The NFL’s Problems With Diversity Stem From the Owners

In the wake of Brian Flores’s lawsuit, let's examine what the league office has already done and whether litigation can be an impetus for much-needed change. Plus, top battles in the draft, Super Bowl prop bets and one more Tom Brady story.

Ron Rivera knows how a lot of coaches sympathizing with Brian Flores, in the wake of his bombshell lawsuit dropping, are feeling this week. Mostly because, at one point, he was that young minority coach: knocking on the door, year after year after year, without an invitation to walk through it.

And while he’d suspected the act of Rooney Rule box-checking from teams before, there was one instance, a little over a decade ago, that stood apart from the rest.

“I won’t say which team, but it was early in the process and the Rooney Rule really had just started,” Rivera said, from a quick vacation in his native California. “And so when it came time to interview, what a lot of people said was this particular coach was getting the job anyways. And I was asked to interview late in the process, and one thing that we noted was that they hadn’t interviewed a minority yet. …

“So I just said, ‘You know what? I’m not going to do that.’”

That’s right, Rivera did what few coaches in that situation would now, let alone back then.

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“That kind of struck me as, ‘Really, O.K., well, you know what? I’m not going to take my time and go up there and interview,’” Rivera said. “And then the next day they announce this is the guy. Because if you go up there and you interview, and you’re the last guy, and the very next day they bring somebody in, to me that would’ve felt really sh--ty, to be honest with you. That’s why I didn’t do it.”

Within Flores’s lawsuit, both the Giants and Broncos were accused directly of such practices with the ex-Dolphins coach on the business end of them. Both teams strongly denied going into interviews with Flores with anything other than the best intentions to give him a shot at winning their jobs.

At this point, though, drilling too far down on the individual facts of Flores’s case against the league and its team amounts to missing the forest for the trees.

Whether or not the Giants or Broncos individually were guilty of wrongdoing doesn’t erase two decades of frustration from Black coaches and executives over the lack of progress in improving the diversity among NFL team decision-makers. And the concept of the “sham” interview is just one example of how efforts to make progress have hit roadblock after roadblock to prevent the kind of big breakthrough so many have been waiting for.

Rivera’s felt it, for sure.

Flores did too, of course, as did so many others. Which is why the events of this week aren’t so much about one man’s experience as they are about years of frustration finally reaching a tipping point, and at a time when just one of 27 NFL head coaches happens to be Black.

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Welcome to the Super Bowl bye-week GamePlan! And first, a programming note: We’re going to use next week’s column to dive into every facet of the Rams-Bengals showdown. This week, we’re going to swing around the league a little more. And in doing so, you’ll get …

• A preview of some of the jockeying for position atop April’s draft.

• A few things to follow on the coaching front.

• Super Bowl prop bets!

• An awesome Tom Brady prank war.

But we’re starting with the story of the week, and one that’s sure to be one of the stories of the year in the NFL.

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Maybe the easiest way to describe the idea of what Flores did this week is to say the ex-Miami coach changed the arena in which this particular fight was being waged. Really, history shows, as much as anything else, he’s bringing it back to where it started.

The impetus for the Rooney Rule, written into NFL bylaws in 2003, was, in fact, the threat of a class-action lawsuit from high-powered attorney Johnnie Cochran, who commissioned a report in ’02 that laid bare a slew of staggering facts. Over the league’s first 82 years, the report said, more than 400 head coaches had been hired, only six of whom were Black; and of the 22 hires most recent to the report, just two were Black.

The interesting thing? At the time, there were more Black head coaches than there are now.

“They need a game plan for change, because what they are doing is not working,” the late Cochran told The New York Times. “In the last three years, it has gone backward, not forward. Some of these owners have exhibited a mentality that they are not going to change unless you have a carrot-stick concept. Tie this issue into draft picks and you will see results.”

The NFL didn’t do that, but to avoid litigation, 19 years ago, it did create the Rooney Rule.

