Former Dolphins coach Brian Flores amended his class action racial discrimination lawsuit Thursday to include allegations that the Texans retaliated against him by removing him from consideration for their head coach vacancy because he sued the NFL and spoke publicly about systemic discrimination in the league.
The lawsuit claims Houston’s “blatant” retaliation “is clear” because the franchise backed away from potentially hiring former quarterback Josh McCown, a white candidate with no NFL coaching experience, after Flores initially sued the league Feb. 1 and instead hired a Black candidate by promoting defensive coordinator Lovie Smith.
The swift pivot by decision-makers, the lawsuit said, made clear the Texans were concerned that hiring McCown would support the allegations of racial discrimination, “particularly given” the franchise had just fired David Culley, who is Black, after one season as head coach. The lawsuit also suggests the Texans made “this retaliatory decision” on its own or that the NFL “pressured” them not to hire Flores after he filed the lawsuit. The league declined to comment on that claim through spokesman Brian McCarthy.
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The Texans hired Smith on Feb. 7, and he later said he didn’t know when he officially became a finalist. Caserio did not specify when Smith became a possibility, saying there was “no direct line” in his head coaching search and noting that Smith was under contract and visited with the McNair family after the season was over.
Flores’ attorneys said in statement that day that while Flores was “happy to hear” the Texans hired a Black candidate in Smith, “it is obvious that the only reason Mr. Flores was not selected was his decision to stand up against racial inequality across the NFL.”
The amended lawsuit repeated that Smith’s hiring “is a positive thing,” but added “it is equally problematic that the reason that the Texans did not hire Mr. Flores in the first place was because he filed this lawsuit and opposed systemic racism in the NFL.”
Caserio said during Smith’s introductory news conference that Flores’ lawsuit “didn’t affect us at all” and dismissed the notion the Texans were planning to hire McCown by saying “there were never plans to hire anybody until we kind of arrived at an endpoint.”
I didn’t blog about this as it was happening, and I skipped over a lot of the timeline details in the story, so read the whole thing if this is not familiar to you. As someone who followed this story, it was always bizarre that the Texans were fixated on Josh McCown, who had not done any coaching at any level. Flores had seemed like a good fit for the team, and then he filed his lawsuit and the next thing you knew the Texans’s short list was Lovie Smith. I will generally attribute incompetence and organizational chaos to the Texans ahead of malice in most things, but this is just so weird that it makes sense for Flores to add the Texans to his complaint. If nothing else, the possibility that the NFL might have intervened, to “persuade” the Texans not to hire a totally inexperienced white guy after firing one of the two Black head coaches in the league so as not to make the NFL look even worse at a critical time, is too great to overlook. We’ll see what comes of it.