Brian Flores was hired as the Pittsburgh Steelers senior defensive assistant/linebackers coach just weeks after he filed a 58-page class-action lawsuit against the NFL, just three years after the league settled its case with Colin Kapernick and Eric Reid.
The timing of this can be a coincidence. It feels like the Rooney family learned from how the NFL mishandled the situation of Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid.
It took until the end of last season for him to have a Black assistant on staff. Teryl Austin was the new defensive coach, and he will report to Flores along with Tomlin.
The idea that Tomlin decided to promote Austin and hire Flores so quickly doesn't pass the smell test given his past statements. In last year's quote, Tomlin said that the fact that Eric Bieniemy keeps getting passed over for head coaching positions was a head-scratcher.
I don't have an answer for you as to how to make it better. All we have is hope. We haven't been able to move the needle.
A coach that hadn't hired a Black coach at the time publicly said how he couldn't understand how a talented Black coach hadn't been given a chance.
If the noise around Flores was going to go away because the league was encouraged to hire him, they were dreaming. The new assistant coach of the PittsburghSteelers is back in the news after an interview with Bryant Gumbel of Real Sports in which he discussed how he missed out on millions by not signing a non-disclosure agreement with the Dolphins.
“To Coach Flores’ credit, he wasn’t gonna sign that, because he wanted — it wasn’t about the money,” Flores’ attorney Doug Wigdor told Gumbel. “If it was about the money, he would have signed it. What he did instead was he filed this lawsuit so that he could help other coaches, now ... and in the future.”
The part where Flores' lawyer says he did it so that he could help other coaches speaks volumes.
You have a point of view.
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