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 Feb. 1, 2022, after the Dolphins fired him, listing the Dolphins, Giants, and 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 Cardinals and Titans, as defendants, as well as the 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 Aug. 14, 2025, upholding Caproni’s split decision. But in doing so, the court wrote, “Commissioner Roger Goodell[’s] unilateral authority to arbitrate was ‘plainly unenforceable.’”
That led Caproni on Feb. 13 to move the entire case into federal court and lift the stay on discovery. According to the letter sent last week by both parties to Judge Caproni, Flores has moved aggressively, sending more than a thousand document requests and “sweeping document subpoenas” to 25 teams seeking information about their hiring practices over the last 24 years.
Sports attorney Chris Deubert expects the NFL will move quickly to quash the subpoenas to the non-party NFL teams.
“They’re obviously going scorched-earth,” Deubert told Front Office Sports about Flores seeking information from 31 teams. “Presuming he’s asking about their employment hiring practices and policies, and even that can be difficult to just to respond to. … But those teams are probably going to object to the subpoenas, probably collectively through the league-friendly counsel, and say it’s not relevant, and there’ll be an interesting sort of fight there.”
If the retaliation claim is indeed as alleged by the NFL in the letter—the argument that the league’s effort to enforce arbitration is itself retaliation—then Deubert believes that it “makes no sense.”
Lawyers for Flores did not respond to a request for comment.
No trial date is scheduled, and it is unlikely to be until Judge Caproni rules on motions to dismiss, which must be filed by the teams and league yet again in response to Flores’s third amended complaint.
