Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith battled for the Super Bowl at Dolphin Stadium, but black coaches are still very much in the minority
By A.J. Hayes
If you’re a major college football institution, tis’ the season to get filthy rich.
Over the next week, millions of American football fans will be glued to their sofas and easy chairs watching an endless string of bowl games, and the schools will rake in the cash.
In between the beer and razor blade commercials, fans will comment on the exciting play, marvel at the colorful pageantry and debate who really is No. 1 in the nation.
But how many of these viewers will realize that while a great percentage of the amateur athletes competing in these cash cow contests are black, each head coach to a man will be white.
Apparently not too many. If there were, these football factories would at least be working to fix the discrepancy. Right now they appear to care not one bit.
According to the Black Coach’s Association, African-Americans currently comprise 50.8 of football players at the 124 Division I universities. But the number of black head coaches at this school is a pitiful five: Buffalo’s Turner Gill, Washington’s Tyrone Willingham, Kansas State’s Ron Prince, and Miami’s Randy Shannon.
The diversity figures at secondary athletic division schools aren’t any better. Just seven of the 119 division 1-A, non-historically black schools, have minority coaches. Four of the 122 Division 1-AA football coaches are black.
And its not like these schools are playing coy, even with pressure applied by the Black Coaches Assoction, two colleges, Ole Miss and Texas A & M recently didn’t even bother to search out black candidates for lip service interviews before giving the high paying slots to Mike Sherman and Houston Nutt, respectively. .
This isn’t just a problem in the Deep South where deep- pocketed alumni call the shots. At the start of the current football season the Pac 10 had two black coaches Tyrone Willingham at Washington and Karl Durrell at UCLA, by the end of the season that total was halved when durrell was dumped despite producing a winning season.
Some have suggested that black athletes boycott the schools that refuse to give minority coaches a fair shake. That would certainly get the point home, buy in the end that would only penalize the athletes. Universities especially state run school must institute a criterion that schools getting public funding consider and hire a diverse range of candidates – including those who mirror the makeup of their sport.