The lawsuit filed by Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores against the NFL and various teams has finally moved forward (as to several of the pending claims) to the discovery process. Which gives Flores’s lawyers a certain degree of latitude to seek information that could help prove one or more of his claims.
As noted by Daniel Kaplan, Flores has asked the NFL to produce documents relating to the Jon Gruden and Colin Kaepernick cases. The NFL is resisting.
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“Requests concerning Colin Kaepernick and Jon Gruden, along with other requests raised by Flores at the August 14 conference, are likewise not relevant or discoverable,” the NFL’s outside counsel wrote to the court, per Kaplan.
On the surface, there’s no connection to the Flores cases. To the extent, however, that his claim against the Texans arises from the argument that he wasn’t hired to coach the team in retaliation for his recent filing of a race discrimination lawsuit against the NFL, the Dolphins, the Giants, and the Broncos, the Kaepernick case becomes arguably relevant.
Like Kaepernick, Flores claims he was essentially blackballed via collusion of the franchises. While Flores has found employment as an assistant with the Steelers and Vikings, Flores has consistently been overlooked for head-coaching jobs.
It’s harder to connect the Flores case to the Gruden case. Gruden claims he was targeted by whoever deliberately leaked confidential documents in an effort to force him out as the Raiders’ coach. Gruden isn’t claiming that he had engaged in protected behavior for which someone retaliated against him, or that multiple teams decided to not do business with him. His case is about someone wanting him out — and about someone weaponizing emails from the Washington investigation to make it happen.
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Obviously, Gruden had pissed someone off sufficiently enough to get that person to try to take him down. Absent evidence that someone was retaliating against Gruden for doing something that insulated him against being forced out, or that the teams colluded not to hire him after he sued, it will be hard to connect the Gruden case to the Flores case for the purposes of getting documents regarding the Gruden case to use in the Flores case.
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