Brian Flores swiveled in a chair and repeated the query.
“Is there anything else I want to say? … Is there anything … Hmm … ”
It was a relaxing December afternoon in Eagan, Minn., and the Minnesota Vikings’ protection coordinator was seated inside his dimly lit workplace. His eyes, shielded by a purple flatbill cap, fixated on the ground.
Five years in the past, Flores accepted the Miami Dolphins’ head teaching job. He rapidly orchestrated a rebuild, producing successful data in 2020 and ’21. Then in the spring of 2022, he was fired. Less than a month after his dismissal, Flores, Black and of Honduran descent, sued the NFL and three groups, together with the Dolphins. He wrote that the league stays “rife with racism, particularly when it comes to the hiring and retention of Black head coaches, coordinators and general managers.”
Flores knew that his option to file the lawsuit may jeopardize alternatives to do what he liked most. He felt the sacrifice was price it as long as it introduced alongside change. “This isn’t about me,” he mentioned at the time. “This is about something that’s much bigger than me, which is a system in the NFL that, in my opinion, is broken.”
A dialog with Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin landed him a job as a senior defensive assistant and linebacker coach in 2022. Last spring, Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell sought somebody who may maximize a talent-deficient protection that had been torched in the playoffs. Flores emerged as the finest candidate, then proved it throughout the season.
Last yr’s Vikings protection ranked twenty fourth in DVOA, an all-encompassing metric that components in energy of schedule. This yr’s Vikings protection ranked eleventh, even with the subtractions of premium edge rusher Za’Darius Smith, stout defensive lineman Dalvin Tomlinson and future Hall-of-Fame cornerback Patrick Peterson.
The 2023 transformation, paired along with his total resume, is why Flores’ identify needs to be talked about amongst the league’s premier head-coaching candidates in the coming days. Should be.
“Is there anything?”
His eyes drifted upward.
“The last five years have been so wild,” Flores mentioned. “It’s been such a journey. And I’m not upset or regretful about any of it. It’s allowed me to grow.”
“What the hell is this defense?” Jason McCourty requested.
He was sitting inside a third-floor convention room at the Westin Hotel in Cincinnati, about a mile from the Bengals’ Paycor Stadium. Smiling mischievously throughout from him was Flores.
The two go back a methods. Beginning in 2010, Flores coached McCourty’s twin brother Devin in New England. Jason joined the fold in 2018, the yr the Patriots final gained a Super Bowl. He then performed in Miami in Flores’ third yr as the Dolphins’ head coach. They’ve saved in contact. Their households stay shut. But now, it was time for enterprise.
McCourty was a colour commentator for the Vikings’ Week 15 sport towards the Bengals. To put together, he and the manufacturing crew lobbed questions at coaches. Few had been as ahead as the one he simply requested.
McCourty learn aloud some statistics scribbled on the paper in entrance of him. Most six-man pressures in the NFL. Most drop-eight coverages. More gamers aligned on the line of scrimmage pre-snap than every other protection. More rotations from one-high security to two-high safeties than all however one different protection. And all of this with a bunch of neglected veterans and inexperienced late-round draft picks.
“Flo, I’ve been in your defenses,” McCourty mentioned. “This is so different.”
Flores agreed, admitting the 2023 iteration of his system was “a little bit out there.” He recalled the gamers’ disoriented reactions initially. A defender lining up in the A-gap, the house throughout from the middle and guard, would run protection towards a deep put up route?
But these questions quieted rapidly. Safety Josh Metellus aligned in the A-gap, then ran the deep put up. Cornerback Byron Murphy Jr. blitzed. Edge rusher D.J. Wonnum dropped. The outcome? Turnovers, stops, even victories.
What the hell is that this protection?
“It’s a defense that has been a lot of fun,” Flores mentioned.
McCourty acknowledged Flores’ emphasis on the phrase. And he smiled.
Flores (left) coached Jason McCourty (proper) in each New England and Miami, the place the coach struck a extra critical tone. (Mark Brown / Getty Images)
“It’s funny,” Flores mentioned, swiveling in his workplace. “When you’re a coordinator or you’ve been a head coach, nobody remembers or cares. The steps. The sacrifice. The hours.”
