A memo prepared for the Las Vegas Raiders by the recruiting firm Korn Ferry was entered as an exhibit in Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores's ongoing racial discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams. The memo was unsealed by the court yesterday, giving the public a rare look at how coaching candidates are evaluated by teams. As it turns out, this particular evaluation was pretty racist.
The memo, first reported on by Front Office Sports, contains a list of Flores's strengths and weaknesses, based on Korn Ferry's evaluation of him. There are some harsh things listed under the weaknesses section, including one anonymous team executive calling Flores "the worst hiring decision we’ve ever made." But it is one of Flores's apparent strengths that is likely to be most relevant to his case. Korn Ferry decided to describe Flores this way:
Polished and a good presenter despite growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn (same as Mike Tyson). He was able to build a strong friendship with a billionaire's son which gave him opportunities to socialize and learn how to build relationships with white-collar and upper-class individuals.
A particularly noteworthy thing about this memo is that it was prepared in 2024, well after Flores had already brought his discrimination claim against the NFL and after it had expanded to include Steve Wilks and Ray Horton as plaintiffs. Whoever prepared the memo was certainly aware of Flores's claims against the league, and yet still decided it would be appropriate to go out of their way to make, Don't worry, he's not like those other ones, the thrust of the memo. That should tell you a lot about just how deeply ingrained racism is to the process of evaluating minority coaching candidates—to say nothing of hiring in general—which of course is the precise argument that Flores's suit makes.
It remains to be seen if Flores's case will ever be heard in a courtroom, but so far it has survived several attempts by the NFL to have it decided via the league's internal arbitration process. The NFL even appealed to the Supreme Court, but in May 2026 the Court declined to hear the league's appeal of a lower court ruling which stated that Flores's suit should proceed in federal court rather than be confined to a closed-door arbitration process.
The league has also attempted to stymie discovery requests made by Flores's lawyers. Flores's legal team has asked for roughly 24 years’ worth of hiring and employment documents from multiple NFL teams, which the league's lawyers have described as "punishingly overbroad." If the rest of the league's internal hiring materials look anything like this Korn Ferry memo, you can understand why the NFL would be so desperate to keep them buried.
