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 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. The court agreed with the NFL that coaches must use the arbitration procedure against current employers, but had access to the federal courts against clubs when the coaches were only applicants. But if the NFL wanted to show the football world that it and its members had not engaged in racial discrimination and really wanted to give Black coaches a fighting chance to win top coaching positions, it would agree to allow all the issues to be decided in court instead of by Goodell.

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