Flores started as a participant personnel assistant working atop a cluttered workplace desk in the back row of the Patriots’ second-floor personnel workplace. Longtime Pats government Scott Pioli employed him on the suggestion of a university coach. The position? Work your butt off and don’t moan about it.
This was 2004, as the curtains opened on the Bill Belichick-Tom Brady dynasty. The constructing operated like a manufacturing unit. Enter, do your job, depart. No excuses, no explanations; workforce over particular person; the commonplace is the commonplace. The ethos was born out of a special period, a era constructed on self-discipline, seniority and obedience. Second-guessing signaled disrespect. Complaints confirmed weak spot.
The Patriots even requested every candidate for rent to take a psychological check. “The test was built around our culture and environment, and how demanding we were,” Pioli mentioned. “Brian fit everything that we thought we needed and wanted.”
Around 6 a.m. each morning, Flores swiped his key card at Gilette Stadium, weaved his means as much as the personnel division and settled into his desk. His duties diversified. He picked up Pioli’s dry cleansing. He caravanned prospects from the airport to the stadium. He filtered scouting reviews. And then there have been the “point-of-attack tapes.”
Online movie databases didn’t exist but, so the Patriots acquired Betamax tapes with movie from notable faculty video games. It was Flores’ job to go looking the tapes for particular person performs that informed the story of every participant the workforce had recognized as draftable. He spliced collectively 5 minutes of performs and transferred them to a brand new tape. When scouts or coaches appeared to observe a participant, they didn’t should kind by means of an hour-long course of.
“Coach Belichick doesn’t have six hours to sit there and look for a player,” mentioned Tim Pichette, who labored alongside Flores on “the back-row crew.” “We trimmed the fat. Now, imagine having to do that for every prospect in the draft.”
Pichette realized his tasks from Flores, who had been employed to do the job a yr earlier. Knowing Flores and Pichette can be working practically 100-hour weeks with one another in the back row, Pioli had structured Pichette’s preliminary interview so he and Flores hung out collectively. Flores struck Pichette as real, “a guy I would never want to let down.”
They earned $20,000 a yr for these 100-hour weeks — ultimately transferring into public housing collectively — but liked the work. They appreciated after they recognized some unknown defensive construction on movie from some faculty protection out west. Flo, come try this Cover-4 look. They’re manning up on the bottom.
Sometimes, the Patriots’ scouts hung out with them. Nick Caserio, then the Patriots’ director of participant personnel, would clarify the significance of good, versatile and reliable gamers. Jim Nagy, then a Patriots space scout, would ask them questions about themselves. Flores not often spoke of his upbringing in the housing initiatives of Brownsville, Brooklyn. But the subject generally surfaced throughout late nights of their new condominium.
He talked about how he witnessed muggings throughout the day and heard gunfire at night time. How Maria, his mom, parented strictly and his uncle, Darrel Patterson, launched him to soccer. Flores shared his reverence for intense highschool coach Dino Mangiero and defined that he selected to play linebacker at Boston College so he might be near residence and are inclined to the particular wants of his youthful brother, Christopher.
“We’d talk about that stuff, but our time was always pressed,” Pichette mentioned. “And he had a well-known saying. I can see him proper now. He’d flip one hand over one other and say, ‘You know what, Timbo? We gotta close the yearbook.’”
GO DEEPER
Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores has mastered art of psychological war on QBs
By 2008, Flores decided he wanted to more closely impact the result of the games. So, he packed his belongings from the back row of the second floor of Gilette Stadium and moved down to a makeshift room on the first.
“When coach Belichick takes a liking to you,” Nagy said, “you go downstairs.”
From 2008 to 2018, Flores held a variety of assistant coach roles on offense, defense and special teams. He cared deeply about his responsibilities. There was no other option. Belichick demanded excellence. Winning hinged on commitment and discipline, penalties and miscommunications lost games. If you weren’t critical about maximizing every day, how may you flip these margins in your favor?
