Ron Rivera knows how a lot of coaches sympathizing with Brian Flores, in the wake of his bombshell lawsuit dropping, are feeling this week. Mostly because, at one point, he was that young minority coach: knocking on the door, year after year after year, without an invitation to walk through it.
And while he’d suspected the act of Rooney Rule box-checking from teams before, there was one instance, a little over a decade ago, that stood apart from the rest.
“I won’t say which team, but it was early in the process and the Rooney Rule really had just started,” Rivera said, from a quick vacation in his native California. “And so when it came time to interview, what a lot of people said was this particular coach was getting the job anyways. And I was asked to interview late in the process, and one thing that we noted was that they hadn’t interviewed a minority yet. …
