Yesterday, Brian Flores filed the bombshell lawsuit that the NFL either anticipated or dreaded. The allegations detail unprofessional behavior of all kinds that undergird the league’s commitment to a culture of exclusion and racism, from “sham interviews” with hungover or disinterested staff to organizational violations to financial incentives for losses. The undercurrent of Flores’s journey through an absolute clown show of a corporation is race, and that is both evidently true and patently unsurprising. The NFL, which prides itself on decorum, has always been a place for hard-headed company men to nod sagely at notions of Tradition and Passion and Love For The Game, while mostly ignoring the collateral damage of their game. Brains are broken, aggression is cultivated on the field and doled out in homes, and all the while billions of dollars are stuffed mostly into the pockets of 32 owners, themselves the oligarchical elite who rule both sport and society. Specifically, Flores takes to task the Dolphins, Giants, Broncos, and Patriots (via texts from figurehead Bill Belichick), all run by a group of people who own or have owned the world. If football is just a game, these powerful owners stretch far outside of it, running oil pipelines, hedge funds, and the largest real estate ventures in the world. Each year, these owners hand the keys to Football Guys, experts at schmoozing with the other Football Guys, staring through binoculars at athletes and coaches who have made, and continue to make, the game (or, more fittingly, the product) of football.
On a Sunday in Autumn, fans forget all of that because, outside of awkward pans to glum faces or celebrations in the owner’s box, the cameras linger on the men who play football. Fans line up to see them after a game, kids holding cards or jerseys with a Sharpie in hopes of a quick brush with athletic greatness. They fire up their video games when they get home and pretend they, too, could precisely place a pass sixty yards away with the flick of their wrist. In this era of player-driven sport, every coach plays a different role. In Flores’s case, he was where the buck stopped: his intensity radiated out of the television, whether in the joy of winning against all odds or in moments of (justified) angry outburst or in general scrutiny of a team he felt clear disdain toward. Other coaches reflect a youthful exuberance, or an overworked vice-principal, or an old jazz guy I guess, but one commonality is that each and every one will thank ownership for believing in them, for better or for worse.
Like the interviews Flores was subjected to, this process of gratitude is a fucking sham, mostly because these owners don’t really seem to believe in anything at all. Their lackeys exist only for firing or serving as living proof of their own shrewdness, little barnacles on a whale providing some ecologically-important purpose I’m sure, but still tiny, disposable, replaceable. A tiny ecosystem, interacting with itself to the benefit of an organism big beyond comprehension. Brian Flores wins and says “Thank you, Mr. Ross,” or he loses and says “Thank you, Mr. Ross” and no one really hears that or cares except for Mr. Ross, incidentally the only person who actually matters. And all that matters to Ross, and 31 other owners respectively, is hearing someone say “Mr. Ross.” Ross and his ilk spend their days between their businesses and the team headquarters, flirting with corporate fascism and ushering in the coming climate apocalypse with glee. “At least,” I imagine they think, “we give the people their bread and circuses.”
Look in the mirror and tell yourself that you believe the NFL is committed to diversity, that the NFL treats all players and coaches with dignity and respect, and then tell me what your face does.
These owners are the villains, and Brian Flores is not, regardless of how his firing went down, because the owners are quite literally the villains of our entire planet. They are the pinnacles of a privatized society, and there are not, and never will be, any good billionaires. Brian Flores, like Colin Kaepernick before him, may have set fire to his own career in an effort to expose the buffoonery, childishness, and pomposity that undergirds a racist and despicable institution. The NFL will do what every institution from police departments to private mega-corporations does: immediately make cosmetic changes while minimizing any structural change it possibly can. It Takes All Of Us will still be in the endzone, and Stephen Ross will still be in the owner’s box if the NFL has its way, but that is an unsettled outcome. Kaepernick, of course, did not fully succeed in his crusade against the NFL’s alleged collusion: he and co-defendant Eric Reid secured relatively small financial settlements, no changes to the NFL’s player practices, and enough shame only to force cosmetic changes. Could Flores do more? In the current state of his allegations, which amount to sham interviews and untoward business practices, his goal seems to be to pry open the NFL’s private communications in hopes of embarrassment that serves as a catalyst for meaningful change. This worked in the case of Jon Gruden, whose emails were filled with as much bile as could be expected from a guy whose whole vibe is “divorced uncle sending you a quadruple-forward from a Hotmail account.” Kaepernick was looking for evidence to prove a concerted effort by ownership to prevent his own continued playing career; Flores is looking to prove that “patterns, practices, and/or policies” constructed a glass ceiling for coaches based on race and/or color. Ultimately, on numerous television appearances today, Flores called for “changing the hiring practices of the NFL,” labelling this moment a “fork in the road.”
