What A Day - On Race, The NFL Fumbles The Ball

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

This weekend's Super Bowl LVI comes as the NFL is being sued by Brian Flores, a former head coach of the Miami Dolphins who has accused the league racial discrimination in hiring practices. To discuss the lawsuit and racism in the NFL, we're joined by Tyler Tynes, a staff writer for GQ who covers the intersection between race, politics, and sports.The nominees for the 94th Academy Awards were announced yesterday and Netflix’s "Don’t Look Up" is up for Best Picture. The climate change satire has been a huge hit for Netflix, though the critical response to it has been more mixed. David Sirota, who co-wrote the screenplay, joins us to talk about the movie and how the climate catastrophe gets covered in media.And in headlines: a new Freedom Convoy blockade emerged at the U.S.-Canadian border, Peng Shuai spoke to reporters in her first sit-down interview since last year, and federal agents arrested a couple for conspiring to launder $4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency.Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/whatadayFor a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Wednesday, February 9th. I'm Gideon Resnick. And I'm Josie Duffy Rice. And this is What A Day, where we want to congratulate U.S. Olympia Nathan Chen for setting the highest short program score in figure skating history. Yeah, that might have been cool, Nathan, but you hadn't gotten the congrats from WOD yet. And that's what really counts. Here's your real gold medal.

We offer it to you as the number one scorers of figure skating. On today's show, the reaction to a disconcerting interview from Chinese tennis star Peng Shui, plus the DOJ announces its largest ever financial seizure of stolen cryptocurrency from two terrible millennials. But first, this weekend is the Super Bowl, and it is arriving at a time when the NFL is kind of in hot water. Last week, Brian Flores, former head coach of the Miami Dolphins, filed a class action lawsuit against the NFL, alleging racial discrimination in hiring practices.

He said, quote, The NFL remains rife with racism, particularly when it comes to the hiring and retention of black head coaches, coordinators, and general managers. Yeah, and Flores claims that the Denver Broncos and the New York Giants conducted these sham interviews with him in order to satisfy the Rooney rule, which requires that team officials interview minority candidates for coaching and senior leadership positions. Included in his lawsuit are text messages exchanged in late January with Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots, also a man who has no intact hoodies. According to Flores, in late January, Belichick texted him congratulating him for being named the head coach of the New York Giants.

There was one small problem. Flores interview with Flores for January 27th. Flores also claims that he was fired by the Miami Dolphins team owner, Stephen Ross, for refusing to purposefully lose games or tank in order to improve the team's position in the NFL draft. It's yet another scandal in the NFL, which has a long history of discrimination. Colin Kaepernick, anyone? And the issues in the organization don't stop with racism. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that women within the NFL organization still experienced gender discrimination, saying the league had, quote, a stifling, deeply ingrained corporate culture that demoralized some female employees, drove some to quit in frustration frustration and left many feeling brushed aside. Here to talk to us about Flores' lawsuit and racism in the NFL is Tyler Tynes, staff writer for GQ, who covers the intersection between race, politics, and sports. Tyler, thanks for coming on WOD. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me. The teams that Flores was talking about ended up being maybe unsurprisingly very defensive in their statements after all of this.

Some even went so far as to say that Flores' comments were, quote unquote, defamatory. Yet we also saw other Black former NFL coaches like Tony Dungy, Marvin Lewis, starting to share similar experiences. So how rampant is this in the NFL? And what more don't we know about what goes on like this? You know, I think it doesn't matter whether Brian Flores wins this lawsuit or not. You know, the precedent that's being set with the fact that he's filing it in general is something that hasn't been done before. And regardless of what he's claiming, you know, we don't need evidence that racism happens in the NFL.