“New England was way, way, way different,” longtime Patriots linebacker Rob Ninkovich mentioned. “You’re held at a high standard, as it should be. Before I got there, I had been in New Orleans and Miami. I had seen infighting, a lack of leadership, a lack of direction — issues that can put a team in position to never accomplish anything.”
Draftees like security Tavon Wilson discovered you had been going to push or be pushed. “I didn’t understand it,” Wilson mentioned. “But it helped me want more for myself than I thought was possible. Flo did that.”
As a place coach, Flores supplied greater than X’s and O’s wizardry. He supplied recommendation when Wilson requested about elevating his younger baby and consoled Wilson in the rapid aftermath of his grandmother’s passing. Players dined at Flores’ home for Thanksgiving. Flores typically joined gamers in conversations with their households in the parking zone after video games. Wedged between Jason McCourty and former Patriots linebacker Kyle Van Noy throughout the workforce conferences in 2018, Flores even cracked jokes whereas Belichick spoke in entrance of the room.
That was Jason McCourty’s first season in New England. He had performed for 2 different groups and been a component of locker rooms that completed seasons with successful data. The Patriots’ tradition differed. “It had less to do with the individual and more about the whole of the team,” McCourty mentioned. “And everybody firmly believed that.”
The perception, paired with expertise, pushed the Patriots to the stage upon which McCourty had at all times dreamt of enjoying. By the time the Super Bowl towards the Rams arrived, gamers knew Flores can be leaving to take the head teaching job in Miami, and they needed a victory for a coach who maximized their strengths.
All season, cornerbacks Stephon Gilmore and J.C. Jackson blanketed receivers in man protection. Second-and-long conditions turned Flores’ favourite for, as McCourty put it, “blitzing the hell out of people.” But to counteract the Rams’ receivers and motions, Flores, cornerbacks coach Josh Boyer and the rest of the workers shelved man protection for zone.
“It totally caught them off guard,” McCourty mentioned.
The Patriots secondary waited for Flores to name an all-out stress towards quarterback Jared Goff. They knew he would. In reality, on the sideline previous Gilmore’s game-sealing interception, gamers prodded Flores. Send this s—. Let’s go.
“It was a microcosm of the season, sure, but also Flo’s aggressiveness,” McCourty mentioned. “We had taken on his personality. We wanted it. We weren’t afraid.”
Slouched in a chair in a single of the center rows of the Dolphins’ workforce assembly room, McCourty targeted on Flores, who, as per normal, paced with presence.
This was 2021. Flores was now in his third season as the Dolphins’ head coach, however the marketing campaign had been McCourty’s first time seeing Flores in the position. The coach delivered that day’s message intentionally and deliberately. No fluff, no phoniness, no facade. Tip-toeing round the fact was not an choice.
Listening to Flores’ message that day, McCourty thought to himself: Flo is so critical all the time. “I was used to him laughing and joking more,” McCourty mentioned.
The change, McCourty believed, derived from the accountability of a strenuous job. A head coach creates the tradition, holds a constructing accountable and navigates mandates, suggestions and suggestions supplied by possession, executives and the fan base.
Flores inherited a Dolphins workforce with one successful season in a decade. He misplaced his first seven video games, the first three by a mixed rating of 133-16. But Miami rallied in the second half of the season, successful 5 of its last 9 video games, together with a season-ending victory in New England.
It would grow to be a sample.
In Year 2, Flores elected to go together with journeyman Ryan Fitzpatrick at quarterback over rookie Tua Tagovailoa to begin the season. Tagovailoa, reportedly most popular by workforce proprietor Stephen Ross and GM Chris Grier, would ultimately begin 9 video games, and after starting the season 0-2, Miami rode a five-game midseason win streak to a 10-6 file.
With Fitzpatrick in Washington the subsequent season, Miami dropped seven straight video games after opening with a victory in New England. Amid reviews of strife with Tagovailoa, Flores helped pull the workforce collectively to win eight of the Dolphins’ last 9 video games, together with one other season-ending win over the Patriots, this one marking Miami’s’ first sweep of New England in additional than twenty years.
The day after that win, Ross fired Flores, saying “an organization can only function if it’s collaborative and works well together.”
