Giants, Brian Flores to face off for first time since Vikings defensive coordinator interviewed for head coach job
Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores watches his players prior to an NFL preseason game against the Arizona Cardinals on Aug. 26, 2023, in Minneapolis. Credit: AP/Bruce Kluckhohn
Hear ye, hear ye. All rise. The case of Brian Flores v. the New York Giants is about to be heard.
No, not the actual lawsuit, the one Flores filed against the Giants (as well as several other teams and the NFL itself) in 2022 in which he claims that because he is Black he was disrespected by and discriminated against during his firing from the Dolphins and the interview process in New Jersey that resulted in Brian Daboll being hired as head coach. Several other Black NFL coaches joined the suit as well. That one is still floating around somewhere amid various legal dockets and billable hours awaiting its fate. When it actually gets to a courtroom to be decided — and even if it does — is just about anyone’s guess. The sides are still wrangling in federal courts over whether the case should go to trial of be referred to arbitration.
Although the substance of Flores’ complaint is a very important matter for the league to reckon with, this upcoming clash may be more interesting — and certainly more pressing — to those who are not regular readers of the Harvard Law Review. It has to do only with the football aspect of things as Flores, now the defensive coordinator for the Vikings, will be on the sideline Sunday at MetLife Stadium, facing the Giants for the first time since he interviewed here for the big job, and going head-to-head against their new offensive play-caller . . . who just happens to be Daboll.
The rift between Flores and the Giants stemmed from a series of misaddressed texts from Bill Belichick, a mentor to both men, who thought he was telling Daboll how well his candidacy was going while actually conversing with Flores.
Turned out he had the wrong Brian.
On Sunday we’ll take the latest step toward finding out if the Giants got the right one.
Daboll confirmed for the first time on Tuesday that he will indeed be the one barking plays into the helmet of Daniel Jones on Sunday. While he did not give a direct reason for the change after two years of coordinator Mike Kafka handling that responsibility — “We've talked enough about that,” he said — the implication since Daboll grabbed the headset himself in the spring has been that he is doing it to gain some measure of control over his own fate as the Giants head into a season that could determine how much longer he sticks around.
“I'm the head coach, so I'm responsible for everything, whether it's the defense, the special teams, the offense,” he said on Tuesday.
It was his play-calling that got him the job when he was the coordinator in Buffalo, and now he seems to be relying on his play-calling to keep him in it.
Flores, meanwhile, revitalized the Vikings defense last season, his first in Minnesota. In 2022, the year the Vikings lost to Daboll and the Giants in the playoffs, they ranked 28th in points allowed per game. Last year under Flores they were 13th.
Because the lawsuit is still open, neither Flores nor the Giants had any new comment on it or this strange dynamic of having an active plaintiff as a visiting opponent in a Week 1 game.
At the time he filed the lawsuit, though, Flores and his attorneys said his discussions with the Giants were “sham” interviews conducted to fulfill obligations to the league’s Rooney Rule that encourages minority hiring. The Giants denied that and insisted Flores was a legitimate candidate “until the 11th hour” when they hired Daboll.
“We're very comfortable with our hiring process,” co-owner John Mara said in the spring of 2022. “It was a fair process and we ended up making the decision that we made based on a lot of factors, none of which had to do with race."
Flores and Daboll go back well beyond the time they were both vying to be head coach of the Giants, though.
They were on the same staff in New England from 2013-16. They faced each other as division rivals when Flores was head coach of the Dolphins from 2019-21 and Daboll was in Buffalo. In those six meetings Daboll’s Bills won all six games, scored at least 26 each time, and hung 56 on Flores’ Fins in the 2020 regular season final.
“It's a pressure defense,” Daboll said of Flores’s schemes. “He pressures often. Sometimes the entire game.”
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Daboll referenced a game the Dolphins played against the Rams when they had Jared Goff at quarterback in 2020.
“They blitz-zeroed it every single snap,” Daboll said (it was actually 40 of 63 passing dropbacks). “It’ll be a challenge. It's a challenge mentally. You have to make sure that you're on point with everything you need to be on point to make sure a play works against 11 people that pressure, I'd say, quite often.”
Flores, meanwhile, is aware of what he is going up against in Daboll and the Giants. He called Jones, the player who might have been his quarterback had he gotten this job, “very talented” and spoke highly of his former colleague.
“I’ve known Brian Daboll for a long time and he is as good an offensive mind and really a football mind as there is,” Flores said on Tuesday. “Schematically there are some things they like to do that are standard operating procedure for them, but in Week 1 everyone’s got some new wrinkle, everyone’s got some new play they can’t wait to run. I got a couple myself. That’s part of the excitement of it.”
That and the smudged legal lenses through which this game can also be viewed.
At the time the lawsuit was brought, Mara said the Giants had no intention of settling the case.
Flores hasn’t had his day in court yet, but he will certainly have an opportunity to settle some things with his would-be employer on Sunday.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
