A report last week linked Tom Brady and the Raiders to Brian Flores as a potential head coaching candidate in Las Vegas and included that Flores would likely want to bring former Giants head coach Brian Daboll with him.
The reactions were mixed, especially considering the way things ended for Flores with the Dolphins, but according to Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter, Brady and company were probably just floating the idea of hiring Flores to assess the reaction.
“There was a trial balloon flown… about Brian Flores, who used to be the DC and New England coming as the head coach with [Brian] Daboll,” Carpenter said on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast.
“I talked to some NFL people about it. They felt like, what one person [called] game of Twister that the league played to allow Tom to be an owner and still do announcing, they just said, ‘I would find it hard to believe that Tom would go hire somebody suing the league after all that the league has done for them…'”
“I think it’s a trial balloon that somebody wanted to go up and see what the reaction was. Because I can tell you that the reaction around the NFL was not excited.”
Following the news that Flores could be a candidate to watch in Las Vegas, comments from former NFL quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick resurfaced last week talking about the mistakes Flores made in Miami.
“Brian Flores has been a really hot name, and I think the further removed we get from his tenure in Miami, the more people kind of forget about how that ended, and the better his name becomes,” Fitzpatrick said on the Fitz and Whit podcast a year ago.
“He went to Pittsburgh and got to learn under Mike Tomlin and see how he led, and now he’s been in Minnesota with Kevin O’Connell. I think the interesting thing with Brian Flores, when I think about him and being able to play under him for a few years, is which version of Brian Flores are we getting? And in year one with Miami, take you back to that year.”
“Miami got rid of every good player they had, and that was jokingly called the ‘Tank for Tua’ year. But I’ll tell you, halfway through that year, we didn’t win a game yet, and there was a shift in the way that he was approaching his job. He was likable, he was relatable, he demanded a lot out of the players, but he was also able to get the best version of his players, and I really appreciated him for that.”
“But as his tenure went on in Miami, he kind of became unrecognizable. A lot of the staff he brought over from New England, that was where, you know, he cut his teeth, and the NFL was there for 15-plus years as an assistant.”
Looking ahead, Fitzpatrick said he has doubts about Flores getting another opportunity as a head coach because of the bridges he burned in Miami.
“I think he’s going to have a really hard time if you’re interviewing him as a head coach,” Fitzpatrick continued.
“I think in the interviews, he’ll be likable, he’ll be relatable. But when people say, okay, give me somebody from Miami that coached under you as a reference so we can talk to them. I think he burned a lot of bridges there. I think he alienated himself from the entire staff. Instead of what you were just talking about, having the humility to ask questions, to collaborate.”
As for Crosby’s comments from a few years ago, he said the Dolphins (when Flores was the head coach) were the one team he told his agent he didn’t want to draft him.
“Pat was in Miami when I was coming into the league, so I was going on my top-30 visits, and I was in Miami,” Crosby on the Pat McAfee Show three years ago. “For the most part, my trip to Miami, I’m not going to lie, it was rough. All the coaches were super hard on me, and I told my agent after, I’m like, ‘I don’t want to come here. Tell Miami don’t draft me.’ But my one meeting at Miami that I liked was Pat Graham.”
Crosby hasn’t responded to rumors that Flores could be in the mix to be the Raiders next head coach, but it’s probably a safe bet that the next head coach in Las Vegas will have an influence on where he wants to play in 2026.
x: @raidersbeat
More rumors without substance.
That’s a big no thanks on flores!
He’d be a disaster