For the league, the idea was to handle the issue on its own terms, rather than have anything dictated by the courts. And now, we’re back here again, mostly because the 19-year effort to manage the problem in-house is failing miserably.

One league official, in describing how he sees this, drew parallels to the concussion case, where players who were misled or flat-out lied to for decades couldn’t get so much as an acknowledgment of the problem until they jammed on the nuclear button and sued the league. That put needed pressure on the owners and resulted in a billion-dollar settlement.

In this case, the NFL itself isn’t claiming there’s no issue. In fact, the league office itself has pulled just about every lever to try and fix the problem in recent years. And the problem now is very clear—owners aren’t responding to the league’s action with action of their own. That’s how Flores got to his own personal tipping point, which is really reflective of a collective frustration in the coaching and executive ranks beginning to boil over.

“I view it as a situation that’s regrettable. It’s regrettable that we’re at this point,” said Fritz Pollard Alliance executive director and former Cardinals GM Rod Graves on Thursday. “But the course of action seemed inevitable. You just didn’t know who and when and what. But I think when you look at the history and what’s currently happening with head coaching positions, the reaction certainly is not surprising. ...

“I put a lot into trying to make the league a better place. And so have so many other people before me. To see us get to this point was really one of sadness for me personally, and while I understand the steps that have to be taken, the dialogue that is taking place around this topic has been going on for years. And it’s my feeling that it never should’ve gotten to this point.”

And the read of people like Rivera and Graves on Flores’s action?

It’s not so much about winning in court, as it is about putting pressure on owners to change their behavior. That pressure will be financial. It’ll also be in the courts’ ability to pull back the curtain on exactly what’s been happening behind the scenes as the league’s diversity numbers have worsened in recent years.

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Rivera has ideas.

For one, he thinks the excuse that minority coaches often hear—that an owner was simply more comfortable with another candidate—needs to be addressed. Like a lot of others, he wants to get young, diverse assistants into social setting with owners on a consistent basis, be it at combines or owners’ meetings, to break down the walls.

He has his own story on how that can work, too. Years ago, Rivera was in such a setting with Chargers owner Dean Spanos. The two hit it off, exchanged numbers, and in 2007, after firing Marty Schottenheimer and bringing in Norv Turner, Spanos recommended Turner try to get Rivera out of Chicago, where Rivera’s contract talks were at an impasse. Turner hired him as linebackers coach and promoted him to coordinator the next year.

A decade after that, Rivera wound up hiring Turner as his offensive coordinator in Carolina, and brought aboard Turner’s son Scott as quarterbacks coach. Scott Turner is now Rivera’s offensive coordinator in Washington.

Long story short, those connections can grow deep, and can be ignited through simple interaction that really isn’t that hard to generate.

“They’re going to hire who they know, people like them,” Rivera said. “Well, hell, then let’s try to put people in front of them so they can get to know them and they can be more comfortable with them. One of the things that I’ve said before is when they have the owners’ meetings, why wouldn’t they do something where they bring in the next group of guys, the next 10 to 20 guys and put them in front of the owners, put them in front of the GMs?”

Then, Rivera continued, there’s the fact that coaches can help on their own, too.

Rivera remembers back during the Bears’ Super Bowl year of 2006, when he was coordinator in Chicago, hearing criticism that the defense he was running was really just head coach Lovie Smith’s defense.

“God bless Lovie, because he came out and said, It’s Ron’s defense, Ron calls the defense, Ron makes those decisions,” Rivera recalled. “And because Coach said that, I started to get taken more seriously.”

So despite his own defensive background, Rivera let Sean McDermott and Steve Wilks call his defenses in Carolina, and both wound up ending up as head coaches in part because of it.

