The lawsuit that Brain Flores filed against the NFL will now have two new coaches added to the amended complaint.
Steve Wilks and Ray Horton have a bone to pick with the NFL and will be represented by the same lawyers that are pleading Flores' case. Wilks coached the Arizona Cardinals for one season in 2018, while Horton had 22 years of assistant coaching experience before interviewing for the Tennessee Titan's head coaching vacancy in 2016.
Both coaches eventually ended up not getting their jobs in favor of white coaches, which is the narrative that they are trying to use as the crux of their argument.
Wilks contends that he was nothing more than a "bridge coach" for the Cardinals and that many of the personnel decisions he wanted to make for the organization's future were disregarded because he was black. His argument also stems from the fact he was fired after going 3-13 in his first season, while his replacement, Kliff Kingsbury went 5-10-1 in his first season in 2019, (Kingsbury still has the job).
"Black coaches and candidates should have exactly the same ability to become employed, and remain employed, as white coaches and candidates. That is not currently the case, and I look forward to working with Coach Flores and Coach Horton to ensure that the aspiration of racial equality in the NFL becomes a reality," Wilkes said.
Horton also believes he was not given a truly equal opportunity to become a long-standing head coach. Thanks to a statement by Mike Mularkey, the coach that ended up getting the job in 2016, about how the interview process was conducted, Horton has some firepower to bring to his case.
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Mularkey claimed that the Titans informed him before the interview process was completed that he would get the job. Mularkey said on the "Steelers Realm" podcast that "the ownership there, Amy Adams Strunk and her family, came in and told me I was going be the head coach in 2016 before they went through the Rooney Rule. And so, I sat there knowing I was the head coach in '16 as they went through this fake hiring process. Knowing a lot of the coaches they were interviewing, knowing how much they prepared to go through those interviews, knowing that everything they could do and they had no chance of getting that job."
Now, this by itself might seem like a case of the NFL being racist. But if you look at it in context, the argument falls apart a little bit.
Mularkey had served as interim head coach for the final nine games of the 2015 season, so it would make sense that the guy who already had a little bit of head coaching experience with that same team would be first in line to get the job.
Now, Horton was the defensive coordinator for the Titans in the 2014-15 season before this happened, and his lawyers claimed he was given a "completely sham interview done only to comply with the Rooney Rule and to demonstrate an appearance of equal opportunity and a false willingness to consider a minority candidate for the position. "While the interview might simply have only been conducted to fill the Rooney rule interview quota, that does not mean Horton was not hired because of racism. It just means the titans already knew what they wanted, and complied with the NFL's rule in the process.
We'll see what becomes of the case, but all we can say for sure is that it got a lot more interesting.
