The NFL Faces Another Existential Threat From New Revelations

It seems a year cannot go by without the NFL facing a potential existential threat. Whether that is concussions, issues with youth football enrollment, racism/sexism controversies around figures like Colin Kaepernick and ex-NFL Owner Daniel Snyder, or more traditional scandals like BountyGate, and SpyGate, there always seems to be another threat around the corner for the league. Many of these problems are of the league’s own making, and though it has at times nearly threatened to bring the US Congress down on them, the NFL has so far managed to dance past these issues and avoid damaging disclosure, loss of tax protections, and attain higher and higher viewership figures.

That said, today Brian Flores dropped a bomb on them that may be the biggest threat since the Concussion case, and one that can engage on a broad emotional level that few of these can with all fans. Flores, the former coach of the Miami Dolphins, filed a Class Action Lawsuit today, alleging racism in the league’s hiring practices in regards to GMs, Head Coaches, Coordinators and more. While the racism claims are big, and tie into a surprising number of NFL issues over the past decade, it was a point that Flores put in the filing that may be the greatest danger the NFL has faced in a while. So we’ll talk about the rampant racism issues here which touch on a number of those issues, but for right now lets focus on one bombshell allegation that could threaten the league.

Miami Dolphins Owner Stephen Ross Allegedly Offered Flores $100k Per Loss in 2019

This is the bombshell in the filing, and I’m going to quote part of it here:

The Dolphins owner, Stephen Ross, was unhappy with this performance not
because it was under-performing. To the contrary, Mr. Ross wanted the Mr. Flores to “tank” the season to put the team in position to secure the first pick in the draft. Indeed, during the 2019 season, Mr. Ross told Mr. Flores that he would pay him $100,000 for each game lost that year. Then, when the Dolphins started winning games, due in no small part to Mr. Flores’ coaching, Mr. Flores was told by the team’s General Manager, Chris Grier, that “Steve” was “mad” that Mr. Flores’ success in winning games that year was “compromising [the team’s] draft position.

I think just on a surface level everyone can grasp how big it is for an owner to be attempting to essentially fix games like this but there are multiple levels to the situation.

• The NFL relies on parity and competitiveness as a major part of its selling product

A lot of the NFL’s success can be attributed to the relative parity of the league and the fact that in any given year — anyone could legitimately win. While there are some teams that have had troubled periods, this year we have the Cincinnati Bengals in the Super Bowl, for the first time in over 30 years, after winning their first playoff game in nearly that long. Routinely you see teams go from worst in a division to best, and in the past two decades we have seen the first 6th overall seed win a super bowl, and a 9–7 Giants team beat the undefeated Patriots in the Super Bowl.

The relatively harder cap of the NFL, the largely equal budgets of teams (yes, some teams have more to spend on coaches, but media rights are shared equally giving teams a similar budget for players), the lower number of games, all add into this compared to other sports and rely on the idea of competitive integrity, something that is significantly damaged by merely the allegation that an owner tried this.

• The NFL is involved in the legalized sports gambling in the US

This is another enormous issue. Here we have the NFL actively involved and sponsoring gambling, and a team in Las Vegas of all places. That makes that competitive integrity all the more important. But, instead here we have an owner threatening it — something that could open them up to liability in lawsuits about games being fixed or manipulated by owners. I don’t know enough about the law in this area but I can’t imagine that having an owner blatantly rewarding a loss would not open the league to some liability of misrepresentation.

• Stephen Ross was invested into the Sports Gambling

In 2019, Dolphins Owner Stephen Ross’ investment Firm RSE Ventures invested into Sports Gambling with Action Network. While they’ve since exited that position, and he wasn’t technically gambling it shows a concerning connection to the area that the person who was attempting to fix games, was also investing into sports gambling infrastructure as presumably one could make money without wagering in such a way. This is less serious than the other two points but they all point to a serious problem for the NFL.

These allegations threaten to damage the NFL shield. There’s not going to be counter-protests or anything else on a point like this — no one is going to want to support an owner wanting to fix games. This makes, even more than normally, a prolonged case that gets to discovery here a huge nightmare for the NFL. It also is far more likely to provoke government action then most accusations have been, and this is a case where the governments have already been looking at the NFL at times.

Additionally Stephen Ross is now a big liability for the NFL. His alleged actions there put a giant target on them, and open them to all sorts of scrutiny and put a lot of pressure on the perception of competitive balance and parity if an owner is making plans like that. Ross also allegedly was attempting to get his head coach to break other rules, namely ones around tampering and meeting with a QB under contract for another team.

Racism right now is also a major hurdle of the NFL. Kaepernick’s case began it, but now you have the Washington situation, the Gruden emails, and this. The case points out, rightfully, that right now there is only 1 black head coach hired in the NFL, and that there is a scarcity of black coaches, coordinators, and GMs. Additionally, it shows that teams are effectively ignoring actions the league has taken to attempt to promote diversity, the ‘Rooney Rule’ by scheduling sham interviews — after they’ve already decided who they are hiring, or showing up hung over, late, and dishevelled. These legal cases have serious image danger for the NFL, as well as discovery risk.

As with the Kaepernick case the league is going to attempt to shut these down early, and kill them before they get to discovery — with motions to dismiss, and failing that offers to settle. I can’t say if Flores has a case here — racial discrimination is often tough to prove, but he’s definitely made a loud statement, as he effectively also ends his career as an NFL coach.

The NFL is facing an existential threat again. Can it weather credible accusations of owners attempting to rig games, and more racism legal action? Only time will tell, but history says more likely than not the NFL will come out of this with only making a token payment.