We don't need evidence that racism happens when, you know, in hiring and intention with hiring because it happens everywhere. And there is long documented data, anecdotal evidence and data paid for by the NFL to prove that there is a problem, both with nepotism and the general idea of who should have these jobs from the top down. Right. So regardless of Brian Flores, Marvin Lewis, Hugh Jackson, Tony Dungy, all of these people know what happens when you become a Black head coach or a Black coach in the NFL. It's a long wait before you get to glory. Yeah, that's a great way to put

it. So where do you see this going? Do you see more coaches joining the lawsuit? Not particularly. I think it is a very noble thing a lot of people are asking for these coaches, right? Is that you're asking for a very gilded set of people, a job market where you really don't get second chances nor third and barely get the first to join something like this. It takes a lot of bravery. And I think we should be a bit more empathetic to the coaches who will probably line up to not do this. I've talked to so many coaches around this and I've covered this issue for a very long time. And it's more split than I think we give credence to that. A lot of these guys don't want to step up for this because they know what the consequence is. They know that this is the

only way they can feed their families. They know that this is their job of choice and that to speak out against the NFL means that you will never have a job again in the NFL. And the penalty for that is so immense that I don't think some people are willing to do that. And it shouldn't be on them either to have to do that. You know, what white coaches are going to sign up to this class action lawsuit to prove that this happens? You know what I mean? So why do we have to always ask the questions of these black coaches who are already disenfranchised? Let's add, like, is Bill Belichick joining us? Let's try to figure that out. Right.

He's joining in one way, that his texts are there. This past weekend, the commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell, said it's unacceptable there are so few black head coaches in the NFL. He also said the league would review its diversity and equity policies. Given everything that you've said, Tyler, what did you make of that? And what changes actually need to be made and could be made to change this? Every change. You need a new league from the top down. You know, I think we have enough evidence to kind of see over the last 10 to 12 years that football is not for the black body. It's not for black people because the only thing that we have been seen to be good enough for is as crash dummies, as labor, as people who will

never rise to be the leaders of men, the head coaches, the GMs, the owners of these teams, right? That it doesn't really matter, you know, what the outcome of something like this is. And it doesn't matter what Roger Goodell said either. I am sure Roger Goodell will review the practices and tendencies like they do every off season. I'm sure he does feel bad that this is happening, but the power within professional football belongs to the owners. It doesn't belong to Roger Goodell. He is an employee of the NFL, a well-paid one, albeit. And so the people who can change this are those who own teams. It won't matter if there are 30 black head coaches in the NFL. As long as there are no black people who are in the ownership group,

we still have a massive issue in how we think about football. Right. And it seems like one of the workarounds, I guess, to that central problem had been the Rooney rule, I guess. And I think that this sort of exposed how easily that could be corrupted. So like, is there anything that could be done with that? Is anybody following that rule? Like, is there any sort of precedent to that? No, I mean, nothing can be done with it, because it's working as is. You know, I mean, I think the thing that's wrong in all of this, the idea or the assumption that something has been exposed, there is at least 40 years of great quantitative and empirical research data on why we have a problem with hiring in the nfl and the central issue in that problem that when you create

job titles that when you think about how these jobs are supposed to work within football that the envisioning and the idea the silhouette even for this job is not Black people. It is not anyone who is not a white guy because the idea of who a coach is to these people doesn't look like me, right? If that's just the baseline, the Rooney rule came to be off of the threat of legislation from Johnny Conklin and Cyrus Mary in 2003. After taking quantitative data from a professor at the University of Pennsylvania that said that Black coaches were doing well, but not getting the same opportunities. Off the threat of legislation, the Rooney Rule was born. And the only thing the Rooney Rule does, it says that you can get in the

room. So the question of has something been exposed is nothing because the Rooney Rule, as intended, is working. People are getting job opportunities. The problem is they're not getting fair ones. Yeah. I wonder, do you see this as a potential turning point or does a turning point really exist for the NFL? I mean, we saw what happened to Kaepernick. We've seen the league kind of clumsily wrestle with racial politics over the past couple of years and often very clumsily. What do you think is going to come out of this? And what do you expect to happen moving forward? I think when you consider the last decade of protest and really how this springtime of athlete activism is kind of coming to vogue within the United States

and internationally too, this is the worst time to be a league like the NFL. This is the worst time to be the NBA who has, you know, a policy about the Star Spangled Banner, you know, in their actual legislation of how the league runs. It's a bad time to be against Black athletes because it's clear the world is listening in a way that, you know, for past Black power movements for Black athletes, maybe they weren't in the same way, right? Like there's a focus on this right now. So if you're in the NFL, you better make good on some of your promises to the people that you are already kind of setting out to do right by. So, again, it doesn't matter what happens to Brian Flores. The precedent is that he did something at all.