Of course, McDermott’s success speaks for itself. And as for Wilks, well, his story illustrates another issue—one that Black coaches often tie back to Tony Dungy’s firing in Tampa after the 2001 season and Jim Caldwell’s firing in Detroit after the ’17 season. Dungy was fired after three straight playoff seasons. Caldwell got whacked, like Flores, after consecutive winning seasons for a franchise that hadn’t broken .500 in back-to-back seasons in years.

Wilks’s case was different. His Cardinals, in 2018, were the worst team in the league. But in his first shot as a head coach, he wasn’t given time other coaches have to grow—and wound up fired after that single season. Which displayed, as the Dungy and Caldwell examples do, that some coaches were getting more patience than others.

“The hard part for him there, he was the last guy hired,” Rivera said. “So all the guys that were on his coaching list, they were already locked in. He had to hire guys that he really didn’t want to have to hire. He had to keep guys he didn’t want to keep. In fact, that’s what got him, some of those guys that were kept, were the guys that everybody was coming back to and whispering about, ‘This, that and the other thing.’ And that causes a problem.”

Rivera also mentioned the importance of former Panthers owner Jerry Richardson giving him a third year.

“My first two years were hard, but we had shown progress, we were going in the right direction,” he said. “He didn’t listen to people saying, ‘Oh well, he’s failed. Move on. Hire yourself a legitimate coach.’ Because I got one more year, I was able to show it. And it all came together.”

And he’s right to focus on an owner.

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While acknowledging the necessity of an action like Flores’s, given all the fits and starts with even the smallest pieces of progress, Graves believes good steps have been taken. He used to work at 345 Park Ave., and working with the league office in his current capacity, he can say plenty of those in New York are genuinely working to improve diversity across the league, with commissioner Roger Goodell prominent among them.

The problem isn’t there. It’s with owners who are ultimately charged with making the decisions on which coaches to hire, and which coaches not to.

“The conversations I’ve had with the commissioner, with his office, with owners, I do sense a heightened awareness,” Graves said. ‘There’s been improved processes, more inclusive processes with respect to interviewing and all of that. We’re at the point now where those areas have certainly been given a lot of attention, and there’s certainly things there that point to areas of promise.

“But it’s the final decisions, where the owners are the only ones who have control there. And if you don’t embrace diversity, if you’re not committed to it, then whatever work is done in the interim is not going to make a difference. And that’s where we are.”

Now, it’s not as if there haven’t been steps taken.

In fact, on the GM side, there have been tremendous strides. Over the first three hiring cycles of this decade, 2020 to ’22, six of 11 GM openings have been filled by minority candidates. So something, whatever it is exactly, has been working.

Of course, that hasn’t done much to quell the frustration of coaches, especially in a year in which the pipeline was stocked with experienced, respected candidates like Bills DC Leslie Frazier, Bucs DC Todd Bowles, Rams DC Raheem Morris, 49ers DC DeMeco Ryans and Patriots LBs coach Jerod Mayo.

To this point, six head-coaching seats have been taken, with Doug Pederson landing in Jacksonville Thursday night. Three remain and the fear is very real, in both the league office and coaching circles, that things could be trending toward an 0-for-9 finish.

“The key word is frustration, and this has been mounting frustration over the years,” said Graves. “Last year, given the opportunities that were out there, there was only one head-coach hire and that was David Culley. … Then, of course, you get a slate this year of just outstanding coaches who are eligible to rise up and fill one of the nine positions that were available, and to date, we don’t have one. And I don’t know, for all the work that these guys have put into it. All I hear from them is frustration and voicing unfairness.”

And it recalls to Rivera not just how he felt all those years ago, but also a pattern that remains to this day.

Rivera had been requested to interview with eight different teams before landing the Panthers job in 2011. Only one of those eight jobs he failed to get went to a minority candidate. The one outlier just so happened to be Mike Tomlin who, 15 years later, is still on the job for the Steelers, as the league’s only Black coach.