Embarrassing the NFL alone is a noble initiative, especially when targeting the owners, but the shape of that change is nebulous and has a lot to do with what you believe about capitalism. Brian Flores, and all coaches of color, navigate the NFL through the prism of race: no one should be shocked to hear about sham interviews, poor communication, and insulting expectations, or act as though there is any alternative explanation. This is a country that holds traditional lines of class mobility, especially when drawn racially, as invisible but immovable, and the NFL loves nothing more than tradition. The owners police their own ranks, requiring a league vote to approve any new ownership, and for each ownership group to have one individual who puts up at least 30% of the equity (the Broncos are selling for $4 billion dollars, currently, so a billionaire is literally a requisite for the purchase) unless your nice white family has owned the team for a sizable amount of time. Flores has not yet defined the specifics of the desired change in his comments or his lawsuit: the Rooney Rule, stipulating a certain number of minority candidate interviews for certain positions, is under direct attack by his charge of sham meetings. But how can it be replaced? Ultimately, 32 individuals have an outsized power in hiring for every single position, including the most important team positions of Head Coach and General Manager, and those 32 individuals answer to no master but capital.
In the wake of this lawsuit, multiple tweets, including one from a personal hero in Kenny Stills, suggested that there is a need to diversify ownership. I remain skeptical. Allowing venture capitalists or McKinseyites or some shit to buy a football team is not a good answer, I believe, because there is no single corporate space in American life that is not hierarchically dominated by patriarchal and white forces. Teams would cease to be owned by individuals and would be owned, instead, by an ownership group whose meetings are as closed-door as ever. Would it be worse? No, probably not, because it does not get worse in terms of Guillotine Candidates than Stephen Ross. But whether your own vice is Marvel movies, gambling, beef, travel, drugs, politics, religion, or any other cultural nook, it is constantly being acquired and re-acquired as IP or disrupted or reinvented, the greenhouse gasses released along with every additional dollar. The NFL, like our country currently held hostage by a dipshit yacht owner in West Virginia and a dipshit lady who wears terrible clothing in Arizona, has no answer beyond a new helmet decal and a Call To Action, and each reform feels painfully naive.
I’m not a nihilist by nature: “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is ultimately true, but I believe your personal choices also have spiritual and/or moral value, and you are obligated for yourself and your loved ones to make the best choice of your available options. Brian Flores chose, even as he remains a candidate in New Orleans and Houston, to take action against the NFL, regardless of what this may mean for the scrutiny on his admittedly-imperfect record as a coach and leader. Fans of the named teams paint Flores as a hypocrite, who cries only now that the demotion from Head Coach is likely concrete, and bitter over a firing for which he cannot accept some blame. Now more than ever before, though, those whiny fans must know the score; look in the mirror and tell yourself that you believe the NFL is committed to diversity, that the NFL treats all players and coaches with dignity and respect, and then tell me what your face does. Now replace the NFL with Disney or the Crypto space or Joe Biden. It’s a fun way to wait for the shower to heat up.
Like Brian Flores, we must all come to terms with what it means that we’ve dedicated years of our lives, large percentages of our attention spans, our ability to secure comfort and shelter for ourselves and our family, and our own emotional health to corporate overlords who absolutely would not notice or give a shit if we disappeared tomorrow. It’s the pain of existence in these times, in which the corporate heads make sure that you don’t have to squint to see it all tumbling down just over the horizon. We experience that pain in the climate, the segregated neighborhoods that seem to now permeate our digital spaces as well, the unending income inequality that continues to polarize and radicalize our citizens in an effort to distract from the elite’s worship of capital over lives. Maybe this is just what being a grown-up is, but it hurts these days to love anything at all; our homes, our jobs, our clothes, our social media, our interests, our possessions, our Big TV with the Super Bowl on.
