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Flores Addresses His Relationship with Tua. (https://www.si.com/nfl/dolphins/news/former-dolphins-head-coach-brian-flores-addresses-his-relationship-with-qb-tua-tagovailoa) Someone in the mix isn't being totally honest. Maybe Tua will shed light on the topic. However, even if he did I don't think he would throw Flores under the bus with public comments. Or maybe he would pull a Belichick and say as little as possible.

Edit #2 - although Dave already posted the correct link, OCD made me fix it LOL...


Edited by Dave:  Here is the correct link - https://www.si.com/nfl/dolphins/news/former-dolphins-head-coach-brian-flores-addresses-his-relationship-with-qb-tua-tagovailoa

Was this the right link? I didn't see anything about Flores.

I added the correct link to the original post.

This isn't really how relationships work -- you might just not vibe with someone but also not have a specific problem, certainly not something you can point to in interviews.

There's this one dude I know...I just don't like his vibe -- there's something about him that turns me off and I felt it from the moment I met the guy.  He's got some characteristics that just red-flag me.  But he wouldn't know I thought this of him in 100 years.  And I certainly wouldn't voice it out since the guy didn't do anything wrong.  We just aren't on the same wavelength.

I get your point to an extent. But how do you think that relates to Tua and Flores?

^ What I mean is that it's entirely possible that Flores thought Tua was a no talent hack or an idiot, but Tua never specifically did anything wrong to earn that criticism publicly.

Or that Tua thought he was being misused by Flores or that Flores didn't know what he was doing or whatever.  Maybe they just didn't respect each other's skills.

But that it's reasonable to think that they never specifically said those words, so on paper, their relationship was fine.  There's no point for either of them to go in there slinging mud after the fact, if it were true.

Basically, up until Flo was fired, both guys thought they needed to maintain a professional environment and work with each other.  Now that Flo is gone, it doesn't really matter, so just move on, save face, wish the other guy the best.  I'm not sure that you can take this statement at face value to mean anything.

I don't think anyone who has been watching the Dolphins since Tua got here belives Flores. Flores may "think" that but their relationship was severely strained at best.

I kind of think there was more to it behind the scenes.

For me it's the timing of everything that Flores has done. He wanted the Giants job, he doesn’t get it, and then sues everyone and throws the Dolphins under the bus. When in reality the Dolphins have nothing to do with it. Why did he wait until he didn’t get the Giants job to tell everyone about the Dolphins? Hell, he’s known about it for years!

And then no one hires him because everyone sees how toxic he is and then sues the Texans because he thinks he’s a better coach than Lovia Smith. Why? Because he’s arrogant. A couple of weeks later he comes out with this statement about his relationship with Tua. Of course Tua probably isn't gonna to push back.

He’s an arrogant asshole that’s now trying to paint himself as a victim. His ego and failure to build relationships with players and other coaches was his downfall. He’s not willing to take responsibility for his own actions and is blaming literally everyone else.

Not saying Ross is innocent or anything but I do believe you are correct. Everything he has done since being fired supports the Dolphins' reasons for firing him.

The problem with the Flores situation was that it was set up for failure from the beginning.  Anytime an organization is trying to lose and a first-time head coach is trying to establish a reputation and a successful career by winning, the situation will be rife for inherent conflict.  If Ross wanted to lose in 2019 he should've promoted someone from Gase's staff as a one-year interim head coach and equipped him with a poor QB and surrounding talent.  Don't hire a coordinator from the most successful team in the league for the past two decades and equip him with a QB (Fitzpatrick) who's had flashes of success in the league and has the ability to win.

Or you could just play the guy you gave up a SECOND round pick for. We gave him like 3 games. No legitimate QB option ... like a second rounder ... only gets a few games to prove their self. The coach was being difficult with his "I've seen enough" approach. Not that he was wrong but he could have helped himself and the team by having their choice of QB.

Again you have an inherent conflict there.  Clearly Rosen is one of the worst high first-round draft picks at QB in history.  The Cardinals gave up on him after only a year when they could've used the top overall pick to support him with another key player (a left tackle or receiver for example).  He posted some of the worst passing statistics in history for a rookie QB.  His passer rating for the Dolphins after four-plus games in 2019 was a mere 52.

If you want to lose, certainly you continue to use Rosen.  But if the head coach wants to win -- and he did -- and he continues to use Rosen when he has Ryan Fitzpatrick available, then he looks like a fool.  A guy trying to build a reputation and a successful career as a head coach in the league isn't going to let himself look like a fool if he can help it.  And if he has Fitzpatrick on the bench and available, he can help it.

I disagree. There is no way he comes off looking like a fool by playing Rosen over Fitz or not winning. First off we were building for the future and we all know Fitz isn't that guy. He's an interesting back-up if needed.

