In reasonably casual's inaugural episode I introduce myself and give a quick rundown about what I hope to achieve with this podcast. We then transition into breaking down the Brian Flores lawsuit. I talk about what the lawsuit means for the NFL and the possible outcomes of the lawsuit. I also breakdown the challenges Flores faces moving forward with the lawsuit and the possible avenues the NFL may explore to try to get this case dismissed.
Hey everybody. Welcome to the show special welcome to the show actually, because this is my first episode. So I got to take a moment to tell y'all. Thanks. Thanks for 20 in then, you know, I hope you enjoy the show and hopefully you keep listening moving forward. So I got to take a moment, you know, give you guys a quick introduction about myself.
And sports has always been a big part of my life. I grew up playing mainly soccer in high school, but you know, I'll play basketball, football and baseball around the neighborhood. I also like watching sports. So I watch a lot of basketball, a lot of football, a lot of soccer, it can be in person or on TV.
Doesn't matter. I'll only watch hockey though, of is in person I think is more exciting and person than on TV, but as just me. Yeah. I like sports, but why specifically am I doing a sports and law themed podcast is really a simple answer. I'm in law school and I thought it would be fun to do a podcast where I get to talk about the two things I like, which is sports and the law.
So that's my little spiel, you know, I just wanted to introduce myself and you know, now I'm just going to give you guys just a little more info about this. I really just plan on talking about anything sports-related and law related that I find interesting and hopefully, I mean, hopefully you'll find it interesting too, but yeah, there's really no, no set guideline of what type of sports I'm going to be talking about as long as it's sports and law related.
And there's a interesting topic going on in that area. I'm going to talk about it and, you know, obviously moving forward, I might experiment with the show, try and see what sticks and what that. If people tend to be more interested in the particular sport, then I might just focus on those sports. But right now the goal is just to talk about a variety of sports I in law related topics.
And I think that flows perfectly into what I plan on talking about today, which is the Brian Flores lawsuit against the NFL. Right? Honestly, this is probably the most well-known sports lawsuit that's happening right now. So I figured it is the best one to kick off the show. Everyone's probably seen or heard something about this lawsuit.
And if you're an NFL fan, you absolutely ever heard about it. So today I'm going to talk about, you know, what this lawsuit is about and to give my thoughts on what I think are the most interesting portions of his allegations.
And I'm going to give some perspective on how things could shake out on the legal side. We'll talk about some of the actions the NFL could take to try and get this suit watered down a little bit. So Flores, you know, he's the former coach of the Miami dolphins and he's now the current senior defensive assistant assistant coach for the Pittsburgh.
So Flores started out his career with the Patriots. He started off working as a scout in 2004, and he ended up working with the Patriots for 13 years. He won four Superbowls during assigned with the Patriots and then he was promoted by coach Belicheck several times during his 13 year tenure with the.
And all good things obviously have to come to an end. And for Flores that came in 2019, when he became the head coach of the Miami dolphins, before Flores came to the dolphins, they were seven and nine, the following the previous season and Flores's his time with the dolphins. It's kind of funny because it's one of those situations where, you know, people say numbers never lie, but if you look at Flores's record, he was 24 and 25.
And that's a perfect example of. The numbers do lie because you look at those that record and you think, oh, the dolphins weren't angry when he was a coach, but actually Flores ended up leading the offense to back to back winning seasons. And the team was really in competition for a playoff spot. Both those years, you know, dolphins kind of faltered towards the end of the season, the first, his first season with them, they kind of started.
And then fell off. And in the second season they started pretty bad and then heated up at the end. But nevertheless, there was still that chance for them to get into the playoffs and for a team that was pretty much the laughingstock of the NFL for several years, you know, that's, that's a pretty good improvement over two years.
