Last week, ex-Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores filed a class action lawsuit against the NFL and three teams, including his former club.

There are currently just five minority head coaches in the NFL in a league where nearly 70% of the players are Black. In an interview for LA Times Today, Op-Ed columnist LZ Granderson told host Lisa McRee that it’s up to those players to take action. 

Flores’s lawsuit alleges discrimination in the NFL’s hiring practices.

“When you look at the history of the NFL, we know that the first Black head coach hired by the NFL was Art Shell in 1989," Granderson said. "We know that when the Rooney Rule was put in place, there was one head coach at the time. At the moment in which Brian Flores filed his class action lawsuit, there was one Black head coach. So that’s about 30 years that you can comb through the league — a league that is now more than 30% Black — and see that there has been one head coach at all of these moments. So, he’s saying that the hiring practices are discriminatory."

Although the Rooney Rule, which requires NFL teams to interview candidates of color for head coaching and senior football operations positions, has been in place for years, Granderson says it isn’t enough. He said the existence of the Rooney Rule tells a story of how the NFL is constructed to begin with.

“If you need a rule to remind owners, to remind team presidents, that they need to hire minority candidates or not just hire, but at least bring them in. They weren’t even being brought in. So, the Rooney Rule was just trying to get people of color in front of these team presidents and owners because prior to that, they weren’t even doing that at a clip that seemed equitable,” Granderson said.

According to Granderson, they put the rule in place because the league was facing threats of legal action and needed to bring in more candidates of color to avoid it. When Brian Flores was brought in to interview for a job with the Denver Broncos, he said the people interviewing him showed up an hour late and appeared hungover. He said his interview was not being taken seriously.

Since the Flores lawsuit was announced, the outcry has been fierce. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is facing the press this week, and now he has a couple of new hires just made in the last couple of days that he can take shelter behind.

“I don’t believe there will be very many people who will see the recent hirings as anything other than a cynical move by the NFL to make sure that Roger Goodell is not standing in a room full of media people trying to explain why there’s only one Black head coach in the NFL,” Granderson said.

There are several talented Black coaches, Granderson said, who deserve these jobs and have been overlooked until this lawsuit gained attention.

“Lovie Smith, who led the Chicago Bears to the Super Bowl, his name has not been mentioned in circles that I’ve been covering in terms of potential coaching candidates in years. But it wasn’t until this lawsuit was filed that you saw them reach and go for a man who has had success and actually had deserved another opportunity but wasn’t provided one,” Granderson said. 

He compared the NFL’s poor track record on hiring Black candidates to Major League Baseball’s, saying both leagues have overlooked qualified coaches. Granderson said it is time for the players to step up because this all comes down to what the owners want, and the owners have nothing to make money with if their players stand up and walk off.

“This is how the NFL ownership group has been able to maintain so much power for so long. For many years, the [player] contracts haven’t been guaranteed. The players have been hesitant to step out against ownership because they know that because they could be treated the way that Colin Kaepernick was treated, which was blackballed out of the league. As you’re seeing more guaranteed dollars being connected to these contracts, NFL players are getting more secure,” Granderson said. “I would encourage any of them to use that influence and to exercise that leverage because we already know that the ownership won’t change unless they’re forced to. So don’t let Brian Flores hang out there with this class action lawsuit without support. We all are witness to what’s happening, and this is an opportunity to perhaps change what’s happening.”

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