IT FEELS GOOD TO BE BACK!!!! Unfortunately I haven’t been able to write anything new for the last three weeks. I spent the first two weeks studying for a final exam and completing a final project. I am proud to say that I have completed the first semester of my MBA program with very good grades. All of my hard work is definitely paying off. I also spent five days on vacation in Cancun with the wifey. It was nice to have a week not to think about work or school. It was much needed, and very relaxing.
Today I want to discuss a very serious topic, therefore this entry will not be as humorous or light-hearted as some of my previous entries. As a matter of fact, I would like to get some good opinions on this topic and also some feedback on possible solutions to the problem that will be discussed (remember this is a family blog, so keep the language clean in the comments).
As you all should know by now, Auburn University hired Iowa State Head Coach Gene Chizik to replace Tommy Tuberville as their Head Football Coach. They have been roundly criticized by many in the sports media and Charles Barkley (arguably Auburn’s most famous former athlete). There are those who wonder why they chose Chizik who has a stellar 5 – 19 record as a head coach and is riding a current 10 game losing streak, to lead a program that plays in arguably the toughest division in the toughest conference in college football. There are also those (namely Barkley) who wonder if the hire was racially motivated. This is because they passed on one of the hottest coaching prospects in the country in Turner Gill (University of Buffalo). In just three years Gill took the Buffalo program from laughing stock to conference champion. He is without a doubt a more accomplished head coach than Chizik. I am not inside the head of Jay Jacobs, Auburn’s Athletic Director, which means that I don’t know what his motivation for the hire was. However, he did say that Chizik is the right fit for Auburn. Only time will tell if he was right, or if he made a huge mistake.
The controversy that followed this hire has brought to the forefront an issue that comes up each off-season, but remains a problem each year. That issue is the lack of African American coaches in major college football. Today 4.20% of Division 1 head coaches are African American. That is 5 out of 119 to be exact. The only black head coaches in the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division 1A ) are Randy Shannon (University of Miami), Turner Gill (University of Buffalo), Kevin Sumlin (University of Houston), Mike Locksley (University of New Mexico), and Ron English (Eastern Michigan University). THAT IS ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS!!!! There is no way that you can tell me that only five African American coaches in America are qualified to be a head coach at the major college level.
In the NFL 21.88% (7 of 32) of all head coaches are African American. Although this is not as high as it should be, it is definitely a step in the right direction toward diversity. It is ridiculous that the college game is so far behind. In 1993 the NFL instituted the Rooney Rule, which makes it mandatory that all NFL teams with coaching vacancies interview at least one minority candidate during their coaching search. Although I wish that this rule was not necessary, it has proven to be invaluable to the advancement of minority coaches. The biggest problem that black coaches have faced in the past was the inability to even interview for head coaching openings. The introduction of this rule made NFL decision makers consider candidates that they usually wouldn’t have given a shot. It also gives minorities a chance to keep their interviewing skills sharp. This rule works, and should be implemented in the college game.
I believe that there is one simple reason that black coaches simply don’t get opportunities to be major college head coaches. This is because the vast majority of college presidents, athletic directors, and big-money football boosters are not African American, and are reluctant to give opportunities to people who don’t look like them. I have heard college Athletic Directors say on several occasions that they hired someone that they were comfortable with or someone that they knew. That is all fine and well, but there will never be true diversity in the major college football coaching ranks until someone steps outside the box and takes a chance.
Not only should black coaches get an opportunity in college football, they should also be treated fairly once they get that opportunity. I can only think of two situations where black coaches were fired fairly. Karl Dorrell was let go at UCLA after five decent but not great seasons. He had a record of 35 – 27, but was not able to win the conference or get to a BCS game. Tyrone Willingham was fired by the University of Washington this season. It was a just firing because he had a record of 11 – 37 in his four seasons at the school. He also went 0 – 12 this past season.
Tyrone Willingham is an interesting case because he was treated so unfairly while at the University of Notre Dame. He was fired by Notre Dame after only three seasons. In those three seasons he had a record of 21 – 15. Normally I would say that if Notre Dame didn’t think that 21 – 15 is good enough at Notre Dame, then they had the right to make a change. However, I found it very strange that Willingham’s successor, Charlie Weiss went 22 – 15 in his first three seasons. Notre Dame even gave Weiss a ten year contract extension during his first season, when he had a similar record as Willingham. Just for the record, I would like to state that Weiss experienced his most success when he was leading a team of players recruited by Willingham. Once he got his own recruiting classes on campus, everything went downhill. Please tell me how it is fair for two coaches to have similar records at the same school, yet be treated very differently by that University.
I can think of three potential solutions to this problem. The first of which is to introduce a rule that mirrors the Rooney Rule that has been implemented by the NFL. I am very skeptical of the chances of this rule working at the college level. This rule works in the NFL because NFL teams are run by business men whose primary goal is to win and make money. If they feel as though an African American candidate is the best person to lead that football team, they will hire him. However, college football is run by boosters. The person that is hired to lead the football team has to be someone that the big-money boosters approve of, or they will simply stop donating to the program. More often than not, these boosters know very little about the technical aspects of football and simply want the coach that they like to be leading their team. If they don’t want a minority, then that school will not hire a minority, no matter how qualified he is.
