If we are being honest, we know the NFL is a white-bread old boys club.
We know there are racist hiring practices in the NFL, similar to almost every major corporation in the United States. Racism is covert these days, not overt, but it still exists. You didn’t need a Brian Flores lawsuit to point this out.
If this were any other type of ism, the NFL would be in a lot of trouble, but since the white majority rules this country, racism is very low on their priority list, especially since they are the ones benefiting from it. These are smoking gun receipts that can’t be disputed by Flores, Horton, and Wilks, but somehow mainstream media will ignore them, and the NFL will try to make it go away.
Lawyers say that Wilks was discriminated against as a “bridge coach” who was “not given any meaningful chance to succeed. Wilks was 3-13 in one season with Arizona before being fired and replaced by Kliff Kingsbury. Lawyers wrote that while Kingsbury has been successful, “Mr. Wilks, given the same opportunity afforded to Mr. Kingsbury, surely would have succeeded as well.”
Horton was a defensive coordinator for the Titans in 2014-15 and interviewed for the team’s head coaching job. Lawyers said the interview was 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.” The Titans hired Mike Mularkey, who is white, for the job, and Horton left to be the defensive coordinator in Cleveland. He has since retired.
Mularkey, who had been the team’s interim head coach for the final nine game of the 2015 season, said in a 2020 podcast that the Titans owners told him he was going to get the job before they’d completed the interview process, including interviewing two minority candidates.
“I’ve always prided myself on doing the right thing in this business and I can’t say that’s true about everybody in this business,” Mularkey said on the podcast. “It’s a very cutthroat business and a lot of guys will tell you that. … I allowed myself at one point when I was in Tennessee to get caught up in something I regret it and I still regret it. But 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. Actually, the GM, Jon Robinson, he was in on the interview with me. He had no idea why he was interviewing me — that I had the job already. I regret. I’m sorry I did that. It was not the way to go about it.”
The NFL said they have been doing a lot of research on the accusation but had no idea about the Mularkey interview.
Sure they didn’t. The NFL needs to be honest about this and not fight it because how can you fight something that clearly is true.
Flip the pages for more about the lawsuit.