“Guys like Brian start at the bottom, he was basically the assistant special teams guy, which is where I started, as a volunteer quality-control coach,” Rivera said. “I went through that whole process. So I can see the frustration when you sit there and you think, ‘Man, I’m going through all this, I’ve worked my way from the bottom up to where I wanted to go and then all this happens.’ I can sense the frustration. It’s valid. It a guy’s life’s work.”

Maybe this will affect major change. Maybe it won’t.

But what it reflects it’s the obvious: The way it’s been done hasn’t been working.

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FIVE STAR MATCHUPS

Being Senior Bowl week, I figured we’d give you five matchups to set up draft season—with players who’ll likely be jockeying with one another for position.

1) Michigan DE Aidan Hutchinson vs. Oregon DE Kayvon Thibodeaux: Hutchinson’s stock went through the roof over the course of the fall, moving the Wolverines’ senior pass rusher from a spot somewhere in the teens to a potential No. 1 pick. And while he’s not a Myles Garrett, Chase Young or Joey Bosa athletically, Hutchinson brings a very high floor and a complete game to the table. Meanwhile, the explosive Thibodeaux, as I see it, has slipped a bit in the minds of scouts, particularly because those who’ve had live exposure to him saw him as physically smaller than expected.

2) Alabama OT Evan Neal vs. N.C. State OL Ikem Ekwonu: Neal is freakish athletically, but not quite as polished as Ekwonu. Both guys have played both tackle and guard. With Neal, the question is whether he can round out his game. With Ekwonu, it’s more whether he’ll wind up playing tackle or guard as a pro.

3) Cincinnati CB Sauce Gardner vs. LSU CB Derek Stingley Jr.: As a true freshman, Stingley looked like a generational type of corner prospect—capable of going right from high school onto a national championship team, then become one of that championship team’s best players right away. The two years since have been rockier, marked by injury and inconsistency. And now, he may not even be the top corner in the class, with the rangy, long Gardner, whose story is pretty much the opposite of Stingley’s, vying to be the first one taken.

4) Utah LB Devin Lloyd vs. Georgia LB Nakobe Dean: My amateur opinion holds that Dean looks the part of a traditional, if undersized, off-ball linebacker in the NFL, and his smarts and intangibles are off the charts. Lloyd, meanwhile, has some do-it-all Darius Leonard to his game, as a converted safety. How high those two go could ride on how teams value a position that’s most certainly been devalued across the league

5) The receivers against each other: There’s no Ja’Marr Chase this year, but it should be fun to watch Ohio State’s Garrett Wilson and Chris Olave, Arkansas’s Treylon Burks, USC’s Drake London and Alabama’s Jameson Williams jockey for position.

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FOUR THINGS TO FOLLOW

The coaching carousel fate of Brian Flores. I understand why people are forecasting a bleak future for Flores as a result of the suit he filed Tuesday that took aim at the 31 owners. But if my conversations on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday are any indication, there’s a tremendous sense of loyalty to Flores among those who know him in the league. Now, does that mean Houston’s going to turn around and hire him tomorrow? Maybe not—Flores and Texans GM Nick Caserio have a strong relationship, though there’s been concern that both might be a little too Type A to mesh as a tandem. But if he wants to coach as an assistant in 2022? That opportunity should be there, whether it’s back in New England or another New England–connected place (Las Vegas?). He’s too connected, and too good a coach. And if that opportunity doesn’t materialize for him? Well … then that’d be pretty fishy.

