Brian Flores didn’t get a fair shot in Miami in his first head coaching stint. The Vikings defensive coordinator wants another chance.
“Look, there’s only 32 of these jobs, so I would certainly want to be a head coach in this league again,” Flores said on The Adam Schefter Podcast, via Kevin Seifert of ESPN.
It remains to be seen whether he gets that chance.
Based on what he has done as defensive coordinator of the Vikings, he deserves one. Minnesota ranks 11th in yards allowed, third in points allowed and first in takeaways.
Flores, though, filed a discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams in February 2022. Some claims have landed in arbitration, and others are pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as to whether they should be arbitrated.
Flores, who went 24-25 in three seasons with the Dolphins, including two winning seasons, received no interviews for any of the eight head coaching vacancies in 2024.
Flores spent 2022 with the Steelers before joining the Vikings as defensive coordinator.
Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa called Flores a “terrible person” this summer, and former Dolphins quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick said in 2023 that Flores’ coaching methods broke Tagovailoa.
“I think a lot of people view the Miami experience as [if] I see it as all negative,” Flores said. “I really don’t. I think it was a great experience for me and my family. There’s so much that I learned during my time there that’s made me a much, much better coach today. . . . Better in a lot of areas. And just in reflecting on that time, there’s things that obviously I would like to do better, but there’s also a lot of things that I would continue to implement.
“But it wasn’t all negative. Obviously, there was some things that I would have done better, but I thought it was a great experience and I’ve really, really come out of it in positive way and excited about where I am now. I really learned a lot from it.”
Flores and his family have found a home in Minnesota, with the Vikings giving his career new life. He joked with Schefter that his family might resist a move.
“But for me personally,” Flores said, “I think [being a head coach] is something that I would love to do again.”
The question remains: Will any team give him that chance?
Before Week 10, it wasn’t looking very good for the Dolphins’ playoff hopes. After Week 10, it’s still not looking great — but it’s looking less bleak.
Beating the Rams on Monday was critical, obviously. But three other outcomes have boosted Miami’s shot at the seventh seed.
Currently, the Bills, Texans, and Chiefs are running away with three of the AFC divisions. The second-place team in the AFC North (the Steelers or the Ravens) will likely get one of the wild cards. The Chargers, at 6-3, are surging toward the next spot on the playoff tree.
Then there’s the seventh seed. And with the Bengals losing on Thursday and the Colts and Broncos losing on Sunday, Miami’s win allowed them to pick up a game on the primary contenders for the seventh seed.
Now, Cincinnati is 4-6, Indianapolis is 4-6, and the Broncos are 5-5. At 3-6, Miami still has a shot.
It won’t be easy. They’ll need to keep winning. They’ll need to finish 6-2, at a minimum, to have a chance.
But it’s not over. And maybe the team with a recent history of starting strong and fading down the stretch can turn it around and steal a playoff spot. If nothing else, that will make them better suited to finally win a postseason game for the first time in 24 years.
Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa took his share of hits during Monday night’s victory over the Rams. But one that may have been unnecessary came in the second quarter.
Tagovailoa had just thrown an interception to linebacker Christian Rozeboom, who was returning the ball up the sideline. Tagovailoa got in front of Rozeboom, lowered his shoulder to try and make a tackle, and Rozeboom’s leg ended up hitting Tagovailoa in the helmet.
Miami’s quarterback was fine, but given Tagovailoa’s history, things certainly appeared as if they could’ve been worse.
“No, I didn’t feel any of that,” Tagovailoa said postgame before joking, “That was pretty bad tackling form though. That was pretty terrible.”
In his third game back from injured reserve after suffering a concussion earlier this season, Tagovailoa finished 20-of-28 passing for 207 yards with a touchdown, interception, and lost fumble.
“I feel good. Everything’s good,” Tagovailoa said. “I went up to that dude that intercepted me. I asked him, ‘Bro, you couldn’t have just ran out of bounds or cut back?’ I was like, ‘You saw me and I saw you, you wanted to just run me over?’ He told me after the game, he’s like, ‘There was no room there. There was nowhere else to go.’ He has to do what he has to do to help his team win games. I wasn’t planning on using my head to go hit that.
“I think when you’re playing, when you’re out there, the game is too fast for you to think of anything else,” Tagovailoa later added. “If you start thinking of anything else, it’s hard for you to focus on your job. So, go out there and play football.”
While head coach Mike McDaniel likely didn’t love seeing his quarterback try to bring down a linebacker like that, he did offer one solution aside from Tagovailoa using a different tackling technique.
