Ron Rivera knows how a lot of coaches sympathizing with Brian Flores, in the wake of his bombshell lawsuit dropping, are feeling this week. Mostly because, at one point, he that young minority coach: knocking on the door, year after year after year, without an invitation to walk through it.
And while he’d suspected the act of Rooney Rule box-checking from teams before, there was one instance, a little over a decade ago, that stood apart from the rest.
“I won’t say which team, but it was early in the process and the Rooney Rule really had just started,” Rivera said, from a quick vacation in his native California. “And so when it came time to interview, what a lot of people said was this particular coach was getting the job anyways. And I was asked to interview late in the process, and one thing that we noted was that they hadn’t interviewed a minority yet. …
“So I just said, ‘You know what? I’m not going to do that.’”
That’s right, Rivera did what few coaches in that situation would now, let alone back then.
“That kind of struck me as, ‘Really, O.K., well, you know what? I’m not going to take my time and go up there and interview,’” Rivera said. “And then the next day they announce this is the guy. Because if you go up there and you interview, and you’re the last guy, and the very next day they bring somebody in, to me that would’ve felt really sh–ty, to be honest with you. That’s why I didn’t do it.”
Within Flores’s lawsuit, both the Giants and Broncos were accused directly of such practices with the ex-Dolphins coach on the business end of them. Both teams strongly denied going into interviews with Flores with anything other than the best intentions to give him a shot at winning their jobs.
At this point, though, drilling too far down on the individual facts of Flores’s case against the league and its team amounts to missing the forest for the trees.
Whether or not the Giants or Broncos individually were guilty of wrongdoing doesn’t erase two decades of frustration from Black coaches and executives over the lack of progress in improving the diversity among NFL team decision-makers. And the concept of the “sham” interview is just one example of how efforts to make progress have hit roadblock after roadblock to prevent the kind of big breakthrough so many have been waiting for.
Rivera’s felt it, for sure.
Flores did too, of course, as did so many others. Which is why the events of this week aren’t so much about one man’s experience as they are about years of frustration finally reaching a tipping point, and at a time when just one of 27 NFL head coaches happens to be Black.
