In early may, the University of Alabama had an opportunity to make history by hiring the first African American head football coach ever in the Southeastern Conference — and fumbled the ball. After firing football head coach Mike Price over an incident involving a stripper, the university — upon the urging of the Rev. Jesse Jackson — began interviewing Sylvester Croom, an African American running backs coach for the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. But in the end, Miami Dolphins assistant coach Mike Shula, a white man, got the job even though Croom was equally (and some say more) qualified.
This is but the latest incident in which qualified African Americans have been turned down for head-coaching jobs within Division 1-A football, collegiate sports’ elite.
In fact, attend one of the 50 or so Division 1-A college football games played on any given Saturday this autumn and you’ll see that nearly half the players battling it out on the field are African American. Also, a good portion of the officiating team is black. Many of the fans cheering and jeering are African American as well. But take a look at the sidelines to the fellows wearing the headsets and you’d be hard-pressed to find a coach who isn’t white.
The stats paint a grim picture: of the 117 Division 1-A football teams, only 3.4% of them have black head coaches. They can literally be counted on one hand: Tyrone Willingham at Notre Dame, San Jose State’s Fitzgerald Hill, Tony Samuel at New Mexico State, and Karl Dorrell at UCLA, who was hired following last season.
By comparison, more than 20% of the coaches in Division 1-A college basketball, the second most popular — and profitable — sport on many campuses, are black. It’s difficult to find worse stats for black coaches even among the ranks of major professional sports. During the 2001–2002 season, the NBA boasted the highest percentage (48%) of African American head coaches, with 14 counted among its 29 franchises. Though the NFL’s statistics are abysmal, NCAA football still lags behind its pro counterpart, which had two African American head coaches (6%) among its 32 franchises during the 2002 season (Marvin Lewis has since been hired by the Cincinnati Bengals, bringing that rate up to 9%). Even Hispanic-dominated Major League Baseball had eight African Americans (26%) calling the shots.
So what’s keeping potential black coaches on the bench? While the process for hiring coaches varies from university to university, it generally falls upon the school’s president or athletic director (AD) — a meager 2.9% of which are African American — to identify candidates and make the call. Sometimes, the AD will form a search committee made up of faculty and student-athletes to make recommendations. However, those with a financial or political interest in promoting a particular candidate can influence the selection process. Oftentimes, as has been prevalent in the NFL, the familiar face gets the nod — an old-boys’ club to which black folks have no membership.
“There’s a pattern for how whites and blacks are hired,” says San Jose State’s Hill. “Black prospects often have the same credentials, or more, as white prospects. But black coaches are left out of the loop when hiring takes place. So, the perception has been that white coaches are qualified and black coaches are not, which is wrong.”
One of the most well-known examples of an outstanding African American head coach left out of Division 1-A consideration was Grambling State’s Eddie Robinson, who was a coach in the Deep South from 1941–1997. His stellar career at the Division I-AA level boasted more wins than Caucasian coaching legends Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden, but he was never even offered an interview with a Division I-A school. “I’m not going to accuse everybody, but [there is racism] out there and we’d be foolish to say it’s not,” asserts Floyd Keith, executive director of the Black Coaches Association (BCA).
Richard Lapchick, chairman of the sports business management program at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and founder of the Northeastern University Center for the Study of Sport in Society, points out that another flaw in the system is the lack of a national search when a university is in the market for a new coach, resulting in ADs, presidents, and alumni choosing a candidate who’s comfortable and familiar. Lapchick says that a white president or AD quickly seeking to fill a coaching position will frequently turn to a familiar pool of candidates who are also likely to be white.
UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT
According to Chuck Bell, athletic director at San Jose State University, the breakdown also occurs at the coordinator-assistant coach level. He cites the 2003 Racial and Gender Report Card, compiled by the Center for the Study of Sport in Society, which states that only 22.7% of Division 1-A’s coaching staff was African American, compared to 74.6% for whites during the 2000–2001 season. “The bottom line is, the improvement of these dismal numbers has to be a priority in the administrator’s mind — that it’s for the betterment of the student athletes — and not necessarily trying to meet boosters’ expectations.”