The next potential solution is for a black coach to get an opportunity at a major program and hire a staff that consists primarily of black coaches. If this coach is wildly successful, then coaches from his staff are likely to get opportunities to be head coaches. This is strategy that Tony Dungy employed in the NFL. It is amazing that every current African American coach in the NFL except for Marvin Lewis, Romeo Crennel, and Mike Singletary (and of course, Dungy) have at one point in their career worked for Tony Dungy.
My third potential solution to this problem is for the elite black high school athletes to go to schools that have African American head coaches and coordinators. If this happens, the number of black coaches being interviewed for job openings will sky-rocket. A college football program is only as good as the players that it can recruit and if a school is put at a recruiting disadvantage, even the boosters that are staunchly against diversity will embrace and demand it.
This is a real problem in a country that is supposed to be the land of opportunity. I think that it’s ridiculous that African American coaches are still treated as second class citizens in the world of college football. They are simply not given equal opportunities. Am I the only person that thinks that it is funny that America feels as though an African American can be qualified to lead our country in these difficult times, but an African American can’t be qualified to lead a college football team to a BCS game? It is time for colleges and universities all over America to treat all coaches equally and give everyone a fair chance to be a head coach.
If you have any additional suggestions as to how this problem can be solved, please comment and share them. (Remember to keep it clean, this is a family blog).
3 comments:
First of all, this topic can be debated from many perspectives. The need for diversification at the coaching ranks in college football is long overdue. When referring to debatable issues that pertain to sports, "race" is always going to be a factor. Race will remain a factor because organized sports in America were founded through a social-economic belief that people who engage in such activities were "cut from a better cloth" with regards to the lower status. The traces of this are still evident because football is the "unofficial" favorite sport in America. Look at the amount of fan fare that the Super Bowl generates around the country and the world!
The Southeastern Conference is by far the most competitive football conference in college football. Likewise, the University of Auburn is rooted deep beneath the moss-draped oak trees of central Alabama "the Heart of Dixie". With this in mind, it is not a shock that Auburn has chosen to hire Gene Chizik over Turner Gill. Many of the boosters and die hard supporters of a collegiate team hold a valuable asset that only seasoned minds are able to reckognize and respect........"OLD MONEY". Old Money carries a lot of implications. Old money is typically built upon a "brand name" or a "family name"; for instance, many families have legacies of children that attend many of these prestigious colleges and follow in their fore-fathers footsteps as participants on the football team, fraternities, sororities, etc. Choosing a coach is no exception to the "keeping it in the family" mantra.
Selecting a black head coach represents "change" on many levels. Therefore, the "new" coach may tend to do away with some of those old customs and traditions; especially if those customs and traditions harbor the "good ole boy mentality" of doing business. This is primarily why a vote for a similar "Rooney Rule" may not pass in the South/SEC. Of course, money also plays a part in the equation.
Collegiate stadiums, in particular SEC stadiums, are larger on average in comparison to the amount of fans that NFL stadiums hold around the country. This spells STRAIGHT CASH HOMEY!! If the hiring of a black coach will disrupt a large majority of the fan base in a bigotry laden southern environment, why rock the boat?...hmmm? This might result in the lack of fans in the seats.
Another thing to consider, are the lengths of coaching contracts on the collegiate level in comparison to the NFL level. Obviously, the professional game is about money and winning. The collegiate game carries the same weight, but the variables are different.
Sadly, African Americans make up more than 85% of the sport, yet the University of Auburn can only stand to see "us" behind the chin strap and not under the head set.
I am not a huge fan of forced diversity for the sake of diversity in most situations; however, in cases like this where the statistics undoubtedly show a systematic lack of opportunity for highly-qualified people I feel that some kind of action must be taken.
Something irrational is at work when schools will not hire from a demographic that has shown to have success at the most elite levels (NFL). Is it racism? I think you would be a fool to not admit that racism is involved to some degree, the question is how much. The other question is why does racism seem to be such a bigger factor in college football versus other areas of everyday life (where it exists but it is less obvious).
To keep things interesting, I'd like to put racism aside for now and try to come up with some other explanations that must explain what is going on because in my heart I don't think the people involved in college sports are as racist as these statistics make them look.
The first place I want to start is by pointing out college sports' general aversion to any kind of change whatsoever. The perfect example of this is the Bowl System, which, like the lack of black coaches, shows total irrational behavior. Colleges claim that the bowl system makes a lot of money, but study after study has shown that a playoff system would generate way more TV ratings and in turn much bigger payouts for everyone, yet the colleges still cling to the old system.
The second thing I would like to touch on is the source of funds for college football. College sports are largely funded by a few crazy boosters at each school. Why do I say they are crazy? Because anyone who spends millions of his own money, with absolutely no chance of seeing any of it back, to watch 22 guys run around in tights and tackle each other is insane. I'm sorry. Crazy people do irrational things.