So as we all know, by now, he was fired last year. Last year 2021, but last this current NFL season, he was fired. And then a few months later he sues the NFL along with all 32 teams. And at the time of this recording, I'm just going to give you some background information again, of where we are currently. So if you're hearing this information, might've changed a little bit, but as of right now, Flores is the senior defensive assistant and linebackers coach for the.
And I believe it's a one-year contract, but I'm not a hundred percent sure on that. So don't quote me, but he is with the Steelers. On the NFL side, you have Roger Goodell who came out publicly and basically said that the NFL was going to reevaluate their hiring process and review its policies about increasing diversity within the coaching ranks court wise, the NFL hasn't filed any documents at this time in response to fluoresces.
But they do have a decent amount of time to do so. Generally you have to respond within 30 days. And so I would expect a response relatively soon, but at this moment in time, they have not, and a little bit more in the NFL. They did tweet actually the, the same day that Flores's allegations came out and his loss was made public.
The NFL tweeted within 30 minutes. They denied everything that he alleged, and there was no merit to the claims. So, you know, that might be foreshadowing, what their response is going to be legally. But I would be surprised if they just admitted to everything in court.
So one thing you know, that I don't think is being covered properly about this lawsuit is that it's not Brian Flores versus the NFL. Its Brian Flores representing a class of coaches versus the NFL. I believe right now, as it stands it's a class of 40 coaches. And how this works is all of these coaches are essentially claiming the same thing as Brian or very similar things as Brian.
And essentially they're all saying they've been discriminated against the. In some capacity that are very similar to each other, and that allows them to file a suit together instead of filing it separately. And you know, when you follow a class action lawsuit like this, it kind of has more teeth because instead if one person brings in these claims, you're now saying it's not just me.
It's 40 of us bringing these claims. It gives a little bit more punch to your, to your claim. I think, well, I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the benefits of a class action lawsuit or talking too much about what's in the complaint. I think at this point in time, it has been covered enough on the news on sports center.
If you were very interested in ed, you probably already read up on what some of the important allegations are. I'm just going to touch very quickly on what I think were some of the more interesting parts of the allegations and really the first one that comes to mind. It's the sham interviews.
So basically the sham interviews, allegations, Brian Flores is saying, NFL teams only interview black or minority coaches to fill a quota. And they actually have no interest in hiring these coaches. And the easiest way to kind of understand the sham interview allegations is to imagine there's an employer and they invite you for interview to interview for a job.
But they've already made up their mind that they're not going to hire you, but they've got to interview you anyway because their policies say that they interview, a certain amount of people. So you go through these interviews with this employer and they gave you the run around, tell you they're interested, blah, blah, blah.
And then at the end of the day, they hire the person they actually plan on hiring the entire time. And that's basically what Brian Flores along with the other members of this lawsuit are alleging that these NFL teams are just giving them the runaround at the interviews. And they're not actually interested in hiring them.
Now, when I hear that, I think it's kind of interesting, but obviously just saying it doesn't help having evidence of it helps tremendously. And that's what I found interesting about this allegation, because. As we all know has been pretty infamous by now in the NFL community, but you've got the text from bill Belicheck to Brian Flores.
Essentially bill Belichick is texting Brian Flores, telling him congratulations on getting the Giants job and then is confused. Kind of texts him back saying, you know, do you know something that. And Belicheck realizes that he's actually texting Brian Flores when he meant to text Brian Dable. And obviously we all know how this story turns out.
Flores goes and interviews from the giants. And then eventually Brian give us a job. And Flores is using that as an example to show a, this is one example, but I'm telling you there's more, if you give me the chance to prove. And so that that's a strong allegation. And I thought that was very, very compelling with the evidence that was presented.
Now, another allegation that I also found interesting is Flores along with the other coaches are alleging that minority coaches are not given the same opportunities are not given the same opportunities as other coaches in the league specifically, he talks about how minority coaches get fired significantly faster than any other coach.
