Brian Flores is not backing down in his legal fight against the NFL, and his team just made a massive move by targeting almost the entire league. New court filings show his lawyers have fired off subpoenas to 25 different NFL teams, along with more than 1,000 discovery requests. They are looking to get their hands on internal hiring records and communications to back up his claims that the league has a deep-rooted problem with racial discrimination.

The paperwork does not name the specific 25 teams getting hit with these requests, but the organizations already named in the lawsuit—the Denver Broncos, New York Giants, Houston Texans, and the NFL office—are fighting back hard. They are calling the legal demands punishingly overbroad. Flores and his attorneys are standing their ground, though, arguing that this data is exactly what they need to prove that Black coaches are dealing with systemic bias across the board.

U.S. District Judge Valerie E. Caproni laid out a schedule for how this will play out over the next few months. Flores has a deadline to submit a third amended complaint; the teams will file motions to dismiss in June, and both sides will argue the issues in briefs through July and August. This stretch is a big deal because it determines whether the case is strong enough to keep moving forward. If it does, the NFL might actually be forced to open up its vaults and reveal how teams really make their hiring decisions.

Flores, who is now running the defense as the coordinator for the Minnesota Vikings, has been locked in this battle for over four years. It all started back in February 2022 when he sued the league, the Broncos, the Giants, and the Miami Dolphins. That came right after Miami let him go, even though he just gave them their first back-to-back winning seasons since 2003. Flores alleged that the hiring process was plagued by racism, claiming the Giants and Broncos put him through sham interviews just to satisfy the Rooney Rule. He also alleged that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offered him $100,000 per loss in 2019 to secure a better draft spot.

As time went on, the case grew. Flores added the Texans to the lawsuit, claiming they took him out of the running for their head coaching vacancy specifically because he sued the league. Other Black coaches, Steve Wilks and Ray Horton, also joined the fight, adding their own accounts of being put through unfair hiring processes.

Getting to this point has been a long, messy game of legal ping-pong. Back in 2023, a judge split the lawsuit, sending Flores' specific complaints against the Dolphins to the NFL’s private arbitration system while keeping the broader systemic discrimination claims in public federal court. The NFL appealed that, but a federal appeals court sided with Flores, even calling out how unfair it is that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell gets to act as the judge and jury in the league's own internal arbitration.

The NFL has taken that specific issue all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and a ruling could drop at any time. In the meantime, Flores is pushing ahead with these new subpoenas, trying to pull back the curtain on how the league operates behind closed doors.