Marvin Lewis on Brian Flores’ Charges: “No Question, It’s Alarming” -

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(EDITOR’S NOTE: To listen to Marvin Lewis, click on the following link: Ep 94: Tom Brady Retires; Marvin Lewis Joins the Show | Spreaker )

One week ago former Miami Dolphins’ coach Brian Flores dropped a bomb on the NFL, filing a discrimination lawsuit vs. the league and charging Dolphins’ owner Stephen Ross with offering him $100,000 for each game he would lose in 2019.

Since then, the NFL and the teams Flores named (Denver, the Giants and Miami) each refuted his claims, but that hasn’t made the subjects go away. And it won’t. Expect them to be front and center when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell answers questions this week prior to Super Bowl LVI.

As they should.

“There’s no question it’s alarming,” former Cincinnati coach Marvin Lewis said on the latest “Eye Test for Two” podcast. “Then the NFL comes out and says, ‘There’s no merit to these allegations?’ Come on. You have to look into these things.”

The NFL promised it will, with Goodell pledging to bolster its minority hiring practices and to investigate Flores’ charges of tanking for dollars. But now the question: What does it find and what does it do when it finds it?

The allegation of rewarding a coach to throw games – a charge Ross vehemently denied – strikes at the core of what Goodell values most about the NFL, and that’s the integrity of the game. In 2016, he ended a year-and-a-half battle with quarterback Tom Brady by suspending him four games for having a “general awareness” of lighter footballs.

So what happens if Flores’ more incendiary charges are accurate? Well, then the plot thickens.

“In 2003, when I took over the Bengals,” Lewis recalled, “people said, ‘Well, you didn’t play (No. 1 draft pick) Carson Palmer. Well, maybe I screwed up and should have. But I didn’t want the team to blame losing on one player.

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“And guys (that were on the squad) said, ‘We’ve got a quarterback in Jon Kitna.’ They didn’t think we should even spend the first pick on Carson Palmer. But he was by far … we felt … the best player in the draft and the one that would be a premier quarterback for a long, long time. And, no question, he was. But I took the pressure off of him that year.

“So, I just think you have to win. As a coach, you have to win. How can you look at people in the locker room and not win? They’re not necessarily promised the next year, and the coaches certainly aren’t promised the next year. So I don’t understand. You can’t do this job, and not do it to the fullest of your ability.”

The other half of Flores’ allegations took aim at hiring practices in 2019 and again this year when he sought head-coaching jobs. He cited examples of what he considered racial discrimination, offering misdirected text messages from New England coach Bill Belichick (apparently, he thought he was contacting Brian Daboll, not Brian Flores) as proof.

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Since then, all parties have responded, categorically denying Flores’ charges. Nevertheless, the league will launch an investigation there, too.

“Obviously,” Lewis said of minority hiring, “there has been no progress made. It’s gone backward. And I don’t know why.

“The situation that the National Football League is in right now does not reflect very well. There has been no change. Really, it’s gone in reverse, and I don’t think it’s going to get better this hiring cycle.”

It hasn’t. Seven of the nine vacancies have been filled, none with African-American coaches. Miami’s new head coach, Mike McDaniel, is bi-racial. The other six are white.

But what Flores pointed out is what everyone already knows: There is a disproportionate number of African-American players to African-American head coaches. Seventy percent of the league’s players are black, while only one of its 32 teams is led by a black head coach – and that’s the Pittsburgh Steelers, with Mike Tomlin.

That wasn’t supposed to happen with the Rooney Rule. But it has. So now what? Now we wait to hear what Roger Goodell and the league office has to say. Stay tuned.