Lance Bennett, a longtime pal of Flores’ and then the Dolphins’ assistant to the head coach, mentioned the determination was an “eye-opener from the standpoint of where talent meets the marketplace.” “Success or talent may not always matter,” Bennett mentioned. “Because there’s other fluff and nonsense.”
Players weighed in. Linebacker Jerome Baker shared that “(Flores) just wanted you to be the best player and best person you could be. He truly wanted us to win games and be great people.” Cornerback Byron Jones tweeted, “Thank you, Flo.”
Less than a month later, Flores filed a 58-page lawsuit in Manhattan federal courtroom alleging, amongst different issues, that Ross tried to incentivize him to “tank,” or purposely lose video games, shortly after he was employed in 2019 by providing him $100,000 for each loss that season.
Flores had two successful seasons on his NFL resume. He may have conceivably been a candidate elsewhere as early as that offseason. But the lawsuit sophisticated his future in the league. After all, who was going to take an opportunity on the man suing his former boss?
“He could’ve easily … said, ‘Let me protect myself and not potentially be blackballed,’” Bennett mentioned. “But that’s just how he is. It is what it is. This is wrong. This is unjust.”
But lower than three weeks after he filed the lawsuit, Tomlin’s Steelers introduced him in. Time round Tomlin fostered studying. Flores noticed so many minor particulars, from how Tomlin structured practices and led conferences to when he pressed his workforce.
Straddling that line — when to problem stars and when to buddy up with them — is a key side of the artwork of good teaching in in the present day’s NFL. The Patriot Way doesn’t at all times work anymore, simply ask Belichick. Collaboration has taken priority over hierarchical division. Society is extra acutely aware of the worth of psychological well being. Constructive suggestions might be delivered in myriad methods relying on the particular person.
Flores, it appears, was taking note of Tomlin’s instance.
“There’s a (balance) between holding people accountable and being intense, and understanding you can’t play this game without having fun and enjoying it,” Vikings linebacker Jordan Hicks mentioned. “Flo gets both sides.”
The Vikings protection took on Flores’ persona in his first season in Minnesota. (Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)
This Vikings protection was a byproduct of late-night movie periods in the Pittsburgh Panthers’ places of work. Seated alongside Pitt large receivers coach Tiquan Underwood, who had labored as a high quality management coach beneath Flores in Miami, Flores scribbled the define of head coach Pat Narduzzi’s three-deep, two-under, six-man stress bundle on paper, including totally new plans to his already-loaded defensive playbook.
The 2023 protection was a max-pressure, max-coverage system that, in the phrases of linebackers coach Mike Siravo, consisted of “not standing there prefer it’s ‘Tecmo Bowl’” but not being so complex that the playbook contained “a conglomeration of s—, of different rules, where it’s like, ‘How the hell is this guy supposed to play football?’”
Minnesota’s was a disciplined protection, committing the fewest penalties in the NFL and rating second in the league in fewest explosive performs allowed, per TruMedia. The unit took off in mid-October as soon as Flores appointed rookie cornerback NaJee Thompson as the workforce’s “celebration coordinator.”
“We did the freakin’ limbo,” Hicks mentioned. “The fact we pulled that off was pretty legit.”
Vikings defensive go sport coordinator Daronte Jones mentioned the protection had somewhat bit of “I don’t give a f—” to it. Bennett, presently the Vikings’ defensive high quality management coach, mentioned the protection is constructed on boldness. “The boldness is what makes you say, ‘I want to run this, which has never been run before, and I’m going to have this player who has never done this before, do it.’”
The outcomes taught Flores the worth of fixed innovation, of stretching the boundaries of traditionalist thought. Maybe most of all, of the significance of having enjoyable.
“It’s gotta be fun,” Flores mentioned final month. “Nothing else really matters if it’s not. I would say that’s a mistake I made in Miami. I didn’t make it fun enough.”
The dialog drifted to the future. To future opponents. To the risk that his brother Christopher may quickly transfer to Minnesota. He didn’t say it, nor did he use the hand movement that’s grow to be a trademark, however he was closing the yearbook.
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(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; picture: Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)
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