The lawsuit that Minnesota Vikings’ defensive coordinator Brian Flores has lodged against the National Football League about its hiring practice is still ongoing, and after a move that Flores made on Tuesday, the suit now involves nearly every team in the league.
According to Front Office Sports, Flores has subpoenaed 25 NFL teams for information about their hiring practices in his ongoing discrimination lawsuit against the league. There were already six teams named in the suit, which means that there’s
only one team that isn’t currently a part of it.
If I had to guess which one it was, I’d be willing to wager that it’s the one that’s currently signing his paychecks.
Flores first filed his lawsuit in February of 2022 after he was fired by the Miami Dolphins following his third season as their head coach. He was interviewed by the New York Giants and the Denver Broncos for their head coaching jobs, but he described those as “sham” hiring processes that were basically designed to satisfy the NFL’s Rooney Rule requirements for interviewing minority coaching candidates. In the case of the Giants, the lawsuit claims that Flores received text messages from then-New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick (who Flores worked under for a number of years in New England) that showed the Giants had decided to hire Buffalo Bills’ offensive coordinator Brian Daboll before interviewing any minority candidates.
After that, Flores was joined in his lawsuit by former Arizona Cardinals head coach Steve Wilks and longtime NFL assistant coach Ray Horton. Those additions added the Cardinals, the Tennessee Titans, and the Houston Texans as named teams in the lawsuit. Today’s filing covers 25 other teams, which, again, would likely cover every non-Vikings team in the league. Neither Wilks nor Horton is currently employed by an NFL team. Wilks was the defensive coordinator for the New York Jets for most of 2025 but was fired near the end of the season, while Horton has not been in the NFL since 2019.
Per the Front Office Sports story, the NFL is expected to move to dismiss the subpoenas for the 25 teams that are not directly named in the suit.
Brian Flores’ case against the NFL has been going on for over four years now, and if this latest move is any indication, we shouldn’t expect it to be coming to an end any time soon.
