Former Broncos general manager Neal Dahlen has died, the team announced. He was 85.
Dahlen has seven Super Bowl rings, which is tied with Tom Brady for the second-most in history behind only Bill Belichick. He held the record alone for the most Super Bowl titles for an individual until Belichick and the Patriots won Super Bowl LI in 2017.
Dahlen worked for the 49ers from 1979-96, winning five Super Bowls. He served as the Broncos’ director of player personnel during their first two Super Bowl titles.
He was with the Broncos from 1996-2003, holding the General Manager title from 1999-2001, and he finished his career as the Broncos’ director of football administration.
His teams were 7-0 in Super Bowls.
“I attribute my good fortune to three key elements: Joe Montana, Steve Young and John Elway,” Dahlen told Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times in 2018.
Dahlen, a California native, was a collegiate quarterback and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from San Jose State.
When former Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed his lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams in February 2022, the claim of systemic and chronic racial discrimination made it a landmark attack against the league. Flores’s efforts have had, to date, a much more significant impact.
Through a series of rulings during a four-year war over the question of whether the claims of Flores, Steve Wilks, and Ray Horton will be resolved in open court or (as the league strongly prefers) arbitration controlled by the Commissioner, Flores and company have torn down the league’s longstanding method for forcing employee legal claims into a secret, rigged, kangaroo court.
The problem is simple. The league wants civil cases filed against it to be determined not by an independent party but by the league itself. Finally, independent judges with the power to do so are telling the NFL that it cannot do so.
“The court’s decision recognizes that an arbitration forum in which the defendant’s own chief executive gets to decide the case would strip employees of their rights under the law,” attorneys Douglas H. Wigdor and David E. Gottlieb said Friday, after the latest decision scrapping the league’s practices. “It is long overdue for the NFL to recognize this and finally provide a fair, neutral and transparent forum for these issues to be addressed.”
And that’s really the next step. Instead of maintaining its current Hail Mary pass to the U.S. Supreme Court, the NFL should do the right thing and abandon the heavy-handed practice of insisting that lawsuits filed against the league be presided over by the Commissioner.
The Commissioner, who recently defended the practice by saying, essentially, “it was like that when I got here,” shouldn’t want to do it. It’s a hopeless and irreconcilable conflict of interest.
Few if any other companies attempt to stack the deck in such a laughable, third world, banana republic way. Most companies realize it’s more than sufficient to force employees into arbitration handled by one of the various companies (like the American Arbitration Association) that exist for that purpose.
It’s still a much better forum for corporate America than the traditional judge-and-jury process. Especially since the various companies that provide arbitration services tend to skew toward the interests of the businesses that are responsible for creating the system that funnels them so much business.
But that’s not good enough for the NFL. Its longstanding approach to arbitration is proof positive that it wants to completely control anything and everything it can.
Finally, the NFL is losing control over legal claims made by non-players. The consequences sweep far beyond Flores, Wilks, and Horton. Every other team and league employee who is compelled to agree to the arbitration term in their contracts now have a pathway to avoiding a fundamentally unfair and un-American approach to justice.
For that reason, maybe it will be useful for the league to keep pushing its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Assuming that at least five of the nine justices of the highest court in the country see this game for what it is, the end result will be a published opinion that becomes the law of the land as to the league, all of its teams, and every current and future employee who have no choice but to agree to a contract that forces them to allow the Commissioner to have final say over any and all grievances they ever may pursue.
The Bills have announced their coaching staff under new head coach Joe Brady and it notably includes a former head coach.
Buffalo has hired former Panthers, Broncos, and Bears head coach John Fox as senior assistant coach.
Fox, 71, led the Panthers to an NFC Championship in 2003 and the Broncos to an AFC Championship in 2013. He was last with the Lions in 2023 as senior defensive assistant.
Additionally, Buffalo announced Rob Boras has been promoted to run game coordinator/tight ends coach, Joe Danna has been promoted to secondary coach, D.J. Magnus has been promoted to assistant receivers coach, Jason Rebrovich has been promoted to senior defensive assistant, Kyle Shurmur has been promoted to assistant QBs coach, and Alvin Vaughn has been promoted to defensive assistant.