You know, it's hard to not have respect for somebody like this who's willing to risk their entire livelihood on making a point in being right. The question shouldn't be, you know, what have you done lately? What's going on here? No, the question should be, what drove him to this level of madness? What drove him to the point to say, fuck my career, fuck this. I have to do this for my kids, for the people behind me,

for the coaches that I know are struggling. That should be where our focus is. What made you do this? Yeah, a depressing but accurate way to summarize where we're at. Tyler, really appreciate you taking all the time today. Yeah, thanks, man. In other news about things that play on our televisions on Sundays

and are meant to distract us from deep systemic problems at the core of their industry's great transition, the nominees for the 94th Academy Awards were announced yesterday. Here are the nominees for Best Picture. Belfast, Laura Berwick, Kenneth Branagh, Becca Kovacic, and Tamar Thomas, producers. Coda, Philippe Rousselet, Fabrice Giafermi, and Patrick Waksberger, producers. Don't Look Up, Adam McKay and Kevinaksberger, producers. Don't look up. Adam McKay and Kevin Messick, producers.

Drive my car. Teruhisa Yamamoto, producer. Dune, Mary Parent, Danu Villeneuve, and Kale Boyter. Love that entire thing. The other five nominees in the Best Picture category were King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, and West Side Story.

Looking at the hard numbers, The Power of the Dog led the way with 12 nominations, followed by Dune with 10. And The Power of the Dog's director, Jane Campion, became the first woman to ever be nominated twice for Best Director,

which is crazy. That's only now. But one of the other major questions is whether a streaming service may finally win Best Picture this year. The pandemic has battered movie theaters and hastened this shift to streaming platforms like Netflix. And this year, Netflix has two movies that are up for Best Picture, The Power of the Dog and Don't Look Up. Don't Look Up, the satire that is about the climate catastrophe, despite not mentioning said climate catastrophe once, received pretty mixed reviews from critics.

And if you were on social media around Christmas, you may have seen people expressing some, shall we say, strong opinions about this movie. Yet it was a really huge hit for Netflix, becoming the platform's second most successful movie ever, at least in the extremely 21st century metric of hours watched. For those who have seen the nominations in the screenplay category, there are two names credited for Don't Look Up's story, Adam McKay, the director of movies ranging from The Big Short to Anchorman, and David Sirota. Sirota is a journalist, a former advisor for the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and the founder of the publication The Daily Poster. So yes, you may be confused about why he's in the mix here. Yeah, to find out and to talk about the movie and how our climate catastrophe gets covered in media,

I spoke to Sirota yesterday. Here is our conversation. So first of all, congrats on the nominations. Best Original Screenplay for Don't Look Up. Best Picture, among others. What does this mean to be nominated? What has your day been like so far? You know, tell me how you found out.

Well, this is quite a plot twist in my own life. I'm a journalist. I've worked in politics. This is my first foray into writing movies. So I'm sort of having an out of body experience. I mean, everyone I know is incredibly excited. I'm very excited as well. And what I'm really excited about is that I think this should give the movie even more of a boost in terms of getting it in front of as many people as possible so that it can spark the kinds of conversations that the movie already has sparked. And I think it sparked conversations about climate change and about how we respect science and about the media and about corruption. It sparked all those conversations through a movie. Yeah. And you talked about this,

but your background is in politics and journalism. How did you and Adam McKay end up linking up for this? And how did you draw on those different backgrounds to actually make this happen? The way this movie came about was the idea and the germination of it was I spent election night 2016 with Adam. And it was obviously a very disturbing and bad election night. Soon after that, Vice came out. And right after Vice came out, I said to him, I said, listen, you know, you have to use your superpowers of comedy and politics, the intertwining of both, to deal with the climate crisis. And he said, yeah, you know, I know, but I haven't been able to figure out exactly how to do it. We were kicking around ideas. And then I had written a couple of stories about something on climate. And it really sometimes feels like an asteroid's headed towards earth and nobody cares.

