THE NFL MADE ITS RACIST BED — SEE YOU IN COURT, OLD WHITE MEN

Fumbling unprecedented prosperity, the league has a Super Bowl victory lap disrupted by Brian Flores’ lawsuit, which draws more eyes to the sham of the Rooney Rule and discriminatory hiring practices

     If the subject matter wasn’t such an incendiary bomb, we’d call for a laughtrack. How can so many Old White Billionaires, armed with so much privilege and prosperity, be so oblivious and cretinous? Is this yet another wretched example of powerful fools feeling too comfortable in their silk PJs, too smug in their C-suites, too invincible in their infinity pools, too drunk with hubris?

     When they think no one is looking, the curtain drops. And time and again, The Mightiest Sports League There Ever Was exposes the same racist warts and sabotages its extraordinarily successful well-being.

     The NFL is sprinkled with magic dust, showered with $113 billion in media money during a global pandemic, which the league has managed with such aplomb that the coronavirus is an afterthought while game audiences climb to 60 million even before the Super Bowl. A week from Sunday, 70,240 people will cram into a man-made, $6 billion canyon for the Big Game, and the league is so almighty that the Los Angeles County health director doesn’t utter a peep during a “state of emergency.’’

     A concussion crisis? The NFL has suppressed it. Colin Kaepernick? He lost his Wall Street halo and his all-eyeballs platform, with kneeling now only a function of a team’s victory formation. All Roger Goodell thought he had to do was show up next week, for his annual State of the Shield address, and thumb his nose at critics who’d said the league would fade away in an existential crisis not conducive to progressive sensibilities.

     Until the one underlying sickness the owners cannot shake — their prejudice within — reared its vile head once more.

     Enter Brian Flores, an angry man aiming to disrupt the OWBs just as they arrive in Hollywood for a week of preening, prancing and dancing. Only weeks after Jon Gruden’s racist, anti-gay and misogynist e-mails were leaked — and only hours before the Washington Football Team’s rebrand from Redskins to Commanders (as safe as the Cleveland Indians becoming the Guardians) gives way to a Congressional roundtable on owner Daniel Snyder’s toxic culture within — Flores is suing the NFL and its 32 teams and alleging he and other Black coaches have been victims of discriminatory hiring practices. Specifically, he is targeting the Miami Dolphins, New York Giants and Denver Broncos, and the timing for his 58-page lawsuit couldn’t be worse for the NFL and its showcase event.

     And it couldn’t be better for those in America seeking significant change in a league too big to care.

     “Without merit,’’ the NFL’s lawyers said of the claims.

     Said Flores, dismissed last month by the Dolphins and rejected last week by the Giants: “I may be risking coaching the game that I love and that has done so much for my family and me. My sincere hope is that by standing up against systemic racism in the NFL, others will join me to ensure that positive change is made for generations to come.”

     This was long in coming, the potential landmark legal case that could involve dozens of other coaches in a class-action filing. The Rooney Rule, the league’s flimsy mandate to ensure “equitable employment practices’’ for head-coaching and general manager vacancies, has been exposed as a sham. After the latest hiring spree, it’s possible 29 of the league’s 32 head-coaching jobs will belong to white men. The only Black head coach is Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin. The other exceptions are Washington’s Ron Rivera, who is Hispanic, and the New York Jets’ Robert Saleh, a Muslim Arab American.

     Beyond the naked numbers, Flores is revealing the inner workings of backroom politics related to the Rooney Rule, along with other examples of alleged heinous misconduct by owners and executives. It’s chilling to think Bill Belichick, widely regarded as the greatest of all NFL coaches, was so centrally involved in the Giants’ hiring process that he lay bare how Flores’ interview was a token nod to the Rule. On the same day that Tom Brady retired from the league, with one more Super Bowl ring than the coach he divorced in New England, Belichick was greeted by another body blow to his legacy: his purported Jan. 24 text exchange with Flores, his former assistant of 15 years and the son of Honduran immigrants.

     “I hear from Buffalo and NYG that you are their guy,’’ wrote Belichick, congratulating Flores.

     Confused by the news, because he hadn’t been interviewed yet by the Giants, Flores asked Belichick if he mistakenly thought he was texting Brian Daboll, another former Patriots assistant considered the front-runner for the Giants job. Daboll’s reputation was rising after his work as offensive coordinator in Buffalo, where he helped turn quarterback Josh Allen into a feared weapon. Daboll is white and, unlike Flores, had no previous experience as an NFL head coach. And yes — oops — Belichick confessed to Flores that he thought he was texting Daboll.

     “Sorry — I f—-ed this up. I double checked and misread the text. I think they are naming Daboll. I'm sorry about that. BB’’ texted Belichick, who soon will turn 70.