Several coachers remain from the previous staff under head coach Sean McDermott: assistant offensive line coach Austin Gund, pass game specialist/game management coach Mark Lubick, running backs coach Kelly Skipper, assistant special teams coach Turner West, and offensive assistant/fellowship coach Milli Wilson.
The club has also hired Terrance Jamison as defensive line coach, John Egorugwu as inside linebackers coach, Bobby April III as outside linebackers coach, Jay Valai as cornerbacks coach, Craig Robertson as defensive quality control coach, Pat Meyer as offensive line coach, Bo Hardegree as quarterbacks coach, and Drew Terrell as receivers’ coach.
Buffalo previously announced Pete Carmichael will be the team’s offensive coordinator, Jim Leonhard is defensive coordinator, and Jeff Rodgers is special teams coordinator.
The NFL’s secret, rigged, kangaroo court is on life support.
In the lawsuit filed four years ago by former Dolphins coach Brian Flores, the presiding judge has reversed a prior order sending some of the claims to arbitration. Now, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has concluded that all claims will be litigated in open court.
The ruling means that the Flores claims against the NFL, the Dolphins, the Giants, the Broncos, and the Texans will be handled in court, not arbitration. It also applies to the claims made by Steve Wilks against the Cardinals, and by Ray Horton against the Titans.
Friday’s decision flows from last year’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which denied arbitration as to the remaining Flores claims based on the NFL’s insistence that Commissioner Roger Goodell control the process. That same “fatal flaw” (as Judge Valerie Caproni described it) impacts all efforts to compel arbitration.
The league will undoubtedly fight the result. Although Goodell defended the practice during last week’s Super Bowl press conference, it is fundamentally unfair for the person hired and paid by the teams to be resolving legal claims made against his employers. No one in that position can be fair and impartial.
The NFL hates external oversight. It wants to control its business, and it hopes to keep any dirty laundry tightly under wraps.
The league previously filed a petition for appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on the question of whether the arbitration requirement is legitimate. Whatever the final outcome, it’s long overdue that the highest court in the country examine and resolve whether it’s appropriate for any organization to require employees to submit their legal claims not to an independent party but to the boss.
Multiple former NFL players received presidential pardons on Thursday.
Via ESPN.com, White House “pardon czar” Alice Marie Johnson announced Thursday that President Trump gave pardons to defensive tackle Joe Klecko, offensive lineman Nate Newton, running back Jamal Lewis, running back Travis Henry, and halfback/fullback/tight end Billy Cannon.
None were currently incarcerated; Cannon died in 2018.
“As football reminds us, excellence is built on grit, grace, and the courage to rise again,” Johnson wrote on social media. “So is our nation.”
Klecko, a Hall of Famer, played 11 years for the Jets and one with the Colts. Via ESPN.com, he pleaded guilty to perjury in 1993 for lying to a federal grand jury investigating insurance fraud.
Newton spent 13 years with the Cowboys and one with the Panthers. The six-time Pro Bowler and two-time first-team All-Pro pleaded guilty, per ESPN.com, to federal a drug trafficking charge in 2002, after police found $10,000 in his truck — along with 175 pounds of marijuana in car driven by an accomplice.
Johnson said Newton, who won three Super Bowls with the Cowboys, “personally” got the news from owner Jerry Jones.
Lewis spent six years with the Ravens and three with the Browns. He was the 2003 AP offensive player of the year, after rushing for 2,066 yards. Lewis had seven 1,000-yard seasons. Per ESPN.com, he pleaded guilty after using a cell phone to set up a drug deal, not long after he arrived in the NFL as the fifth overall pick in the draft.
Henry played seven years in the NFL, with the Bills, Titans, and Broncos. He pleaded guilty in 2009 for conspiracy to traffic cocaine, per ESPN.com.
Cannon won the Heisman Trophy in 1959 before spending a decade in the AFL and one year in the NFL. Via ESPN.com, Cannon pleaded guilty to counterfeiting in the 1980s.
No reasoning was given for the decision to grant the pardons.
