Brian Flores Subpoenas Dozens of Teams as NFL Lawsuit Grows

Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores has subpoenaed 25 NFL teams—in addition to the six he is suing—for information about their hiring practices as part of his long running discrimination lawsuit against the NFL, a new court filing shows. That brings nearly the entire NFL in some fashion into his case, likely omitting only his current employer. The move comes as he is set to file a new amended complaint Wednesday, the second time this year he’s added to the charges in his original 2022 discrimination suit that rocked the NFL with allegations of systemic racism in head coach hiring.

“The proposed Third Amended Complaint also improperly purports to add a brand new claim for retaliation against the NFL that in no way responds to, let alone cures, the deficiencies in the Second Amended Complaint,” the NFL wrote last week to the judge overseeing the case. “In any event, that claim too— asserting supposed retaliation based upon the NFL’s enforcement of its arbitration provisions in employment agreements that this Court found to be binding upon the parties, is meritless. ” Flores filed the lawsuit February 1, 2022 after the Miami Dolphins fired him, listing the Dolphins and the New York Giants and Denver Broncos as defendants.

The Giants and Broncos had interviewed him for their head coach position in what Flores dubbed sham processes designed to meet the requirements of the Rooney rule, the NFL policy that requires teams to interview minorities for top positions. Two months later, he added former head coaches Steve Wilks and Ray Horton as plaintiffs, and their former teams, the Arizona Cardinals and Tennessee Titans, as defendants, as well as the Houston Texans. The NFL, which declined to comment for this story, has described Flores’s lawsuit as having no merit, though quickly in its aftermath expanded the scope of the Rooney rule.

Over the ensuing four years, the case resided in a kind of purgatory as the NFL tried to shift litigation against the league and teams into arbitration, the league’s preferred venue. Judge Valerie Caproni ruled in March 2023 that the claims against the trio of coaches’ former teams—the Dolphins, Cardinals and Titans—could go to arbitration, but not the Broncos, Giants, and Texans because they never employed the coaches. A time consuming series of appeals and cross appeals ended with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals on August 14, 2025 upholding Caproni’s split decision .