Lapchick points the finger at college presidents as well as athletic directors. “There seems to be a culture in college football [not] to think out of the box and take some risks like college basketball did.” He cites the successes of African American coaches John Thompson (who guided Princeton to the basketball league championship and the NCAA tournament in his first season as a head coach) and John Chaney (who has a winning percentage of .720 with Cheyney State and Temple University) in the 1980s. “Other athletic directors saw that these coaches can keep alumni involved, they can keep fans coming to the games, and they can win and do it honorably.”
Lapchick says very few athletic directors have been willing to take the risk fearing that black football head coaches can’t raise money and won’t be able to keep the alumni happy and contributing.
The crusade to increase the numbers of African American head coaches — particularly at the pro and college ranks — isn’t new; the BCA has championed the cause for years. In fact, in 2002 the BCA sent a comprehensive list of the top African
American coaching candidates to every Division I-A president and AD. Thirteen head-coaching vacancies were up for grabs that year, but at the end of the day, only one African American got the nod: Willingham — one of the few who’d already had a head-coaching job. But even that was only after George O’Leary, who’s white, resigned as Notre Dame’s head coach when it came to light that he had doctored his résumé. (Willingham declined our request to be interviewed for this story.)
THE GAME PLAN
Attorneys Johnnie Cochran and Cyrus Mehri have entered the fray, releasing a report blasting the NCAA and NFL’s hiring practices involving black head coaches, and threatening to sue the NFL if it did not adhere to
Simply put, Cochran contends that there is an unquestioned higher standard for African American coaches in the NFL, even though they average 1.1 more wins per year and 28% more playoff seasons than their white counterparts, according to the report.
In the NCAA, however, it’s been a mixed performance for black coaches. While Willingham succeeded in leading his team to the Gator Bowl in his inaugural season as head coach, Bobby Williams, who coached for Michigan State, was fired in November 2002 after compiling an overall record of 16–17 in three seasons. John Blake also was released from coaching at the Univers
ity of Oklahoma in 1998, after a 13–21 record in three seasons.
A report, issued in October 2002 by the BCA, along with the Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee, the Minority Opportunities Athletic Association, and Mehri and Cochran (see sidebar), looks to apply as much pressure as possible on the NFL and NCAA, using political and economic means as well as public opinion. The report also includes incentives and proposals the league can put in place to help spur the hiring of African Americans as head coaches. These proposals include extra draft picks for teams with a diverse front office and league requirements in which team owners would include diverse racial groups when interviewing candidates for coaching positions.
A similar strategy worked for Mehri, who is best known for successfully pushing racial discrimination suits to the top of corporate America’s agenda. Despite the academic institutions involved, collegiate sports are big business. Football represented 69% of all revenues generated by men’s sports programs in 2001, for an average of $10.92 million for each Division I-A school, according to the Racial & Gender Report Card.
Even though Cochran’s involvement is widely viewed as a much-needed wake-up call to a league where over 90% of its coaches are white, not everyone is convinced his connection is the ultimate cure-all. “A lot of Johnnie Cochran’s leverage is public awareness, and there tends to be a short memory span for that in this country,” says Kevin J. Matthews, director of external affairs at the Center for the Study of Sport in Society. “The country being outraged for a year is not going to change the system. The system will only change by bringing in more people of color. There’s no other way.”
LATE-GAME ADJUSTMENTS
The BCA has launched a long-term plan that has already shown signs of turning the tide, Keith says optimistically. Part of the plan includes a hiring report card, which is an annual survey generated by the combined efforts of the BCA, the Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee, and the Minority Opportunities Athletic Association. The report card system recommends, among other things, that at least one ethnic minority faculty, athletic administrator, and football student-athlete is involved in the hiring process for head-coaching vacancies.
