We learned last month that Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores has amended his grievance against the NFL and 6 of its teams to incorporate a retaliation count. As Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk detailed in an episode of PFT Live (video link), Flores alleges the proven fact that he has not been hired as a head coach since he filed suit in 2022 supports his retaliation theory.
Flores’ candidacy for an additional head coaching opportunity seemed to be at its zenith on this 12 months’s hiring cycle given his work with Minnesota’s defense in 2025. His efforts led to his earning perhaps the best salary among the many league’s coordinator contingent, but he received only two interviews despite the fact that there have been 10 HC vacancies.
While that fact alone will likely prove insufficient for Flores to prevail, Florio says the invention process will naturally feature a “full investigation” of all teams which have hired head coaches because the initiation of the suit. That features, after all, whom those teams considered and hired and whom they didn’t consider or hire. We previously heard Flores has subpoenaed 31 of the league’s 32 clubs, with the Vikings likely the one exception.
Florio appears to have modified his stance since news of the retaliation count first surfaced. At the moment, he said retaliation could be difficult to prove, but he now believes it could possibly be Flores’ strongest claim, because it should be easy for a jury to know the “culture of retaliation” that Flores alleges persists within the NFL. In spite of everything, nobody likes to be sued, and it stands to reason that a company entity may be tempted to lash out at someone who has questioned its practices.
Several days after the above-referenced PFT Live episode, Florio published an article detailing two of the more intriguing paragraphs in Flores’ most up-to-date amended grievance. He avers the Dolphins did not make contractually required severance payments to him after firing him in early 2022, and he also alleges the Dolphins tried to recuperate money that they had already paid him.
The amended grievance reads, partly, “[t]o make matters worse, after this lawsuit was filed, the Dolphins filed a letter with Commissioner Goodell searching for an arbitration over claims that Mr. Flores must be required to return lots of of 1000’s of dollars of earned income. The one reason that the Dolphins filed this request is because Mr. Flores filed this suit and opposed the team’s discriminatory conduct.”
Presently, there isn’t any further details about Miami’s alleged efforts, that are surely amongst the various targets of Flores’ discovery requests. For the reason that United States Supreme Court has declined to listen to the NFL’s appeal to maintain this matter in arbitration and out of open court, it is feasible the league will increase its urgency to settle the case before discovery advances too far (assuming the trial court doesn’t grant the NFL’s motion to dismiss).