And he said, wait a minute, maybe that's the germination. Maybe that's the seed for the movie. And so we started spitballing ideas. I was like, oh, you know, the president would go try to address the crisis, but there would be a government shutdown and they can't pass a bill to get the funding necessary. comes back a month later, says, hey, I've got a script, what do you think? And I gave him some notes, and he revised it again. And then he said, you know, I think Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are interested in doing this. And I was sort of like, yeah, yeah, sure. You know, a lot of things in Hollywood, like things are always sort of in development. And then all of a sudden, he was

like, we're doing it literally now, they're sending over the papers for you. It's happening. And I was like, wow. Yeah. And this really did get polarizing reactions, like to say the least. So were you expecting that? I knew it was going to be polarizing because anything that you make about the here and now, especially anything about the here and now of politics and culture, people are going to react in a passionate way. This movie, it's about now. And so people are

going to have their feelings right now. And I actually think that it's a good thing. Whether you like the movie, whether you hate the movie, the fact that it has spurred those conversations and discussions and the thought and the discourse, that's what a film is really supposed to do. You're talking about the genesis of this and, you know, saying like, it's sort of like a comet is about to hit Earth. I think that people like on an intellectual level understand climate change in that way. And yet, there has been this enormous struggle for popular entertainment to wrestle with climate change and to actually present it in work that is mass consumed. Why do you think that is? And are there other things that you think have done that well? Look, climate is a tough issue because it's fast moving geologically, but it's slow moving in some ways in our lives,

although it's accelerating now. I think climate change is also a scary issue. That part of climate denial, I think part of the reason it has traction, it still has traction, is because it offers a comforting message. Hey, nothing's happening, nothing to worry about. I know this thing is scary, but hey, it's not really going to happen, or it's not a big deal, or it's not urgent. So you see the appeal of climate denial, but I think lots of us know that that's false comfort. And so I think this movie says explicitly it's false comfort. It uses this as an allegory to say this crisis really is urgent. And I think part of the comedy of our movie is that you're laughing in some ways because the movie is saying things that you know to be true, but that you know we don't really talk about a lot, right? Like our frivolizing media,

how it frivolizes everything. And I find the Daily Rip show to be one of the funniest parts of the movie because it's like, we know that that's how so much of the media operates. So to see it so explicitly in a funny way, we're like, yes, I recognize that. That's a thing that I recognize in the world that I know we don't talk about a lot. There's kind of a release to that. And the hope is that the release then begins to get us past denial. And what we're trying to dramatize is that this isn't 30 or 40 years from now. It may not be as six months of an asteroid, but it's right here and now.

And there are people trying to warn us about it. And the longer we ignore the Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence character, the worse it's going to be for us. I'm curious, because now that you've had this foray into the industry, what to you is more toxic, DC or Hollywood? Oh boy. They're both fun houses of

mayhem and, and confusion. Look, I would say I have a lot more experience in Washington, DC. Washington, DC is a place most of us know is broken in various ways. What I'm focused on in my journalism, and one of the themes in this movie is to shine a white-hot spotlight on how decisions are made in Washington, how they're often made without the public as the focus, without the public really being represented. I think that we need a whole hell of a lot more of that kind of accountability. Journalism, that kind of accountability. Media content to constantly put pressure on the people in that city who are running the government to actually deliver for us.

The Oscars are on March 27th, so you have plenty of time to catch up, but that's the latest for now. We'll be back after some ads. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. The Ottawa trucker protests continue to escalate after a new blockade emerged at the U.S.-Canadian border yesterday, effectively cutting off most traffic at Canada's busiest bridge to the U.S. The bridge is crucial to sustaining Canada's busiest bridge to the U.S. The bridge is crucial to

sustaining Canada's automobile industry, and the blockade could seriously disrupt its supply chain if it continues. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has been heavily criticized for not taking enough action against this so-called freedom convoy, took to Twitter to condemn the truckers yesterday, saying, quote, they don't have the right to blockade our economy or our democracy or our democracy or our fellow citizens' daily lives. It has to stop. Meanwhile, far-right activists around the world are hailing the Ottawa protesters as heroes of the anti-vax movement. Right-wingers in New Zealand and Australia have even staged similar protests, with thousands of protesters using their vehicles

to disrupt traffic over pandemic restrictions. Plans for a trucker protest in the U.S. are also gaining traction online because why not? According to the New York Times, anti-vax activists are already plotting on Facebook and are expected to announce an action soon. Chinese tennis star Peng Shui spoke to reporters at the Beijing Olympics on Monday in her first sit-down interview since last year. Shui disappeared from the public eye in November after she took to social media to accuse a former high-ranking Chinese government official of sexual assault. In Monday's interview, Shui completely backtracked on all of her claims,