     In a screwup that might be recalled as no less damaging in league circles than his role in the Spygate scandal, Belichick swung open the door for Flores’ legal bombshell. The timeline is damning. Flores finally was interviewed by the Giants on Jan. 27. A day later, Daboll was hired. The lawsuit states Flores was “humiliated in the process as the Giants subjected him to a sham interview in an attempt to appear to provide a Black candidate with a legitimate chance at obtaining the job.”

     The Giants didn’t help themselves in a statement, which said “Flores was in the conversation to be our head coach until the eleventh hour’’ and that the team was “confident with the process that resulted in the hiring of Brian Daboll. … Ultimately, we hired the individual we felt was most qualified to be our next head coach.’’ Curiously, Flores was the second candidate interviewed, though he was a native New Yorker who grew up in Brooklyn and had just finished coaching the Dolphins to their first back-to-back winning seasons since 2003.

     On his legal mission, Flores, 40, has chosen to ignore his supposed candidacy for head-coaching openings in Houston and New Orleans — is he a Rooney Rule token for those gigs, too? — and offer a peek behind the curtain at Dolphins owner Stephen Ross. He claims Ross asked him to “tank’’ games in 2019, offering him $100,000 for each loss to improve the team’s draft position. When Flores refused and finished the season with five victories, he was told by general manager Chris Grier that Ross was “mad.’’ The tension never lifted, and when Flores was fired after a 9-8 season in 2021, the Dolphins floated that he was difficult to work with and couldn’t get along with quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.

     If true, the tank accusation is an integrity scandal that should result in Ross’ ouster from the league. Goodell cannot embrace legalized gambling and cut sponsorship deals with multiple sportsbooks, then allow a team owner to urge a coach to tank a season. Also, Flores says he was asked to violate league tampering rules by Ross, who wanted the coach to join him on a yacht for lunch with a prominent NFL quarterback. The Dolphins, for their part, say “the implication that we acted in a manner inconsistent with the integrity of the game is incorrect’’ and “vehemently deny any allegations of racial discrimination’’ in firing Flores. They reportedly are considering two finalists for the vacancy, NFL offensive assistants Kellen Moore and Mike McDaniel. Moore is white.

     Flores reached back to the 2019 offseason, before he won the Miami job, in an attempt to bolster evidence of “sham’’ interviews to satisfy the Rooney Rule. He says the Broncos had no interest in hiring him, claiming general manager John Elway and team president Joe Ellis showed up an hour late for an interview with Flores in Providence, R.I. “They looked completely disheveled, and it was obvious that they had been drinking heavily the night before,” the lawsuit said of the two executives. “It was clear from the substance of the interview that Mr. Flores was interviewed only because of the Rooney Rule.”

     “Blatantly false,’’ countered the Broncos, who hired Vic Fangio, who is white, before firing him last month. They replaced him with former Green Bay offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett, who never had been an NFL head coach — just as new Chicago Bears coach Matt Eberflus never had been an NFL head coach, and just as Daboll never had been an NFL head coach. All are white, like new Las Vegas Raiders coach Josh McDaniels, who flopped as a head coach in Denver and infamously fled Indianapolis after his spoken deal with the Colts in 2018.

     The Saints, Texans and Jacksonville Jaguars still have openings as we assume the Minnesota Vikings fill theirs with Jim Harbaugh, who gets a second NFL shot after once screaming his way out of San Francisco. The fact we are keeping score is an indictment of the process in itself.

     Appearing with his attorneys on a CBS news show Wednesday, Flores doubled down. “We’re either going to keep it the way it is or we’re going to go in another direction and actually make some real change where we’re actually changing the hearts and minds of those who make decisions to hire head coaches, executives, et cetera," he said. "And that’s what we’ve got to get to. We’ve got to change hearts and minds."

     Of the Giants’ snub, he said, “It was a range of emotions. Humiliation, disbelief, anger. I’ve worked so hard to get to where I am in football to become a head coach. For 18 years in this league and to go on what felt like, or what was a sham interview, I was hurt.

     “The Rooney Rule is intended to give minorities an opportunity to sit down in front of ownership but I think what it’s turned into is an instance where guys are just checking the box.’’

     And just like that, with a bungled text message from Bill Belichick, of all people, racism become the biggest story of Super Bowl week. Instead of taking his victory lap, Goodell will be pummeled with questions about the Rooney Rule, Brian Flores and the Old White Billionaires atop the league. He’ll be asked about Gruden and why the league still hasn’t released the remainder of 650,000 other emails gathered in its probe of the Washington Football Team. He’ll be asked about the Commanders nickname and the workplace horrors on the watch of Snyder, who once said of the Redskins nickname, “We will never change the name of the team. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.’’

     Put this in caps, too.

     THE NFL IS RUN BY PACKS OF RACISTS.

     And if a lawsuit spoils their fun next week, too bad, old boys.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.