL and the Miami Dolphins published statements calling the lawsuit meritless.

• The Dolphins also broadly denied an allegation in Flores’ suit that owner Stephen Ross offered him $100,000 for every loss in order to obtain a higher draft pick – which, if true, would raise legal questions involving anti-bribery laws and sports.

🔢 By the numbers: 70.7% of NFL players are people of color, and 58% are Black. But only three of the 27 active head coaches are non-white (11%), and only one of them, Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin, is Black (4%).

• There are five people of color holding general manager positions (15.6%), all of whom are Black. The NFL has zero Black owners and just two owners of color, one of whom co-owns a team with her husband.

📅 Zoom out: The NFL is no stranger to racial controversies. In the early 2000s, it instituted the ‘Rooney Rule’ – a policy requiring teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and key front office jobs – in response to a study showing black head coaches, despite winning a higher percentage of games, were less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired than their white counterparts.

• Last year, it settled a case with Black former players who alleged the league’s $900+ million concussion settlement gave doctors the option of using race-based norms to estimate athletes’ cognitive abilities when they were playing.
• The norms assumed that Black former players started with worse cognitive functioning than white former players, meaning a Black player’s mental skills would have to fall to lower thresholds than a white former player to qualify for a payout.