In the league and he sides to first himself being fired after two years with a winning record. But then there's other coaches who come in and bad situations. I'm looking at David Cawley in Houston, took over a horrible situation, Houston and actually the Texans, obviously they weren't great, but they were competitive and are much better than what people thought they were gonna to.
But he got fired the same season. And so Flores is using these examples to show it's not a fair playing field because other coaches who are significantly worse or have a better situation team-wise but perform worse are given these longer leashes to try and improve the team. And that's not afforded to minority coaches.
Now, I thought those who were. There's obviously a long way to go, because he's going to have to provide a lot of evidence to show that these claims are true, but just on the face and with some other evidence that he did provide an initial complaint, I think it's, it could go either way. And it is, those are the two that I really found.
Interesting. And obviously there's more than two allegations in this suit, but those are the ones, like I said, that really jumped out. And what the NFL face in the series lawsuit and with so many allegations, what are they going to do in response? Right? They've got all these allegations made from Flores and the other coaches against them.
How are they possibly going to respond? Or first, the first thing they could do is they could file a motion to dismiss. And basically they're going to say, we want this case dismissed because Flores has failed to state a claim. Basically what. There's a motion to dismiss means is the NFL is going up to the court.
And they're saying Flores has made several claims and he can't possibly prove any of these facts to support his claim. Therefore, this case should be dismissed. Now it's very unlikely that this motion goes through because I think Flores has done enough in the initial complaint to satisfy that he has.
Given enough facts and given the chance he can support these, these claims. So I would look out for the NFL, filing the motion to dismiss as very standard practice in litigation that you follow the motion to dismiss. And I don't think it gets granted. And so I think the next motion that they would file.
And honestly, I think this is probably going to be the biggest decision that the court will make about this case very early on. Is going to be when the NFL files a motion to compel arbitration. Now a motion to compel arbitration is right now the biggest hump Flores has to get over because the NFL, it gives them is like a get out of jail, free card for the NFL.
And so if they win this motion is kind of like a get out of court, free card for the NFL. And as we get through this podcast, you'll understand why say is a get out of court. So was arbitration. Right. And why is this so important for both sides? If you haven't, if you don't know what arbitration is, basically, arbitration is an alternative dispute resolution and it allows parties to resolve their disputes outside of court and due to the federal arbitration act that was passed in 1926.
Generally speaking, if a case is brought to court and there's a clause in the contract that says you have to. Courts generally honor that clause and remove the case from court and send it to a mediator. Also called an arbitrator. If I use those words interchangeably, they may in the same thing. So generally when it comes to employment contracts, the NFL includes an arbitration clause to prevent the employees from sewing them in court.
And sometimes like we see in this case, employees are still gonna bring file suit in court. And then that's where the NFL comes in and they say, Wait a minute. You know, we have an agreement to handle these disputes through arbitration. So even though he brought this case in court, we need to have it removed.
Now I mentioned earlier that this is probably the biggest hump that Flores faces early on because the NFL has been very, very successful with using a motion to compel arbitration. Now only is the NFL, usually on the winning end, when they file a motion to compel arbitration is often their go-to move to get cases out of court.
So for those of you, who've been keeping up with the various lawsuits that are ongoing, I guess the NFL seems like everybody's on the NFL these days, but you probably have already heard about the Jon Gruden lawsuit against the NFL. And basically Gruden on the NFL for those leaked emails that eventually led to him being fired by the Raiders.
And so in that case, the NFL also filed a motion to compel arbitration. And as I'm looking at the court documents here, it looks like they haven't ruled on it yet, but they add a conference that is expected to happen in April. And my guess is they'll probably make a ruling on it then. And so it does important to keep an eye on because I believe they'll probably make that ruling before they make a ruling on this case when the NFL does file a motion to compel.
And if the NFL wins on the Gruden motion , these two cases aren't very different as far as employee employment contracts with the arbitration clause. And so it's very likely that they might also went on the Flores is one, if they can win on the Gruden one. So that's kind of the rundown of what arbitration is and what it means for the NFL, but also what it means for Brian Flores and his class of coaches, but why exactly would the NFL want arbitration.