saying she never accused anyone of assault and that the whole thing was, quote, an enormous misunderstanding. Wow. The three-time Olympian also announced in the interview that she would be retiring from tennis and thanked her fans for their support thus far. The interview has reignited international concern about her well-being and safety,

as many wonder whether or not she's acting of her own free will. Mark Von Tuyok, one of the two journalists who interviewed Shui, told the Associated Press that he wasn't sure if Shui was speaking freely during their conversation. The Women's Tennis Association, the organization that led the charge to defend Shui back in November, also was not convinced. Steve Simon, the association's CEO, released a statement yesterday calling for a formal investigation into Shui's claims and demanding to meet with Shui privately to inquire about her well-being. Just a scary situation all around. On Tuesday, the evil sleeping giant who may come to life again once he hears the word Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took a very minor stand.

He joined a small group of Republicans in pushing back on the Republican National Committee's vote last Friday to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their participation in the House investigation of the January 6th attack. At the RNC's winter meeting last week, the committee also characterized the January 6th attack on the Capitol as, quote, ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse. Whoa. If you are Mike Pence and you're listening, and for some reason this hurts you in a way that you cannot describe, just know that we disagree with the RNC here at WOD. In an address to the press Tuesday, Mitch McConnell called January 6th, quote, a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next. McConnell did reiterate his confidence in the RNC chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, no relation to Ronald

McDonald. However, he expressed concern at the targeting of, quote unquote, moderate Republicans like Cheney and Kinzinger. The issue is whether or not the RNC should be sort of singling out members of our party who may have different views from the majority. That's not the job of the RNC. In what the Department of Justice is calling its largest financial seizure ever, federal agents arrested a young couple in Manhattan Tuesday morning for conspiring to launder $4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency. The couple, Elia Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, were linked to a 2016 cyber breach of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, in which they allegedly stole almost 120,000 Bitcoin,

then valued at about 71 million dollars the doj was able to seize more than 94 thousand bitcoin now valued at 3.6 billion dollars take that any haters who thought bitcoin wasn't cool back in 2016 when the real heads were smart enough to steal it in giant quantities i am that hater doj officials made the seizures through search warrants after tracking how the couple had attempted to hide the money in various personal and business accounts. It didn't take long after the announcement of the couple's arrest for the Internet to discover that they had committed an even worse crime, posting rap music videos on YouTube. It turns out Heather Morgan, who goes online by the alias Razzlecon, what a name, had left behind a multi-website trail of cringe, including a TikTok in which she gives entrepreneurial advice, a personal website in which she describes her art as, quote, something in between an acid trip and a delightful nightmare, and articles on Forbes about how to protect your business from cyber

criminals, which if anyone's going to tell you how, it might as well be someone who is allegedly a cyber criminal. Allegedly. Makes sense. Not committed yet. We'll see what happens. Like many millennial icons, Morgan is a multi-hyphenate, and it's hard to describe her. So here she is describing herself in one of her many works of digital content terrorism. Remember that until recently, this person had over $3 billion. I'm many things. A rapper, an economist, a journalist, a writer, a CEO, and a dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty hoe. No. No. No, no, no. The interesting thing about all of this, too, in terms of the timing,

is that she's also performing the Super Bowl halftime show. I don't know if that's going to be possible given the recent developments, but that's pretty, I'm excited. That's going to be good. Yeah, that's the low point of my life, I think, that recording. It could only go up from here, so that's the upside true that's true um that's true we love razzle con here at wad for sure and those are the headlines that is all for today if you like the show make sure you subscribe leave a review delete your entire internet presence before the doj blows up your spot and tell your friends to

listen and if you're into reading and not just cybercrime tips from accused cybercrime rules like me, what it is, also a nightly newsletter, check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Josie Duffy Rice. I'm Gideon Resnick. And Lady Gaga was snubbed. That's right.

She worked on that accent day in and day out. I gotta say, I feel like if she had never said that, she could have gotten a nomination. But the accent, when you know how much work went into it, it's not that impressive. Yeah. Wasn't a great accent. Yeah.

What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Bill Lance, Jazzy Marine, and Raven Yamamoto are our associate producers. Our head writer is John Milstein with writing support from Jossie Kaufman. And our executive producers are Leo Duran and me, Gideon Resnick.

Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka.