When Brian Flores sued the NFL and several of its teams for race discrimination in hiring head coaches, the league denied discrimination, said it agreed that not enough progress had been made, and promptly moved to send all the claims to arbitration.
On March 1, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York largely rejected that effort as applied to Flores, but agreed, at least for now, that the claims of his co-plaintiffs, Steve Wilks and Ray Horton, were stuck in a system from which the public is totally excluded, there is likely to be limited discovery, and the “neutral” decision-maker is NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