Secondly we desmantled this team one week before the season and continued to do so for weeks after starting. No one was expecting us to win and in fact many of the talking heads worried for the safety of our players becuase they supposedly were practice squad players.

Again, the owner and GM had a strategy to rack up draft picks and get a franchise QB with the top pick in the draft. Flores decided he knew better .. they gave him 2 more years after that to prove it and he failed to make the playoffs in those 2 years, meanwhile the guy he literally gave up (because he knew better) took a team to the superbowl.

What more needs to be said here?

After that season the refrain about Flores was how well he did with that sad sack of a team.  So he accomplished exactly what he set out to do -- establish a reputation for himself as a quality head coach (to the degree possible in only a year under those circumstances).  If that was his goal, how you can possibly question what he did when it accomplished exactly what he apparently intended?

Just because the organization's goal was apparently losing doesn't mean that had to be Flores's goal as well.  Again, if you want to lose and you want a first-time head coach to go along with it, then hire a patsy you plan to fire after the year, not a guy trying to establish a reputation for himself as a quality head coach.

The measure of a head coach is always going to be how much more or less he's extracting from the talent he's given.  Flores was given garbage and extracted five wins out of it as a first-year head coach.  People marveled at that at the time and he was seen as an up-and-coming head coach because of it.  If he sticks with Rosen and goes 1-15 (or thereabouts) he establishes nothing for his reputation or career.

Rosen has proven to be shit, but he was not given a real shot in our "Tank for Tua" season and that's all on Flores. Management should've told him he needs at least 5-6 full games before an evaluation can be made.

So on the one hand Rosen has "proven to be shit," but instead of sticking a feather in Flores's cap for recognizing that and making a move to the better QB he had available to him, we're blaming him for something regarding Rosen?  Isn't it a part of these guys' jobs to use a smaller sample of games than would be necessary for a layman to determine when a player is inadequate?  I mean if they can't do that kind of thing any better than you and me, what are we paying them for?  What exactly is their expertise if it isn't in part to identify inadequate talent and replace it ASAP?

We get it. You either can't or won't see any gray areas. Life for most of us isn't so black and white with numerical outputs. We live in the gray area and sway towards the black and white as the situation warrants it. We, as well as many hosts during the time, felt we would have benitted from not playing to the best of our abilities.

There isn't a single number I've used in this discussion to illustrate the inherent conflict between an organization's trying to lose, with a head coach who's trying to win.  You're simply trying to negate my point of view by pigeonholing what I've said into a category you're discounting, when nothing I've said here belongs in that category.

I would've liked for the team to have lost every game that year and gotten the #1 overall pick and Joe Burrow as well, but I can certainly appreciate how that wasn't the fault of Brian Flores, a guy who was simply doing his job and doing the best he could to advance his reputation and his career.

His job is to do what he's told by the people that pay him. That's literally how a job works. I highly doubt that ownership and management didn't tell him their plan before they hired him. And if not, he should have resigned when he found out.

If it's true that Ross offered him $100K per loss, it doesn't sound like he was made aware of the plan, because if he was it would've been understood that the salary he was already making was the compensation for implementing that plan, and no additional monetary incentive would've been needed.

Whether he should've resigned or not doesn't nullify the fact that there was an inherent conflict between an organization trying to lose and a head coach trying to win.  That conflict was the central problem, and that was the organization's fault, not Flores's.  If you want the team to lose, hire a head coach you're going to fire after a year and equip him with so little talent he can't possibly win.  Don't hire a guy who's trying to make a name for himself and become a successful head coach.

Rosen has proven to be shit AFTER Miami had him by many factors, such as his on field play and inability to even get on the field elsewhere. Miami spent good draft capital on him and not only did Flores not even start him in Week 1, he gave him 2.5 games before getting the boot despite similar numbers to Fitzpatrick in that small sample size.

Flores ignored the plan to see what they had in Rosen because he wanted to win meaningless games with a 37 year old. Terrible decision by him and it did cost us the #1 pick. Hindsight is 20/20 and even if we drafted Burrow who is to say that we go to the Superbowl this year, but we didn't draft the best QB available(which was supposed to be Tua but plans change) because Flores was an idiot.

As I've said before: complaining about the 2019 record and 2020 draft is really pointless.  If Flores tanks correctly and Tua doesn't get injured, there's an excellent chance MIA takes Tua with the #1 pick anyway!

If you were the owner or GM of an NFL team and your goal was to lose to obtain the #1 overall pick in the draft, what measures would you take to ensure the head coach couldn't function in a way that would undermine that goal?