NCAA President Myles Brand says the dearth of black coaches in Division 1-A football is “a serious problem,” but he says he is optimistic about these diversifying efforts. Another such initiative is the NCAA Coaches Academy for football coaches. The NCAA allocated $180,000 to develop the program, which is comprised of workshops designed to enhance skills, interview preparation, networking, résumé building, media training, and booster relations. Whether this will actually have an impact or simply increase the number of African Americans qualified for, but left out of, the head-coach-interviewing process remains to be seen.
The BCA’s Keith says the goal of these undertakings is not to have African Americans considered just because of skin color, but to ensure that qualified candidates are no longer shut out on the basis of race. “We’re not publicly going to say, ‘Don’t go to school A’ — that defeats our purpose,” Keith explains. “But we need to present the case that if school X does not have minority representation in their athletic department and the environment isn’t such that it creates opportunities for you in the future, go somewhere else where it does.”
At the very least, institutions that refuse to make the hiring of African American head coaches a priority will be spotlighted — particularly in the media, which will in turn affect their bottom line (read: enrollment, gate receipts). “The moment we put out those grades, everybody will wake up. I will guarantee you this, you can’t hide an F,” Keith says.
Harry Edwards, one of this country’s premier sports activists who played a key role in organizing the “Revolt of the Black Athlete” at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, would like the BCA to take an even more radical approach. “The BCA needs to go to the parents of the top 100 high school seniors, give them a ‘whitelist’ of ranked schools, and ask: ‘Is your child being recruited by any of these schools?’ [Then] show [the parents] where the institutions rank on our whitelist’; the higher they rank, the more [parents] should not consider them,” says Edwards, a founding member of the BCA.
The good news: there are a few African American head-coaching candidates in the pipeline. Prospects include Randy Shannon, defensive coordinator, University of Miami; Ron Cooper, defensive coordinator, Mississippi State; John Eason, assistant head coach, University of Georgia; David Kelly, associate head coach, Stanford; Tyrone Nix, defensive coordinator, Southern Mississippi; and Charlie Strong, defensive coordinator, University of Florida.
HALL OF SHAME
Make no mistake, the lack of diversity in NCAA football is evident on many levels. At the college level, African Americans are not getting a fair chance at head-coaching jobs. But as long as ADs and presidents, most of whom are white men, continue to do the hiring, this situation will continue. It almost becomes a Catch-22 scenario.
“The low numbers of African American athletic directors contribute to the low level of African Americans in coaching football,” says Matthews.
Bell believes the best strategy to increase the number of African American coaches is for the coaches who have broken the color barrier to help those who aspire to follow in their footsteps. “I told the BCA that if Jackson and Cochran are really interested in changing the numbers, they would lead the charge to help the few black coaches that exist — like Fitz Hill and Tyrone Willingham — become successful and get the best recruits,” he says.
Should the current group of African American coaches achieve a degree of success on the field, as Willingham did last year, it could lead to more doors opening for future black candidates. But that still isn’t the end of the issue. According to Lapchick, sports programs need to look at hiring practices outside of the high-profile positions. “When you look at the other positions in these programs, the percentages of African Americans are very low — it’s
not just at the top, it’s throughout the organization,” he says. “If you bring in an African American general manager and he feels totally isolated within the organization, [unfamiliar] with the people and culture, his chance of success is going to be reduced as a result of not having [a] supportive environment.”The BCA’s and Cochran’s positions basically come down to pressuring college administrators into allowing more African Americans to lead their teams on the gridiron. Whether this tactic will have an impact on the number of black coaches excluded from Division 1-A coaching remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt that without such pressure, America’s largest colleges and universities will undoubtedly continue to fumble the ball. B
–Additional reporting by Curtis Bunn
Goals for Balancing the Scales
The Black Coaches Association, along with the Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee, the Minority Opportunities Athletic Association, and attorneys Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran, issued a statement that lays out NCAA and NFL diversity hiring benchmarks they hope to reach.
Short-Term Goal (to be accomplished by August 2003)
Maximize the use of electronic and print media and political alliances to heighten awareness of the issues surrounding the hiring of minority coaches.