“No, I think the best way to do that is to not throw it to the opponent,” McDaniel said. “These are the moments that I can feel the growth from the three years the most. When something doesn’t go well, he gets so mad at himself and holds himself to a high standard but he is also recognizing that he’s the franchise quarterback of this team. So, you can’t go too deep into your own self-lashing. You have to lead, and you have to move on from things good or bad. I thought he did a very good job of taking those L’s, so to speak, and not having it affect his play as he progressed and moved forward through the game. I was very happy with that.
“I’d prefer not to have the adversity, but that’s not really the case in NFL football. You have to be ready to pick yourself back up and go at it with gusto.”
Dolphins receiver Tyreek Hill missed practice on Friday and Saturday with a wrist injury. He played on Monday night. Before the game, he made it clear that the wrist is — and has been — a problem.
Consider this quote from ESPN’s Lisa Salters from the Monday night pregame show, regarding Hill’s wrist: “He said that it’s something that he’s really been dealing with all season long. He said it first started in training camp, but then he said it got re-aggravated when he was arrested right before the opening game of the season. He said he was taken to the ground by police — we remember seeing that video — and he said that that’s where the further damage was done. Tyreek told me that he’s had an MRI, and he said that the MRI has shown that he has a torn ligament. That he said he is playing through it. . . . And he said he’s just been quiet about it all season long. So I said to him, ‘Do you not want me to say anything about it? Because you just told me all about it.’ He said, ‘It’s fine. It’s something that I have to deal with.’”
It’s now something the Dolphins might have to deal with, too. Because even though Hill has been dealing with the wrist injury since before Week 1, he didn’t appear on the injury report with a wrist injury until Week 10.
Will the league look into it? Probably not. If so, there probably won’t be a punishment. In an age of legalized gambling, the NFL seems to be very careful about admitting to the world that teams are violating the injury reports. Once that happens, folks who have placed wagers with sports books that stuff sponsorship dollars into the pockets of the NFL might want refunds. And one of them might file a class action against the NFL and the team that hid the injury seeking full reimbursement for all relevant wagers (including Hill’s prop bets that failed to hit the over) due to the hiding of the injury.
It’s the second time in recent days that a potential injury-report violation has bubbled to the surface. On Friday, Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said that quarterback Jalen Hurts missed practice on Wednesday due to an ankle injury. Sirianni then corrected himself, saying that Hurts was resting before claiming that he confused his franchise quarterback with someone else.
As long as the league does nothing about it, it will keep happening. But even if the league doesn’t publicly smack a team like the Dolphins for not disclosing Hill’s wrist injury, the evidence is there to support a mass claim against the league and the Dolphins for compensation. The violation is hiding in plain sight. The smoking gun came from Hill’s mouth, as related to Salters on Monday night.
Hill also spoke to NFL Network’s Taylor Bisciotti after the game. And Hill did little to contradict what he had told Salters.
He said he initially injured the wrist “against the Commanders Week 1” and that he “kind of like reaggravated it trying to block my tail off during the course of the year.”
Because the Dolphins haven’t played the Commanders in the regular season (the Dolphins faced Jacksonville in Week 1) and because Hill didn’t play when the Dolphins faced the Commanders in the preseason, Hill presumably is referring to the joint practices with the Commanders in the days before that game.
Regardless — and even though he didn’t mention the altercation with police as a contributing factor to the injury — Hill admitted in his own words that he had a wrist injury that was both aggravated throughout the season and hidden until recently.
The NFL launched the injury report in 1947 as a way to combat illegal gambling. Now that gambling is legal, there’s an even greater obligation to insist on transparency when it comes to the health of the players.
Maybe Hill hid the injury from the Dolphins. Some players will do that, getting treatment and care on their own. If that’s what happened, let’s find out. The league should investigate — and the league should share the results.
Even if the end result is a class action against the NFL, the Dolphins, and/or Hill brought by anyone who bet on Hill to hit the over on yards, catches, and/or touchdowns in any of Miami’s 2024 games.
The Rams didn’t get the result they wanted against the Dolphins on Monday night, but they got another standout performance from rookie edge rusher Jared Verse.
Verse had a sack for third straight game and also stripped the ball from Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa on the play. Verse recovered the ball and would finish the night with four tackles and two tackles for loss as part of a Rams defensive effort that kept them in the game despite the offense’s inability to score touchdowns.
The first-round pick’s play has made him a top contender for defensive rookie of the year, but he was more focused on what he didn’t do when he spoke to reporters after the game.
“I’ll never be satisfied with the way I play,” Verse said, via the team’s website. “I think there were definitely a couple plays here and there that I could have made if I did a little bit more.”
The Rams are going to need more performances like that from Verse over their final eight games and his desire to do more should serve them well on that front.