It's very simple -- you hire a head coach you're going to fire after the year and equip him with so little talent that it doesn't matter what his goal is.  Even if he tries to win, he can't possibly be competitive with the talent with which you've equipped him, and your goal is easily reached.

The idiocy is not in Brian Flores for prioritizing his reputation and his career -- the idiocy is in the team brass who couldn't create a situation in which that didn't matter.  Brian Flores is quite the intelligent guy for pulling off a year in which his coaching reputation was enhanced despite that the most powerful levers within the organization were apparently functioning with the opposite goal in mind.

Sure that makes sense if you disagreed with the approach and were looking out for yourself to the detriment of the team you're coaching. If instead you were on board and pulling in the same direction, then you'd probably still be the head coach of a more successful team. Maybe the problem is the lack of teamwork overall, like was noted when he was fired.

Or not.  Would take that risk with your career?  There was no guarantee this organization was going to enable Flores to showcase his ability at any point, and there was no guarantee Flores was going to be kept after his first year.  The Texans just fired David Culley after one year for example.

As it is, Flores turned in three years of extracting better than expected performance from the talent this team had.  This team just had zero players with any votes for the NFL all-pro team, one of only three teams in the league of that kind.  The others were the Lions (3-13-1) and the Giants (4-13).  Flores somehow made a team with similar talent finish 9-8, after extracting better than expected performance from the team his previous two years as well.

Flores looks like a genius surrounded by incompetence here.

LMFAO yeah, so much of a genius that after 3 years he had a worse record than the year before, lost 7 straight, and missed expectations for the year. Including botching several games that they could have won with horrible HC decisions. Even losing to the worst team in the league.

Speaking of the worst team. It's also surprising that you keep mentioning that stupid all-pro team stat. I notice you didn't mention Jacksonville as one of the teams in that ridiculous stat. I wonder why? Does that mean that Jacksonville was a better team than the Dolphins? No, it means nothing. Maybe ask yourself how all-pro is decided?

Listen bud, I'm going to pretend like your posts don't exist from now on.  You don't carry yourself in a way I'm interested in engaging with.  You take care and have a wonderful life.

Yeah that's what thought. But then again, it's a forum to discuss things. So feel free and don't discuss things. That's what people do when their opinions don't line up with reality. It says a lot about your character and silly opinions. Peace out bro, lol.....

Steelers senior defensive assistant Brian Flores alleged the Dolphins asked him to sign a non-disparagement agreement when he was fired, to which the Dolphins responded by saying they did no such thing.

In an interview with Bryant Gumbel of Real Sports, Flores claimed the Dolphins asked him to sign an NDA when the Dolphins fired him in January. The Dolphins organization released a statement on Tuesday evening saying Flores' claim is "categorically false." There is an ongoing investigation by the league into Flores' lawsuit against the NFL and several teams.
Source: ProFootballTalk
Feb 22, 2022, 7:00 PM ET

If Miami did this, there would be some type of trail. After all, Flores wouldn't do this to be nice, he would do this because Miami was offering money. If so, they didn't do it WHEN they fired him, it would have to go through lawyers and there would be phone or email records of that.

Unless Ross is beyond stupid and asked him to sign that for free the minute he fired him.

^ What's the issue here?

Maybe I'm not understanding, but isn't an NDA agreement at the point of termination a pretty standard practice in business?

Dave is right, an NDA is standard after a firing.

It's SOP in these situations. Flores is just throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. Just another disgruntled ex-employee. He alleged that he was cast as the "angry Black man" who was "noncompliant and difficult to work with". Those labels fully apply to this dickhead, except he isn't black. How ironic

It is standard in some types of business and is not criminal at all, but is it standard in sports? I just figured coaches keep their mouths shut so that they don't burn bridges and scare off future employers. That's why I don't think Flores will ever be a Head Coach again, even though I was shocked he got any job at all.

I'm just curious if Miami asked him to sign one, the price of it and if it is standard in the NFL. Never heard of it before in sports.

I hadn't either, but I just assumed it was because it wasn't publicized, which is kind of the point of an NDA anyway, which is discretion against dirty laundry and trade secrets.

I don't know how it applies to the NFL, because it's a monopoly, but also because your competition (other teams) also share in your profits and success (the NFL as a whole).  It would kinda be like signing an NDA at a company and then getting hired at a different sector of the same company but not being able to discuss your previous employment.

I ultimately don't know at all, but I don't find anything scandalous at the thought of it, at first glance.

I don't have a link because I saw it in the very first article I saw about this. Not only is it common but the article said it is contractually tied to the remaining salary usually.

So, Flores let go millions in salary just to sue the NFL and act like an idiot in public? Either he has amazing lawyers who will get him $100 Million since no team will ever pay him big money to be an HC again, or he has the absolute worst lawyers who just cost him a career and tens of millions.