Give the Saints credit for exploring their options. I’m on record as saying that I believe Dennis Allen’s deserving, and that he’s the most equipped guy for the task of replacing Sean Payton in New Orleans. They’ve kicked tires on Flores, Pederson, Buccaneers offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich, Lions defensive coordinator (and ex-Saints assistant) Aaron Glenn, and their own special teams coordinator, Darren Rizzi, conducting a few of those interviews in Mobile this week. And yes, they had to comply with the Rooney Rule, so the process couldn’t just begin and end with Allen. But I think the Saints are doing more than just taking a cursory look at these guys. Remember, that sort of approach is how the Steelers wound up with Mike Tomlin in 2007—he beat out in-house favorites Ken Whisenhunt and Russ Grimm for the job. So again, I love Allen, and think it’d be smart to keep the infrastructure in place (Rizzi, OC Pete Carmichael, Loomis, assistant GM Jeff Ireland, cap manager Khai Harley). But it’s also smart just to take a real peek at what else is out there.

The McVay-Shanahan coaching tree keeps growing. With Kevin O’Connell set to take the Vikings’ job, there will be four former Rams assistants (Chargers’ Brandon Staley, Packers’ Matt LaFleur, Bengals’ Zac Taylor) with two more (defensive coordinator Raheem Morris, running backs coach Thomas Brown) having scored interviews during this cycle. Meanwhile, 49ers alumnus Robert Saleh is running the Jets, and his replacement as DC (DeMeco Ryans) is starting to knock on the door, while Niners offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel’s still in the running in Miami. Then, there are guys like Atlanta’s Arthur Smith, who worked with LaFleur on the offensive side in Tennessee and took tenants of the Shanahan system with him to the Falcons. Why have things continued to trend this way? In general, the Super Bowl can give you one clue—what these guys are doing seems to be working. But more specifically, they all run systems that are perfect for today’s players, easy for the guys to learn and hard for defenses to deal with. Which, in the end, has routinely allowed for these teams to get guys acclimated and onto the field fast, and then get the most of them when they’re out there.

Will quarterback dominos start to fall? In 2017, the Chiefs offloaded Alex Smith during Super Bowl week. Last year, the Lions moved Matthew Stafford to the Rams even earlier than that, getting a trade in place on the Saturday of the Super Bowl bye week. So could things accelerate in the next week or two? It’d make some sense. First, teams were together over the last four days in Mobile to trade information, and start laying groundwork toward trades. Second, if you’re a team with a second-tier quarterback to trade, wanting to get ahead of Deshaun Watson, Russell Wilson or Aaron Rodgers hitting the market in earnest would be smart. So keep an eye on this over the next week or so.

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TWO BEST BETS

Since we don’t have any games this weekend, I figured I’d give you a couple of props. And in case you’re scoring at home, a split last week put me at 22–20 for the season—so I’m somehow finishing over .500. (I know you care!)

(Ed. note: Albert either forgot he has a column next Friday and could easily go 0–4 the next two weeks, or he totally jinxed himself. We’re honestly not sure which.)

• Joe Mixon over 64.5 rushing yards. The Bengals stuck to the run against the Chiefs even when Kansas City wasn’t giving much in that area. Mixon wound up with 28 of his 88 yards in overtime. I see Zac Taylor being similarly disciplined in the Super Bowl, if for no other reason than the run game should help keep a ferocious Rams pass rush at bay.

• Odell Beckham over 65.5 receiving yards. I just have a feeling that the Bengals are going to throw a lot at Cooper Kupp, which should open things up for Beckham.

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Peter Read Miller/Sports Illustrated

ONE BIG QUESTION

What’s the best Tom Brady story I got this week?

All right, so you probably weren’t asking yourself that. But I had to find a place for this one.

This is a story I’ve always heard referred to as the Packing Peanuts Story. It was the outgrowth of a prank war between Brady and his then backup, Matt Cassel. And I figured I couldn’t go through memories with Cassel the other day, for the larger Brady story I wrote, without getting him to tell it. So let’s let Cassel go with this one.

