EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Brian Flores was supposed to meet up with his high school coach and longtime friend, former NFL player Dino Mangiero, on Saturday night, before the Vikings’ faulty team plane knocked that appointment off the board.

As it turned out, the landing-gear issues and maddening delay in Minnesota before the late arrival in New Jersey did not change the nature of this trip. Flores, out of Brooklyn, wasn’t on this homecoming journey to make holiday-time small talk with family and friends anyway.

This was very much a business trip.

The business of proving to the New York Giants that they hired the wrong Brian in 2022.

Daboll got the job, and Flores, in his mind, got the shaft. He sued the NFL for racial discrimination and cited the Giants, among others, for putting him through what he called a sham interview. The Giants denied the charge and pointed to the fact that co-owner John Mara personally recruited Flores into the process, but in the end, new general manager Joe Schoen decided to hire his buddy in Buffalo, Daboll, rather than the Brian with head coaching experience, Flores.

The same Flores who prevented the 2-13 Giants from scoring an offensive touchdown Sunday as Minnesota’s defensive coordinator, just like he prevented them from scoring an offensive touchdown last year. In fact, including his victory over the Giants as Miami’s head coach in 2021, Flores has allowed them a grand total of ZERO offensive touchdowns in their last 12 quarters of shared competition.

That’s a total shutdown of three Giants coaches — Joe Judge, Brian Daboll, and Mike Kafka.

Flores told The Athletic on Sunday night from Minneapolis that he was not keeping score like that against the franchise that didn’t hire him, that his focus was and always will be on his players. “It’s never about me,” he said hours after the Vikings’ 16-13 victory at MetLife Stadium.

“I think Brian is above all this and feels the Giants thing is behind him,” Mangiero said. “But human nature says in the back of Brian’s mind, you want to do well against the team that snubbed you.”

Flores did far better than “well” against the Giants and their dynamic dual-threat quarterback, Jaxson Dart. He held Dart to 13 net passing yards — 13! — while throwing enough different looks at Dart to reduce him to a dazed and confused novice.

“Just chaos,” Dart had said last week about facing a Flores defense.

He wasn’t surprised by all the curveballs and still couldn’t put any wood on them. As much as Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell tried to hand this game to the Giants with brutal play-calling at the end of the first half, leading to Tyler Nubin’s scoop-and-score touchdown that kept it close, Flores denied the giveaway.

An injured J.J. McCarthy was done at halftime, and the Vikings scored a mere three points in the second half, and still Flores gave his team a path to victory by allowing the Giants only three second-half points themselves.

 

Jaxson Dart’s stat line so far today 👇 pic.twitter.com/H6XA5xCNRA

— FOX Sports: NFL (@NFLonFOX) December 21, 2025

“With a young quarterback,” Flores said of Dart, “you want to mix up the looks. Bring pressure, make it look like you’re bringing pressure and not bring it. You want to speed up his process.”

The man was just doing his job, of course, as one of the finest defensive coaches in the league — a coordinator once good enough to run Bill Belichick’s defense in New England and to hold Sean McVay’s high-scoring Rams to a lousy field goal in the Super Bowl. But this had to be personal, too. It’s just the way human beings are wired.

“It’s natural to feel that way,” Mangiero said. “If someone tells you that you’re not good enough for a job, you want to prove that you are. Brian would have been so great for the Giants.”

Flores won 49 percent of his games in Miami and delivered two winning seasons out of three, before Daboll, a first-time head coach, won 33.6 percent of his Giants games and delivered one winning season out of four.

Flores isn’t the better candidate, in retrospect, because Daboll got himself fired. Flores was the better candidate the day Schoen made his fateful decision. He needed to work on his in-house relationships and willingness to collaborate, but if the biggest knock against Flores the game-day coach was his lack of belief in Tua Tagovailoa, well, how’s that evaluation looking right about now?

In Minnesota, player relations don’t seem to be a problem.

“Flo does a great job of changing up the looks, changing up our different rush plans, who’s coming, our pressure packages,” said Pro Bowl linebacker Andrew Van Ginkel.

“He’s always one step ahead. He puts us in position to make plays and be successful, and that’s all you can ask for. … If you look at his track record, every place he’s been he’s got an elite defense, and he’s very good at what he does.”

Six-time Pro Bowl safety Harrison Smith said the best part of playing for Flores is “the aggressiveness mixed with a thoughtful way of complementing the aggressiveness with different coverages. And really, the commitment to playing some unique stuff that might scare some people if you told them what the rules of it are. It’s not completely traditional all the time, and I think his commitment to doing that is a bigger deal than a lot of people would realize, because it could be uncomfortable for him as a play caller and for players. But when you buy into it, it creates some different opportunities.”

Asked if he would be surprised if Flores doesn’t get a second opportunity to be a head coach, Smith said, “I think he’s definitely built for whatever role he desires within an organization, to be honest. I don’t know what decision-makers are up to, but he’s absolutely cut out for it.”

As he was in the winter of 2022. Now the Giants are an undisciplined mess, losers of 38 of their last 49 games. At some point, Flores would have imposed his will on this team and held the culprits accountable. He is a tough guy from perhaps the toughest neighborhood in New York, Brownsville, and it’s hard to believe he would’ve let his city’s flagship NFL franchise become a laughingstock on his watch.

“I never backed down from anybody,” Flores told me once. “If people see you’re scared, or as somebody who backs down, you’re going to deal with it every day. That was my thing. I didn’t back down from anybody or any situation. Football, school, anything.”

Late Sunday night, Flores said, “I’m still improving as a coach and leader. I’m getting better and I can feel that.” He said he’s in a great spot in Minnesota, where his contract is expiring, but that he’ll be ready for a second shot at being a head coach “when the timing is right.”

Flores ended up beating his mentor, Belichick, four times in three years in Miami, and that wasn’t good enough for Joe Schoen. Three days before Flores was set to meet with the Giants, Belichick famously sent him a text meant for Daboll to congratulate him for landing the job. When he realized his mistake, Belichick wrote, “I think they are naming Brian Daboll. I’m sorry about that.”

Four seasons later, the Giants should be the ones sorry about that. The Vikings’ defensive coordinator said he had about 35 family and friends at the game to watch him turn the local team’s offense inside out.

Yes, this was a business trip for Brian Flores. But it was personal all the same.