Can Brian Flores Fix It?

Looking at the lawsuit's proposed solutions…

Yesterday, I wrote about how job interviews and the Rooney Rule are an inadequate lens through which to see Brian Flores’ charge of discrimination. One of the most exciting things about his lawsuit is that it seems to recognize this, placing the alleged sham interviews in the larger context of racism in the NFL. The complaint filed last week even includes specific structural remedies, although some of these are a lot better than others.

Indeed, I wanted to look at these proposed remedies in detail, because they are an interesting mix of useful suggestions aimed at class power and, in my view, completely useless neoliberal proposals that will accomplish nothing. If you look at the complaint, the reforms are found in Section 23. (Here’s all of them, but feel free to skip ahead):

Among the other relief sought, Mr. Flores seeks the following injunctive relief:

i. Increase the influence of Black individuals in hiring and termination decisions for General Manager, Head Coach and Offensive and Defensive Coordinator positions;

a. Ensure diversity of ownership by creating and funding a committee dedicated to sourcing Black investors to take majority ownership stakes in NFL Teams;

b. Ensure diversity of decision-making by permitting select Black players and coaches to participate in the interviewing process for General Manager, Head Coach and Offensive and Defensive Coordinator positions;

 ii. Increase the objectivity of hiring and termination decisions for General Manager, Head Coach and Offensive and Defensive Coordinator positions

a. Require NFL Teams to reduce to writing the rationale for hiring and termination decisions, including a full explanation of the basis for any subjective influences (e.g., trust, personality, interview performance, etc.);

b. Require NFL Teams to consider side-by-side comparisons of objective criteria, such as past performance, experience and objective qualifications;

iii. Increase the number of Black Offensive and Defensive Coordinators;

a. Create and fund a training program for lower-level Black coaches who demonstrate an aptitude for coaching and an interest in advancing to a Coordinator position;

 iv. Incentivize the hiring and retention of Black General Managers, Head Coaches and Offensive and Defensive Coordinators through monetary, draft and/or other compensation such as additional salary cap space; and

v. Complete transparency with respect to pay for all General Managers, Head Coaches and Offensive and Defensive Coordinators.

That’s a lot, so let’s go through these one at a time, starting with the first component: “Increase the influence of Black individuals in hiring and termination decisions for General Manager, Head Coach and Offensive and Defensive Coordinator positions.” This is a great idea! As I wrote yesterday, the key to this issue is taking the power to hire and fire coaches/GMs/coordinators away from the owners. As long as they have complete discretion in this field, there is no way to ensure their biases will not dominate the process.

But the complaint subdivides this component into two sections. Part A reads: “Ensure diversity of ownership by creating and funding a committee dedicated to sourcing Black investors to take majority ownership stakes in NFL Teams.” This is a terrible idea! If the last 50+ years of racial capitalism have illustrated anything, it’s that diversifying the ownership class is not the way to address discrimination. All you do is replace one set of oppressors with another.

How would this even work? NFL teams only go on sale once in a blue moon. In the last 15 years, only five teams have been sold; nearly a third of the league’s teams have not been sold in half a century. And when the teams DO get sold, they get sold to the highest bidder, for billions of dollars. Given the way wealth in this country is distributed—namely, that nearly all of the racial wealth gap can be found in top deciles of the wealth distribution—it’s not like there are a ton of Black people who can afford to make offers like this.

Of course, NFL teams do occasionally go on sale, and there are rich Black people. The Denver Broncos are on the market right now, and theoretically the NFL could solicit Black investors to make a bid (but if you want to own the Denver Broncos, you just don’t understand football). But what would that accomplish? You’d have one Black owner in a league of 32 teams. Does anyone really think that would change things? The team can only have one coach, after all...

More to the point: Black capitalists are, ultimately, still capitalists. They will not save us. Even if they mean well, or care about racial justice, it is the structure of the system—not the bad actors within it—that perpetuates racial discrimination.

Of all the proposed solutions in the Flores lawsuit, this is by far the worst—and for that reason I could actually see the NFL doing it. The Broncos will obviously be sold to whoever offers the most money, but it’s easy to imagine the NFL trying to get an ownership group that had a prominent Black face in it to make a serious offer. It’s exactly the kind of empty, superficial, meaningless PR-stunt that the league loves. It’s honestly a real shame that the Flores complaint even includes this suggestion, because doing so grants the stunt a kind of legitimacy.

Conversely, the other suggestion for increasing the influence of Black people on the hiring process is quite good: “Ensure diversity of decision-making by permitting select Black players and coaches to participate in the interviewing process for General Manager, Head Coach and Offensive and Defensive Coordinator positions.” It’s interesting how these two solutions differ. If you want to diversify the people hiring GMs/coaches/coordinators, you can either diversify the ownership class OR add non-owners to the hiring process. The former is a terrible idea, and the latter is great!

For one, “select Black players and coaches” are far more equipped to evaluate potential hires than any owner would be. Even for reasons unrelated to racial justice, this would be a good way to ensure the process was more merit-based, and not just about who has prior relationships or good chemistry with the team executives. Another advantage is that adding people to the interview process would provide a neutral check on it. As we’ve seen with the example of Flores’ 2019 interview with the Broncos—which he claims John Elway and Joe Ellis came to hungover (a claim they’ve denied)—the interview process can proceed haphazardly and unfairly, in a way that can have a discriminatory impact even if that’s not the intent. So making sure that a third-party was involved would be a way to prevent these…misunderstandings.

That brings us to the second proposal in the Flores lawsuit: “Increase the objectivity of hiring and termination decisions for General Manager, Head Coach and Offensive and Defensive Coordinator positions.” This is a nice idea, even if I admit to being a little skeptical. Hiring positions like this can only ever be so “objective,” so there’s a limit on what it can achieve. On the other hand, I do think the specifics suggested here could have a small positive impact. First, they say: “Require NFL Teams to reduce to writing the rationale for hiring and termination decisions, including a full explanation of the basis for any subjective influences (e.g., trust, personality, interview performance, etc.).” This is an easy thing to get around—you can always make up some bullshit post hoc explanation—but I do enjoy the idea of making teams do little pointless writing assignments like they’re in middle school.

The second suggestion is a little more promising: “Require NFL Teams to consider side-by-side comparisons of objective criteria, such as past performance, experience and objective qualifications.” In other words, this would be a version of blind hiring, which is the kind of solution liberals love: technocratic, nonthreatening, apolitical. So I’m a little skeptical, but studies have shown some mild effects to this kind of hiring, and if you could figure out a good way to do this with GMs/coaches/coordinators, I do think it could have some marginal benefit in that it at least forces some objectivity onto the process.

The third proposal in the Flores lawsuit is aimed at increasing Black coordinators, since those positions serve as a gateway to Head Coaching jobs. The suggestion is to, “Create and fund a training program for lower-level Black coaches who demonstrate an aptitude for coaching and an interest in advancing to a Coordinator position.” This solution seems a little insulting to me—I’m not sure why Black coaching candidates need some special training program that white candidates don’t need. But if you can get past that, training programs like this do tend to work.

Obviously, there is no shortage of Black people who want to be coordinators right now. But one recurring theme in integration stories (insert obligatory plug for the Undrafted integration rundown) is white gatekeepers saying things like, “Oh gosh, we’d love to hire Black people, but where ever will we find qualified ones???” So even though it’s obviously condescending to imply Black candidates need special training, the real function of such a program is to make it easy for the dumb white people in charge to find those candidates.

The fourth proposal in the lawsuit is one that the NFL has already considered: “Incentivize the hiring and retention of Black General Managers, Head Coaches and Offensive and Defensive Coordinators through monetary, draft and/or other compensation such as additional salary cap space.” I’m wary of solutions like this. Either the incentives aren’t worth much, and so they don’t lead to much change. Or they are worth a lot, which stigmatizes potential hires and leads teams to try to game the system by manipulating titles or lying about people’s racial background.

Finally, the last proposal in the lawsuit is just common sense: “Complete transparency with respect to pay for all General Managers, Head Coaches and Offensive and Defensive Coordinators.” Pay transparency is basically always good, and it’s particularly useful for addressing racial disparities.

None of these proposals are all that radical or game-changing, but taken together they have a clear goal: to reduce the power of owners in the hiring process. This is unquestionably the right goal. I would probably go further in some areas (for example, players should have a role in the hiring process), and I would drop other proposals altogether. But the lawsuit has selected the right target, which is a reason to be excited about its potential for change.