Completely overshadowing the renaming of the Washington Football Team to the "Washington Commanders" (this observer believes that "Washington Presidents" would have been better), recently-fired Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores has filed a class action suit against the NFL and three of the league's teams — the Denver Broncos and the New York Giants (or as Chris Berman liked to call them, "The New York Football Giants"), in addition to (obviously) the Dolphins.
(Flores has no proverbial leg to stand on against the Broncos — because the reason why they hired former Green Bay offensive coordinator Nathaniel Hackett to be their new head coach is to lure Aaron Rodgers into accepting a trade to Denver, a deal that is likely to be consummated within mere minutes after the beginning of the new NFL year at 4:00 PM Eastern time on March 16).
Though technically Hispanic, at least under the original racial bean-counting format promulgated by the Carter Administration in 1978, which states that "all persons who satisfy the criteria for designation as Hispanic are classified as such, irrespective of their other characteristics (i.e., skin color)" — both of Flores' parents were born in the Central American nation of Honduras — Flores is basing his lawsuit on the fact that he has been discriminated against because he is "black."
In any event, the firings of Flores and of Houston's David Culley leave Mike Tomlin of the Steelers as the NFL's lone black head coach (although there are also two other "minority" head coaches — Ron Rivera of the now-Commanders, who is Hispanic, and Robert Saleh of the Jets, who is not only Arab-American, but also the first Muslim head coach in the league's history).
Yet that's not the story that is coming out of Miami — which is that Flores was fired because he insisted that the team move on from Tua Tagovailoa (who was born in Hawaii to Samoan parents — wow, these things can get so complicated!) at quarterback and engineer a trade for Houston's scandal-ridden quarterback Deshaun Watson.
But wait — this tale gets a lot juicier from here: Flores claims that he was offered a bribe of $100,000 per loss in 2019, his rookie season in Miami, so as to give the team a higher pick in the 2020 draft.
And now former Browns head coach Hue Jackson, who is African-American, has come forward, claiming that he, too, was offered financial incentives to tank games as head coach of that team in 2016 through 2018. Jackson was 3-36-1 in his two-and-a-half-year stint at Cleveland, getting fired after having finished 1-15 in 2016, 0-16 in 2017, and 2-5-1 after eight games in 2018 (maybe he was fired because of the two wins?) — which seems rather fishy since he had gone 8-8 as head coach of the Raiders in 2011, and got fired despite the fact that this was tied for the team's best finish since 2002, the Raiders also having been 8-8 in 2010.
In 1985, the NBA implemented a lottery system to determine the draft order among the teams that did not make the playoffs the previous season. For the first five years, it was a flat lottery — meaning that each of the seven non-playoff teams had an equal chance at getting the first pick, and each of the seven such teams had an equal chance at getting the seventh pick; this became nine teams when the Charlotte Hornets and the Miami Heat were admitted to the NBA as expansion teams in the last of these five years.
(Prior to 1985, the teams with the worst records in the Eastern and Western Conferences — the Eastern and Western Divisions before 1971 — flipped a coin to decide which team got the top draft pick).
After eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox were banned from baseball for life for allegedly throwing that year's World Series (although it appears as if the most famous of the eight, "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, was "guilty" only of remaining silent during the affair, and did not participate in the fix, much as Ray Lewis did in connection with the murders of Richard Lollar and Jacinth Baker), a reprehensible martinet with the unlikely name of Kenesaw Mountain Landis was named to be baseball's new commissioner, with the mission of "cleaning up" the sport.
Part of his "cleaning up" agenda was to keep African-Americans out of the game — which he succeeded in doing until three years after his death in 1944 (Landis also intensely disliked Jews, who he blamed for the scandal that led to his hiring, and Italian-Americans, among other groups he considered to be among "the great unwashed").
While Roger Goodell is hardly anybody's idea of Landis 2.0, what he should do is strongly urge the owners to adopt the NBA's original lottery format — with all 18 non-playoff teams having an equal chance of getting the first overall pick, and all 18 of these teams having an equal chance of getting the 18th overall pick.
From the second round onward, the draft should remain unchanged, with all teams drafting in reverse order of their previous season's records.
The NFL has a far more serious tanking problem on its hands than its problem of not having enough black head coaches — and needs to solve it in as draconian a manner as possible (what would Landis have done?).
Not only that, but there is something that can be done about the former problem that has a one hundred percent chance of success. The same cannot be said about the latter problem.
In the words of John Kester, amputation is a rough treatment, but it does get rid of gangrene.
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