The league and the New York Giants, Denver Broncos and Houston Texans plan to move the lawsuit to an NFL-administered proceeding.
Published May 26, 2026
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the National Football League’s proposal to move racial discrimination claims by black coaches from federal court to arbitration proceedings administered by the NFL.
The justices declined to hear an appeal by the league, filed by three teams, after a lower court ruled that the NFL cannot force former Miami Dolphins head coach and current Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores to arbitrate workplace bias through a process overseen by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
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The teams involved in the appeal were the New York Giants, Denver Broncos, and Houston Texans.
Flores, 45, accused the NFL, the most popular professional sports league in the United States, of systematic discrimination against black coaches.
His 2022 lawsuit alleges the NFL and several teams discriminated against Black candidates for coaching and management positions, in violation of federal and state law. Flores filed the lawsuit after he was fired as head coach of the Miami Dolphins, even though the team had a winning record for two consecutive seasons.
Flores claimed that during his career, he was asked to do “fake interviews” with the Giants and Broncos just to satisfy a 2003 NFL policy called the Rooney Rule that required minorities to interview for coaching positions. The NFL adopted the Rooney Rule in 2003 in recognition of the historically low number of minorities in head coaching positions in the NFL.
Two additional black coaches, former Arizona Cardinals head coach Steve Wilkes and former longtime NFL assistant coach Ray Horton, later joined Flores as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit seeks to force the NFL to make a series of changes, incentivize teams to hire Black coaches and general managers, and require teams to explain hiring and firing decisions in writing.
The NFL, which denies the racial discrimination claims, responded to the lawsuit by arguing that the suit should be dismissed for lack of legal merit or otherwise sent to arbitration.
A New York-based federal judge ruled in 2023 that the NFL and the Giants, Broncos and Texans must face Flores’ claims of systemic discrimination against Black coaches within the league, while referring other aspects of the case to private arbitration.
On appeal, the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed in 2025 that some of Flores’ claims belonged in federal court. The Second Circuit ruled that the provision in the NFL constitution giving Goodell unilateral arbitration authority was “clearly unenforceable” because it would deny Flores arbitration “in the fullest sense of the word.”
“An arbitration agreement that compels one party to submit a dispute to the substantive and procedural authority of one of the other party’s chief executive officers is an arbitration agreement in name only,” Judge Jose Cabranes wrote for the Second Circuit.
