If officials from the global consulting firm Korn Ferry had reached out to Mangiero about Flores — he said they didn’t — while helping the Las Vegas Raiders find a new head coach, Mangiero would have handed them a glowing scouting report.

“Straight-A student in eighth grade, very smart kid, Boston College didn’t blink when they took him later,” Mangiero, who coached Flores at Poly Prep Country Day, told The Athletic. “A lot of good academic schools wanted him.

“His mother was tough and made sure he did his schoolwork. Bright-eyed, wanted to learn. You never had to tell Brian to do anything twice. It was always, ‘Coach, I got it.’ He had great listening and comprehending skills, and those are his biggest attributes.”

So Mangiero was knocked back when he read of an unsealed Korn Ferry document tied to Flores’ discrimination lawsuit against the NFL and multiple teams that described his longtime friend as a man who “can fool you with his polish upwards” and who learned “how to build relationships with white-collar and upper-class individuals” only through his ability to “build a strong friendship with a billionaire’s son.” Mangiero said he was disgusted to read that characterization, along with the claim the current Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator is “polished and a good presenter despite growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn (same as Mike Tyson).”

Corporate America has always had a problem distinguishing a tough neighborhood from a bad neighborhood. A tough neighborhood is home to tough people doing their damnedest to overcome societal inequities to build a better life for their kids.

Raul and Maria Flores, Honduran immigrants, raised their children in the Glenmore Plaza projects on everyday American values — discipline, accountability, earn every single thing you get. Raul was a merchant marine who was away working on a ship for most of the year. Maria was running the ship at home with a no-nonsense approach designed to keep her sons out of trouble.

Yes, Brownsville was a challenging place to raise a family; Flores’ twin brothers had knives pulled on them, and the sound of gunfire was not uncommon. “It shaped me in a lot of ways,” Flores told me once. “It made me tough. I learned how to deal with adversity, and it motivated me to get out of there. … It’s a tough environment, and there’s violence and drugs. But it wasn’t the wild, wild west.

“There’s a lot of good people there, too. I was fortunate to be around a lot of them.”

Those good people get forgotten in reports like the one supplied to the Raiders. As a recruiting firm that matches companies with leadership talent, Korn Ferry maintains a giant footprint in the world of sports. It is an Olympics partner with its name on the circuit that feeds the PGA Tour. Korn Ferry helped Michigan land Jim Harbaugh and helped a lot of schools and a lot of professional teams land a lot of people.

It sure didn’t help the Raiders land Brian Flores.

Korn Ferry and the Raiders did not respond to requests for comment, but in a memo first reported by Front Office Sports, the firm listed for the team what it saw as seven Flores weaknesses and six strengths in side-by-side boxes. Though the document praises Flores as an outstanding defensive coach who is smart and adaptable, it also said he needs “someone strong at the top to reign (sic) in some of his worst behavior” and states he “once threatened violence to his GM and made irrational demands during an ownership meeting.” The memo quotes a longtime senior team executive saying Flores was “the worst hiring decision we’ve ever made” and points out that his ongoing lawsuit “may be a distraction.”

Flores was hardly a perfect first-time head coach in Miami, where he went 24-25 while beating his former boss in New England, Bill Belichick, four times. With some time to reflect on the mistakes made with the Dolphins and the need to build stronger relationships in and around the building, Flores figures to be a better head coach the second time around. Just like Belichick.

“I don’t have any doubt that Brian would already be a head coach again if he didn’t file this lawsuit,” one of his attorneys at Wigdor LLP, Michael Willemin, told The Athletic.

Flores alleged in that 2022 suit that the NFL is “rife with racism, particularly when it comes to the hiring and retention of Black Head Coaches, Coordinators and General Managers.” He accused the New York Giants of putting him through a sham interview to meet Rooney Rule requirements before hiring Brian Daboll, a charge the team denied.

But when a memo such as Korn Ferry’s surfaces, more light is shed on why the Rooney Rule doesn’t stand a chance in a league of billionaire owners who currently employ only three Black head coaches.

“There seems to be a significant number of references in it that are veiled racist stereotypes,” Willemin said, “saying essentially that Brian was a poor Black person from Brooklyn only able to be polished and to socialize properly because he happened to meet a billionaire’s son. That’s a pretty offensive assumption that he couldn’t develop those skills on his own.

“And saying he had this polish that could fool people, that’s very akin to a comment on a Black person being articulate, as though that would be a surprising trait. … Along the same lines, there are various comments that seem to evoke the caricature of the angry Black man. Those are all problematic.”

As is this fact: Any corporate matchmaker surprised by (and suspicious of) a candidate’s disposition and communication skills because he emerged from public housing in Brownsville is more likely to believe the negative evaluations from his colleagues over the positive ones.

After the Tennessee Titans’ Robert Saleh became the only minority candidate hired among the 10 openings filed in the most recent cycle, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said at the Super Bowl that the league is evaluating every aspect of the hiring process to enhance opportunities for Black head coaches. No matter what Goodell says or does, and no matter how often the league embraces anti-racism initiatives and slogans, the commissioner can’t force team owners to hire people they don’t want to hire.

Not even Brian Flores, the NFL’s best defensive coordinator. I was there last year when Flores’ unit held Jaxson Dart to 13 net passing yards. That’s right, 13. Minnesota’s defense was so good, so confusing, the Giants were afraid to throw the ball.

For starters, Goodell should issue a strong statement denouncing the language in this Flores memo even as the league fights the coach in court. Something has to change. Something has to give.

It wasn’t too long ago that the quarterback position was off-limits to Black athletes who, over time, forced team decision-makers to discard vile stereotypes in favor of what they were seeing with their own eyes. It happened organically through competition from the grassroots level on up.

But the NFL’s coaching ranks remind us that institutional racism remains an ideal society’s most formidable opponent.

Nearly 15 years ago, a few days before the Giants won Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis, I sat with defensive coordinator Perry Fewell as he described the humiliation of sitting through a token interview for a head coach opening, knowing he was somebody’s Rooney Rule box to check.

“More than the questions, it’s the body language, just the interview process itself,” Fewell said. “You can pick out the questions and how they’re structured and how the conversation is going. It’s a lot to do with body language and how you’re being catered to.”

Sometimes, Fewell performed so well in those interviews that the executives on the other side of the table admitted he had exceeded their expectations.

“I felt like they should’ve known that when they brought me in,” Fewell said then. “So it’s kind of like a slap, because I’ve worked my ass off for 20-some years to get to this point.”

Seven years later, Flores actually landed the rare promotion as the New England Patriots’ coordinator after he held Sean McVay’s Los Angeles Rams to 3 points in the Super Bowl. He delivered two winning seasons out of three before the Dolphins fired him, before Korn Ferry described him to a potential employer as an erratic coach lacking in self-awareness and people skills who “can be a dictator with players, coaches, and can even be difficult with ownership.”

The Dolphins rallied around that “dictator” to win eight of his final nine games.

So was that an unbiased, fair-and-square assessment?

Or another example of why Black coaches are still searching for that level playing field?