The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to let the NFL move Brian Flores’ racial discrimination claims out of federal court and into an arbitration process controlled by the league. The justices declined to hear the league’s appeal, leaving in place lower court rulings that blocked the NFL from forcing Flores into a system overseen by Commissioner Roger Goodell.
The decision keeps alive a lawsuit that Flores, 45, filed in 2022 after he was fired as head coach of the Miami Dolphins despite the team posting winning records in two consecutive seasons. Flores accused the NFL and several teams of systematic discrimination against Black coaches and candidates for coaching and management jobs, and he said he was asked to sit through sham interviews with the New York Giants and Denver Broncos to satisfy the league’s Rooney Rule.
The appeal had been filed by the NFL and three teams — the Giants, the Broncos and the Houston Texans — after a New York-based federal judge in 2023 ruled that those claims had to be heard in court. That judge sent other parts of the case to private arbitration, but allowed the discrimination claims to proceed in federal court, setting up a fight over who gets to decide how the case is handled.
That fight carried into 2025, when the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that some of Flores’ claims belonged in federal court and said a provision in the NFL constitution giving Goodell unilateral authority to arbitrate was plainly unenforceable. Judge Jose Cabranes wrote that an arbitration agreement that forces one side to submit disputes to the substantive and procedural authority of the chief executive of an opposing party is not arbitration “in any meaningful sense of the word” and is “an agreement for arbitration in name only.”
The ruling matters because it leaves Flores free to pursue claims that go to the heart of how the league hires and promotes Black coaches. The NFL adopted the Rooney Rule in 2003, requiring minority candidates to be interviewed for coaching jobs, but Flores has argued that the rule can be hollow when interviews are only procedural. By turning away the NFL’s appeal, the Supreme Court ensured that the central bias claims will stay in a public forum rather than a league-run process.
What happens next is now narrower, but no less significant: the federal case moves forward while the arbitration issues remain split off. For Flores, the court’s refusal to step in keeps pressure on a league that has long defended its hiring practices. For the NFL, it leaves in place a ruling that limits its ability to control how one of its most closely watched discrimination cases is decided.