“It really started, he was sitting in the quarterback meeting room and he’d always sit by the door. So when I would swing open the door, he was close to it. And he was like, ‘Cassel you gotta stop throwing open the door; you’re going to knock me out. I was like, ‘O.K., if I knock you out in the chair, that would be funny, one; and two, I would be upset that I knocked you out, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

“Well, he got sick of me coming in the room like that. And he knew I was coming in with this huge plate of food. He put his foot near the door, so all my food went up all over me. I was like, ‘All right, b----, I’m going to get you back.’ And I get those old-school Gatorade shakes, 55 grams of carbohydrates, and I went into his locker and he had these Air Force Ones that he’d always wear. He loved them, and I filled those things up with the Gatorade shakes. And then got some Atomic Balm and I put that in his underwear.

“I was like, ‘O.K., I’m going to get out of here before he comes out from getting treatment.’ So then as I’m walking back, I’m fully dressed, I’m going to my car and he comes and he has this huge protein shake and threw it on me. I’m leaving and I’m fully dressed, and I’m pissed. So I got this trash can, put it on his Audi, because he’s always parked in the front. … I was like, ‘This is going to be good, something’s going to happen. So I come into the locker room and he had f---ed with my jersey, put a bunch of s--- on my jersey and stuff. And I knew it because usually my jersey was hung up, but it was all over my pads and I could smell it.

‘It reeked, it smelled. I was like, ‘All right, I’m going to have to [take a dump] in this guy’s helmet. And I told him, I was like, all right, dude, that’s fine. I’ll go s--- in your helmet, no big deal. He’s like, ‘Cassel, you’ve got until the beginning of practice to call me Daddy Longshanks,’ from Braveheart. ‘If you don’t, then you’re gonna find out what’s going to happen.’ I was like, whatever. I just thought he was bulls---ing.

“So we get through practice, we’re in stretch lines and we’re all hyping it, I’m hyping it up. And then I walk into the locker room. As we’re walking in, there’s a crowd close to my locker. And as I get closer, there’s three tires from my car. And he hid one of them. They put my car on blocks. Literally, I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ There were three tires! And I looked at my car and sure enough, my car is on blocks.

“He took off the wheels of my car, and I was like, ‘O.K., you win.’ I called him Captain Longshanks. But the best part about it is I couldn’t put my wheels back on my car for like two days. I couldn’t find the fourth tire. So I had to get rides to the practice facility, through my buddies, Ellis Hobbs and all those guys. And he could care less. He was just loving every minute of it.

“The interesting part about it was, when it was cold weather, we used to go up to the club level of the stadium and do our walkthroughs up there, so we didn’t have to go outside for the walkthrough on cold days. And of course Matt Light, [Dan] Koppen, those guys all love the fact that this was going on. So they had to get a piece of the action. They went and had somebody come and fill up his Audi with packing peanuts and put confetti in his air conditioning unit.

“So as you’re looking out from the club level, all the guys are standing over there looking at the parking lot, the whole offensive line is there, laughing—‘Cassel, you got him again.’ And I was like, ‘What are you guys talking about?’ It probably sounded like I was playing dumb, but it wasn’t playing dumb. I really had no idea what they’re talking about. And so I walk over and I see. And Brady’s like, ‘Oh dude, you’re dead. You’re dead.’ And I was like, ‘No, really, I didn’t do that. I swear, dude, this one, this is one that’s above my pay grade.

“And he’s like, ‘Dude, you’re done.’ But then of course Bill [Belichick] got wind of it, and he’s like, ‘Look at you two, with this is World War III bulls---. Somebody’s going to get hurt. You guys gotta stop it. No more of this crap right now.’ And he never got me back. But he did eventually figure out that it wasn’t even me.”

Anyway, I always thought that story was hilarious, and it became legend among Patriots players of that era.

But there was something to take from it: Brady was always most comfortable being one of the guys and strived to be as normal as he could be (which is where introducing himself, “Hi, I’m Tom Brady” comes from), despite his ever-growing celebrity. Which, ultimately, is another reason why he’s engendered the sort of loyalty we detailed in the Wednesday column.

Also, I’d love to know what Brady’s next move was gonna be, before Belichick stopped him.