MARK BRODIE: The Cardinals beat the LA Rams yesterday 18-16 on a field goal as time expired. That brings the Cardinals’ record to 2-4 on the season.
Off the field, though, a pair of former Arizona Cardinals employees has sued the team and owner Michael Bidwill. The accusations include racial discrimination. These follow previous lawsuits filed against the team and owner over allegations of age and gender discrimination and defamation.
THEO MACKIE: This lawsuit was filed by Kendra Hogue and Don Shumpert. Kendra Hogue was the former assistant of the Cardinals COO Jeremy Walls, and Don Shumpert, who was a former assistant coach on the team who left in 2022.
MARK BRODIE: OK. And what are they alleging happened?
THEO MACKIE: So Kendra Hogue’s lawsuit — portion of the lawsuit — is fairly broad, I would say. It alleges discrimination. It alleges that as a Black woman she was subject to disparate treatment, that the working conditions, she wrote, were so intolerable that a reasonable person in Hogue’s position would have been compelled to resign. There was not much detail in terms of what exactly that looked like from her perspective. It was referred to in those sorts of broad and vague terms.
Shumpert’s allegations were more specific. He was an assistant coach with the organization, fairly low down the totem pole when he joined the staff as a coaching fellow in 2019. By 2022, he had been promoted, he alleged, to running backs coach and was required to keep the same responsibilities of his previous role. So he was essentially working two jobs.
He met with the organization to request a pay raise because he was working two jobs, and the general manager and the head coach at the time both said, “Well, basically, we can’t deal with this.” It’s not clear whether he actually then went to ownership to request that promotion or that pay raise, but a week later he was fired, and he alleges that it was due to requesting that pay raise.
He also points out that the previous year, multiple white coaches had been given title increases, which are notable in the NFL because the title that you have is basically that’s what gets you on the radar of other organizations. So he was never given the title of running backs coach, which was this promotion. He said that two white coaches on the staff were given title increases, so to speak … nominal promotions, without actually having the responsibilities change. So he was alleging discrimination given the difference between how he was treated compared to those two white coaches.
And then there were other more minor things, referring to the treatment that he experienced in the organization, including from owner Michael Bidwill. And the one little tidbit that has kind of got attention this week is that the owner, Michael Bidwill, scowled at Shumpert as he took two water bottles from the fridge one day and asked if he was going grocery shopping. Which played into a lot of the notions that exist around Bidwill because he had been the last owner to continue charging players for meals during the offseason, charging for dinners during the regular season. … There’s a lot of points to ownership in Arizona not being willing to spend on minor aspects of the organization, and so that little tidbit there also garnered a lot of attention this week as well.
MARK BRODIE: So what are the Cardinals saying about this lawsuit? How are they responding to it?
THEO MACKIE: Yeah, essentially the Cardinals gave us a statement this week and just said, “We deny this, and it’s going to be proven wrong in short order. And because it’s a legal matter, we will refrain from further comment.” But the future of this is basically that it has been sent to an NFL arbitration process rather than an actual court hearing to determine any payouts here.
MARK BRODIE: Now, this is not the first lawsuit that has been filed against the Arizona Cardinals in the last number of years. How does this one sort of fit in with the others and sort of the general talk about this organization within the NFL?
THEO MACKIE: I mean, really, ultimately in this situation, because I guess there are two things that have followed Michael Bidwill in recent years. It’s the frugality, and then it’s the fact that he doesn’t treat people very well, reportedly. This adds to that second notion, that he doesn’t treat people very well. That was the crux of the claims from a former executive with the organization, Terry McDonough, in 2023 and 2024, who won those claims. A former assistant, Brittney Neuheisel, last year had claims that included age and gender-related discrimination in terms of how Bidwill treated her. These current claims do seem more nebulous. They seem less — there’s not a ton of specificity in terms of what exactly went wrong.
But it does build, right? It builds when the organization has been under fire so often, and when there’s been a new lawsuit every single year essentially for the past four years, it just kind of continues the conversation in a way that is uncomfortable for ownership.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, I would think this is not the kind of thing that the Cardinals would prefer people be talking about, this off-the-field stuff and negative off-the-field stuff.
THEO MACKIE: Right, exactly. Not that their on-the-field stuff is much better recently. But, yeah, it’s more about this just continues the conversation in a negative way around this organization. This is not the type of thing that’s going to get an NFL owner to have to sell the team or anything like that. Of course, you see fans hoping for that because of what the on-field results have been. This is not that. For that to be the case, allegations have to be truly massive. There have to be serious, serious issues. Not that these aren’t serious issues, but there’s really an extremely high bar for ownership to be forced to sell in the NFL. It’s only happened a couple times in recent memory.
So this is not that, but it does continue that uncomfortable conversation that surrounds this team and has surrounded this team for a really long time, because a lot of these notions, with the frugality especially, they’ve gone back to when the team was in St. Louis. … The team has been owned by the Bidwill family for almost 100 years, and for most of that time, they have been known as a cheap organization that does not do the little things to benefit its players. And so when you have things like an assistant saying, “Well, they wouldn’t give me a pay raise when I was working two jobs,” it feeds into that notion even if it might not have any tangible impacts on ownership or who owns the team.
MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Theo Mackie. He covers the Arizona Cardinals for the Arizona Republic. Theo, thanks so much.
THEO MACKIE: Thanks for having me on.
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