Create a partnership between the Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee, the American Football Coaches Association, and the Black Coaches Association to develop programs designed to recruit, train, and retain ethnic minority coaches.
Intermedi
ate Goal (to be accomplished by August 2004)
Create additional professional development programs for ethnic minority coaches, such as BCA Achieving Coaching Excellence programs and the BCA National Convention.
Develop materials highlighting coaching as a career to student-athletes.
Long-Term Goal (to be accomplished by August 2005)
Achieve an overall 20% success rate in the hiring of ethnic minorities for Division I (excluding historically black colleges) head football positions that have opened since the conclusion of the 2002 football season.
Recommend that athletics administrative staff and head coaches attend NCAA-sanctioned diversity education workshops at least once every three years to enhance their understanding and value of diversity.
Recommend that employment contracts for head coaches and athletic directors include incentive clauses that reward them for hiring and mentoring minority coaches.
A Mixed Performance
When Karl Dorrell was hired as head coach for the UCLA Bruins in December 2002, he became only the 17th African American to lead a Division 1-A football squad. This historical listing of black head coaches shows that while several coaches have struggled with their programs, some have exceeded their teams’ 10-year winning percentage. Willie Jeffries, the pioneer who became the first African American to coach at this level, went on to Howard University and South Carolina State University and amassed an impressive career record of 174-130-6.
| Name | College | Year(s) | Record | Winning % | School’s Previous 10-Year Winning % |
| Willie Jeffries | Wichita State | 1979 — 82 | 21-32-2 | .40 | .30 |
| Dennis Green | Northwestern | 1981 — 85 | 10-45-0 | .18 | .20 |
| Cleve Bryant | Ohio University | 1985 — 89 | 9-44-2 | .18 | .44 |
| Wayne Nunnely | Nevada-Las Vegas | 1986 — 89 | 19-25-0 | .43 | .55 |
| Francis Peay | Northwestern | 1986 — 91 | 13-51-2 | .21 | .12 |
| Dennis Green | Stanford | 1989 — 91 | 16-18-0 | .48 | .43 |
| Willie Brown | Long Beach State | 1991 | 2-9-0 | .18 | .44 |
| James Caldwell | Wake Forest | 1993 — 00 | 26-63-0 | .29 | .44 |
| Ron Cooper | Eastern Michigan | 1993 — 94 | 9-13-0 | .41 | .40 |
| Matt Simon | U. of North Texas | 1994 — 97 | 18-26-1 | .41 | .45 |
| Ron Cooper | Louisville | 1995 — 97 | 13-20-0 | .39 | .49 |
| Bob Simmons | Oklahoma State | 1995 — 00 | 31-37-0 | .46 | .47 |
| Tyrone Willingham | Stanford | 1995 — 01 | 44-36-1 | .55 | .48 |
| John Blake | U. of Oklahoma | 1996 — 98 | 13-21-0 | .38 | .70 |
| Tony Samuel | New Mexico State | 1997 — 02 | 26-42-0 | .38 | .23 |
| Jerry Baldwin | Louisiana-Lafayette | 1999 — 01 | 6-27-0 | .18 | .42 |
| Bobby Williams | Michigan State | 1999 — 02 | 16-17-0 | .48 | .50 |
| Fitzgerald Hill | San Jose State | 2001 — 02 | 9-16-0 | .36 | .37 |
| Tyrone Willingham | Notre Dame | 2002 | 10-3-0 | .77 | .67 |
| Karl Dorrell | UCLA | 2003 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Passed Over Again
The 2003 Racial and Gender Report Card released in April 2003 shows that while African Americans continue to make up more than 40% of the player base for NCAA Division 1-A football, the shockingly low number of black coaches and athletic directors creates a disparity that the league is finally beginning to address. The 12th issue of the report card studied players, coaches, and front office/athletic department employees of major league baseball, the NFL, NBA, NHL, WNBA, Major League Soccer, and college sports. The report concludes that while the top-level leadership at the pro leagues and the NCAA remains committed to diversity, the results continue to filter down to teams, colleges, and universities at a slow pace.