The NFL, on the other hand, is funded by people like you and me. NFL owners might pony up the initial capital to purchase a team, but that is an investment which pays them a return every year. The actual cost of operations is paid by you and me through ticket sales or indirectly by our eyeballs watching TV advertisements. Either way the cost is spread among millions of fans. This diversity leads to rational decisions.
So how do you solve the problem? In normal situations, I would be an optimist and claim that these sorts of things will work themselves out. Given my arguments above plus the simple fact that there were double the amount of black coaches in 1997 as 2008 (in other words, we are going backwards), it would be foolish to think that things are ever going to change with no action.
Can the fans solve it? Yes, but we are stuck with the Prisoner's Dilemma (look it up). We can only affect change as fans if we all work together to withhold sponsorship of our teams until new rules are put into place. I have to admit that as a fan of Ga Tech I would not have had the will to boycott the hiring of Paul Johnson.
Can the schools solve it? Yes, but only if the Presidents get the guts to stand up to the boosters. The Presidents are scared of the boosters, but if any of the Presidents had guts they would force the issue and make boosters come out on record as fighting against any reform. Presidents need to realize that their schools are there to teach the next generation of workers in America, not to entertain us.
Finally, what about the players? This can absolutely have an impact. It is obvious that the teams that get the most 4 and 5 star recruits win championships. College football really is an arms race. If enough players stand up and only play for black coaches (like Thaddeus Young did when he picked Tech over Memphis), things will definitely change.
However, we have a chicken and the egg problem here. There is no way we could expect a player to go to a lesser school with less exposure just to prove a point when a significant number of athletes come from poor families. Right now, there is only one school that kids could go to in order to make a point but still have a shot at the NFL - the University of Miami.
Which brings me to my final point. We should all start pulling hard for the University of Miami. Calm down, Carlos, hear me out. The 80's brought us Doug "How Long Have You Been a Black Quarterback" Douglas and a Super Bowl Win. The 90's is when the head coaching career of Tony Dungy began which culminated in the first black coach to win a Super Bowl for the 2006 season. I think in the next 5 years Randy Shannon can bring another championship to the 'U' and you will see things pick up.
I'll wrap this up with one more suggestion - legislation. I don't like the government getting involved with things like sports, but this situation is inarguably one where there is widespread discrimination. If any of us had our companies working with the same percentages where there were a provable number of well-qualified minority candidates, we would get shut down. Why is college sports any different?
Carlos, I truly do appreciate the blog this week. I haven’t really thought much about the African-American coaching situation. It is a dead issue to me. As a former HBCU athlete, I have played for an African-American coach at the D-1 “sub-division” level. However, I can’t really side on the issue for African-American coaches. I just can’t. All my life, I have been taught that you do things for your “own,” and never beg any man to give you a hand-out of any kind—because something is always owed at the end, and since we had to ask for it, then we can never dictate the weight of payment.
Point, period, blank, the issue resides on the African-American athletes and their households.
Many African-American athletes grow up only thinking about the predominant white universities because the grotesque saturation practices displayed on the major networks. I can’t blame them; I always wanted to attend UGA. My father and high school football strongly protested against African-American students receiving scholarships from those schools. I really didn’t understand at first, however, I do now. Although I never had a true scholarship offer from Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Florida, Boston College (all of which showed interests through visits and annoying phone calls), I was sternly wheeled towards HBCUs all of my life. On my visits, I was deeply amazed at the advanced equipment provided to the top athletes at these schools: t.v. monitors in treadmills, cherry oak lockers, generous “stipends,” etc. How can any young man turn down these eye-popping amenities when juxtaposed to African-American training facilities? We must seriously ask ourselves this question: Are we still attracted/distracted by the shinning lights of big programs? And the answer is “hell yes!” The Rooney rule or any mirroring rule will not stop the apparent injustice. What will stop it, or help the cause, is the self-exclusion of the nation’s top athletes from predominate white programs. In others words, a great sacrifice must take place. And Carlos, you and I both know that this will never happen.
One top athlete that I have known all of my life tried this, Rodney Williams. For those of you that don’t know Mr. Rodney “Rocket” Williams, he was it. He was an anomaly at the highest collegiate ranks, an African-American punter and kicker. Rodney attempted to maneuver a strategic move from Georgia Tech to Morris Brown College. Rodney was displeased with the way they turned on African-American athletes when becoming injured. When attempting to transfer credits to Morris Brown, Georgia Tech stopped the shift. They threatened to sue him over the infringement of contract; however, ladies and gentlemen, college contracts are year to year. His junior year ended, and he had a year left of eligibility. Mr. Williams was pressured to continue his matriculation at Georgia Tech through threats.
I am not saying that African-American coaches don’t deserve the opportunity, but we all need to sit back and examine the microcosm that is college football. Stop asking for pacified support, and create an existence that doesn’t need outside assistance. Maybe if the Reggie Bushs’, Vince Youngs’, Calvin Johnsons’, QUINCY CARTERs’, etc. went to HBCUs, or colleges that have black coaches, then we could start a positive trend. I truly don’t think this trend will ever happen.
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