thelesterlee
Not too long ago I was listening to a Barry Bonds interview where he gave his theory on why guys didn’t like him. He explained how he never gave any of his teammates hitting tips because he didn’t want to give anyone else an advantage juuuust in case they ended up being opponents down the road.
Just a GOAT doing GOAT stuff. Nothing odd about that.
And a new Tua Tagovailoa interview, Tua revealing his former head coach, Brian Flores, was a huge asshole to him on a daily basis, gives me that same feeling about another GOAT.
#Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa discusses the difference between having Brian Flores as his head coach vs. having Mike McDaniel.
This is a brutally honest answer from Tua… Positive energy and empowering someone goes a long way.
(🎥 @LeBatardShow)pic.twitter.com/DxUJuyfuxg
— Ari Meirov (@MySportsUpdate) August 19, 2024
“To put it in the simplest terms, if you woke up every morning and I told you that you suck at what you did, that you don’t belong doing what you do, that you shouldn’t be here, that this guy should be here, that you haven’t earned this,” Tagovailoa said, describing Flores’ coaching style. “And then you have somebody else come in and tell you, ‘Dude, you are the best fit for this. You’re accurate. You’re the best whatever, you’re this, you’re that.’ How would it make you feel listening to one or the other?”
In 2019, the Miami Dolphins hired Brian Flores as the head coach for a team that was supposed to #Tank4Tua but Flores and his psychopath QB, Ryan Fitzpatrick, won the final two games of the season to go 5-11, dropping them to the 5th overall pick.
Somehow, even though Flores went out of his way to avoid Tua, the Miami Dolphins still ended up drafting Tagovailoa with the 5th pick of the 2020 NFL Draft.
And according to Tua, Flores did not hide his disgust with his performance.
Brian Flores, who is currently the defensive coordinator of the Minnesota Vikings, was forced to address this in a press conference where he didn’t really deny being a dick to Tua but called it a learning experience.
Why was Brian Flores such a jerk to Tua Tagovailoa?
Brian Flores started his coaching career in 2008 as a special teams assistant for the New England Patriots. He worked under Bill Belichick for a decade before getting the head coaching gig in 2019.
Flores was fired after the 2021 season, finishing with a 24-25 win-loss record. Flores would join a growing list of Belichick assistants who help the Patriots win a Super Bowl only to have no idea how to run their own teams away from Bill.
And that’s what makes Bill Belichick the GOAT. Just like Barry Bonds, it seems like Belichick doesn’t share his secrets with his assistants so when they leave, they take the wrong lessons with them. Instead of understanding how Bill prepares week-to-week, they walk away thinking the secret to Bill’s success is how mean he was to Tom Brady.
It makes all the sense in the world for Brian Flores to text Tua at 6am every morning like “hey, don’t forget. You suck at football”.
Flores isn’t the only Belichick disciple that believed the recipe for Super Bowls was 1 teaspoon of preparation and 100 gallons of authoritarian bullshit.
Josh McDaniels was hired by the Denver Broncos in 2009 and fired in 2010. McDaniels went to war with Jay Cutler and Brandon Marshall, the two best players on the team.
I imagine he watched Belichick scream at Brady and Wes Welker, taking notes like ‘first step: humiliate the most respected players”.
But Bill Belichick became HIM, first, by knowing how to maneuver in any and all random in-game situations thanks to his autistic ability to recall that 4th and 15 fake punt conversion Navy did to beat Army in 1956 or the perfect time to call time outs after watching a 1997 Tennesee Titans preseason game.
And by winning, he was then able to establish a culture that demanded perfection because all the players in the building knowingly signed up to play for the guy who wins Super Bowls, regardless of how harsh he may treat them.
(The third step is knowing all the rules and constantly toeing the line of cheating until he is suspended for recording practices.)
His assistants always skip that first step of turning their brains into super football computers and jump immediately to alienating players who don’t respect them yet because they haven’t won shit without Belichick.
And I give alllll the credit in the world to Bill Belichick for all these guys failing.
He shared his cheating with ONE assistant, Eric Mangini, and was immediately burned when Mangini became the Jets head coach and snitched on Belichick for spying on them.
Mangini ruined it for everyone.
Brian Flores never stood a chance to be a good head coach. Bill Belichick sabotaged him for a decade. Nothing but respect for the greatest asshole to ever do it.
Is Tua Tagovailoa a baby?
Real quick, I noticed a split in the response to Tua calling Brian Flores a terrible person. Tom Brady, whose opinions I somehow can’t stop seeing every day all of a sudden, said that great players should take tough criticism well and use it as motivation to improve.
Others believe it’s the job of the coaching staff to build up their players, the way Mike McDaniel clearly has since arriving in Miami and Brian Flores is a bad coach because he put down his players.
I have to defend Brian Flores here.
The NFL doesn’t give these jobs to people who look like Flores. I’m sure he recognized he had one chance to succeed or else he’d be back to coordinator, never to be heard from again.
So I imagine he didn’t love watching Tua throw 1-yard screens and limping after every single snap in practice, knowing his future was in the tiny baby hands of a small, frail, injury-prone QB.
Shout out to Mike McDaniel watching Tua film, hitting his vape and being like “Oh, we’ll just be fast as shit” when Flores watched film, throwing darts a photo of Tua being like “I will never financially recover from this”.
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Is this Brian Flores asshole thing going to prevent him from ever coaching again? Leave a comment below. Respond on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Or shoot me an email at Deadseriousmailbag@gmail.com. Let’s chat, bay-beeeee.