Taking a case out of court is one thing, but you're still going through arbitration and arbitration basically acts like a court. It just isn't court. If that makes sense. So we know there's a good chance that the NFL files this motion, and there's nothing really certain to say that they win on his motion, but if they do win on this motion is, is very huge for their case.
The reason why you want arbitration instead of dealing with this case in. Is because the amount of money that the NFL has to spend on resources to litigate this case will be very, very expensive. Now don't get me wrong. The NFL has huge pockets. I mean, deep pockets, but handling this case through arbitration is significantly cheaper than it would be to handle this case on a court.
Also arbitration tends to be much faster than dealing with a case of. So, for example, I just mentioned the Gruden lawsuit. There's this case has been ongoing for 106 days, and they haven't even made a ruling on whether or not they're going to grant this motion to compel arbitration. So if you're the NFL, you mean you want to get these cases out of court as early as you can, because you don't want to be litigating cases for years on end.
Now, another reason why the NFL would want to get this case out of. And I think is if you, if you understand, arbitration is probably the most obvious, but when you take a case out of court and go through arbitration, and generally speaking, you have the option to keep that private. So if this case was arbitrated instead of being in court, the NFL has the chance to keep everything confidential.
And none of us would ever know that the truth of what happened in this arbitrary. So, what I mean by this is let's say they do arbitrary and Flores wins, right? They go through arbitration and the arbitration judge rules for, for Floria says he's the winner. All of the evidence that was used by Flores would be confidential.
The fallout. For example, if they paid Flores a settlement that would be confidential. We wouldn't, we would never know about that. Like we, the speculate, what. And for example, if after Flores wins, his lawsuit or Flores wins in arbitration, the NFL comes out, they start making all of these changes to their policies.
And maybe like, let's say they create more positions for minority head coaches, right? Obviously we're going to put one and one together and say, okay, Flores probably won this suit and the NFL, this is the fallout from it. But again, we would never be able to say that concretely because everything would be confident.
And if you're a little skeptical, I get it. I understand. You're probably looking at me and saying, how's the NFL going to keep something like this confidential? Well, I'm going to point you guys in a direction of the Colin Kaepernick lawsuit that was arbitrated against the NFL. Right? Everybody remembers Kap accused the NFL of blackballing him.
Right. He accused NFL and all their owners said they colluded against them to make it so that he couldn't couldn't play in the NFL. Again, that case was aribitrated and everything about it was kept confidential. The settlement confidential, whether the NFL admitted or not to blackball him confidential, the only reason people even have some number that they think that he at that Kaepernick one in the settlement is because a couple of people who were close during these, these arbitration proceedings basically came out and said that Cabernet got less than 10 million.
But again, there's not an official. That's just, he said, she said from someone who was close to Kaepernick's camp, so it's very possible. Like I'm trying to, trying to illustrate here is very possible that we could have a situation where this case is arbitrated and the NFL and Flores agree to keep everything confidential.
Now, as, as best case scenario for the NFL that's worst case scenario for Brian Flores. So lets let's flip the switch now, and now and look at the other side, let's look at the best case scenario for Brian Flores and worst case scenario for the NFL right now.
Like we've been kind of hammering it in year, but obviously NFL wants his case outside of court. Florez wants this case handled in court. So if the motion gets denied, then that means this case is going to stay in court and it'll move forward in the litigation, bro. When it moves forward in the litigation process, generally speaking, you know, the next step is going to be discovery.
The simplest way to explain discovery is like this Flores, he's accused the NFL of a lot of things during discovery. He would be allowed to ask the NFL to turn over documents, phone records, and emails, and a whole bunch of other things. Basically anything that Flores thinks is relevant to proving his claim.
You would be able to ask the NFL to overturn those pieces of information. Now, this is best case scenario for Flores because obviously the NFL is going to be turning over thousands upon thousands of documents, emails, phone records, you name it. If his allegations are true, there's bound to be something in all of those pieces.
Uh, and all those documents that he's requesting for him to prove his case. Now this is worst case scenario for the NFL, because one retrieving all of those documents, especially if they're saved electronically, there cause a lot of money. So that's, that's already bad for them. They don't. want to be already litigating a case, but now also spending millions of dollars trying to retrieve documents that could potentially come back and show that everything flora said is true.
Additionally, if this case stays in court, like we were talking about now, not only would Flores have access to their documents, but if this case files through discovery and goes to trial, the public generally would have. To this case, and they would be able to see all of the evidence that Flores is going to present, which would be coming from these documents.
And so basically that is just worst case scenario for the NFL, because if all of these allegations turn out to be true, we're not only going to see these documents and we're going to see the NFL for what they are. And so the NFL's credibility, their reputation and their image. It all takes a hit. And if, you know, from a business perspective, Especially considering the NFL have rely so heavily on their image.
All in all. This is just the worst case scenario for them, but obviously we also have to take a look again on Flores aside because while this is something Flores would want and would welcome, we do need to understand that discovery of this magnitude with the amount of documents that would be overturned would be massive.
And it would take potentially a couple of years, I think. For them to, you know, sift through all of these documents and find the smoking gun or find, you know, pieces of evidence that they can put together to, to show these allegations are true. So this is not something that's just going to be handed to him.
And then he's going to say, oh years, what I was looking for is something that would take quite a lot, a lot of time and a lot of resources and, you know, NFL coaches get paid very well, but we had to consider that as. When we talk about discovery and being in court because while it's going to be, you know, a burden for the NFL to pay all these lawyers, so they're going to be a burden on Flores to pay all of his lawyers.
So that's something to keep in mind that could also Allie bring that up because that can influence how the case goes. You know, if we're two, three years down the line and he still going through discovery, You know, he might've found enough where he can throw it at the NFL and say, Hey, I've got this.
Maybe we just settle now and you implement these changes. And now forget about these other changes is something to keep in mind. I don't know how exactly it could go, but you know, litigating cases at this magnitude, cause a lot of money and at some point money is going to run out for someone and that's usually.
The biggest factor in settling a case, you know, everyone wants something, but when the money starts running low, you kind of decide what's important and what's not. So that's something to keep in mind. Obviously. I hope that's not the case, but it's something to keep in mind.
Now, you know, the NFL could come out and surprise everyone on earth and just admit to these allegations of the likelihood of them doing that. It's probably. So I think the biggest takeaway that we can take right now from this case is pay attention to this arbitration clause. See if the NFL actually does file this motion.
And if they do keep your eye out and see whether or not the courts granted, if the courts grant this motion to compel arbitration, a lot of the sting a lot of the punch in this case kinda gets popped right away. If this, uh, if this motion is denied, it changes the entire playing field. And then, you know, things become super interesting at that point, because like we said, it opens a door to discovery, new evidence potentially coming in and just, you know, everything changes if this case stays in court.
So that's the, that's a Brian Flores lawsuit, you know, as it stands right now, in a nutshell, obviously I'm going to be keeping my eyes on it very closely. And if there's any major developments. I'm going to hop back right in the studio and record an episode updating you guys on it. But in the meantime, if you guys see any new updates as well, feel free to send me a DM on Instagram.
You can send it to me at reasonably casual, which is the name of the show. And also while you're there, you know, give us a follow or like some of our posts show us some love, who knows even share, share our page with someone, but if you liked this episode, please subscribe to the podcast. I do plan on posting new episodes every one to two weeks.
So again, huge shout out to everyone who tuned in and listened to our inaugural episode. You know, first ones out the way we got many more to come, and I hope to see you tuning in to our next episode, but until then I'm SWAT. See you next time.