With news on Monday that Brian Flores’ legal battle with the NFL now involves the Raiders, it will be interesting to see what the mystery document currently sealed by the judge will reveal about the Raiders’ hiring processes.
NBC Sports host Mike Florio said on Tuesday that there is belief among Flores and his legal team that they have come across a “smoking gun” within documents involved in one of the Raiders’ recent head coaching searches.
Florio added that there are complicated matters within the ongoing litigation but offered an update from his legal perspective on Tuesday.
These were Florio’s comments on the NFL on NBC’s YouTube page…
“Pablo Torre and I are planning to do a deep dive to help everyone get up to speed on the Flores litigation. Where it came from, what’s happened, where it’s going, and what it means. As part of that process, I put on the fedora with the little reporter hat, the little reporter flag… I pretended to be a reporter to try to gather some more information about the case. And something that I recently came across, that I thought would hold until Pablo and I taped this, and it didn’t, Daniel Kaplan reported about it yesterday, but I had some more stuff beyond what he reported.
In the Flores case, now that the discovery process is unfolding in court, where the parties have a lot more flexibility to gather information, especially from people who aren’t parties to the action. If the Flores case had landed in arbitration withdrawal by the NFL, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for Flores lawyers to get relevant information from the files of others who aren’t directly tied to the league.
And that’s important because the headline from yesterday, Korn Ferry, search firm. Now this came from Kaplan’s report. I hadn’t heard this part, that the document in question was generated in connection with a Raiders coaching search. What I was told and what Kaplan has reported is that in the stack of documents that Korn Ferry produced, and it wasn’t some giant haystack. That’s one of the things about practicing law. They will dump thousands of documents, and you will be required to go through them one at a time to find the needle. For Korn Ferry, I think it was less than a thousand documents.
They were produced. So you still go through them all, one at a time. And one was found that is believed to be a smoking gun.
And it prompted Flores and his lawyers to immediately seek leave to amend his complaint to add one or more theories of liability based on this document. As we mentioned in the PFT item on it, one source with knowledge of the document characterized it as “insane” and chances are we’re going to find out at some point what it says.
Unless the NFL shows up with a literal Brinks truck and buys out Brian Flores with a settlement. And it’s enough money that he doesn’t refuse it. Because I could see Brian Flores, and I’ve mentioned this before, I could see him taking the position, ‘I’m not settling. I’m not settling.’ And it’s easy to say it until that, that mound of cash gets bigger and bigger. If it’s eventually as big as the cash that Walter White and his wife kept in the storage locker, at some point, you’re going to say ‘Yes.’ Or maybe he holds firm.
If he holds firm, if they don’t try to settle it, if they can’t settle it, a document could be critical…
So the bottom line in this case is moving forward, rulings are expected in the coming weeks, but this one document from Korn Ferry could shake up the whole thing.”
Did the Raiders avoid Flores because of the ongoing lawsuit?
Florio doesn’t seem to know what was uncovered in the Korn Ferry documents, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that NFL teams avoided Flores, in part, because of his ongoing lawsuit against the league.
Sports Illustrated insider Hondo Carpenter dropped this little nugget in January, and it sounded like some “NFL people” might not have been enthusiastic about the idea of Flores getting a head coaching job in the middle of his legal battle with the NFL.
“Is there a franchise that’s more willing to fight the NFL than the Raiders? No. But if they were going to go in a Brian Flores direction, I’m just telling you, NFL people don’t think that would be a wise move by Tom Brady. I’ll just leave it there,” Carpenter said on the Las Vegas Raiders Insider podcast.
“I’m not against Flores, I’m just telling you that is the perception. Do I think if there wasn’t the lawsuit that Brady would be interested in Flores? I do. I could see Brian [with the Raiders]. I want to make this clear because I’ve said this multiple times over the last few weeks. I would not be shocked if Brian Flores ends up in Vegas as the defensive coordinator.”
And one other thought on the matter…
From the outside, it certainly sounds like Florio has been getting information from the Flores camp.
If that’s the case, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the mystery document has been described in such strong terms.
Until it’s revealed what was actually found in the Korn Ferry documents, charismatic descriptions about the contents of those documents shouldn’t necessarily carry a lot of weight.
x: @raidersbeat
Force Mark & Tom out like they did to Snyder…eff Flores too
Discovery. Markie giving Gruden the high hard one-hump city.