The Washington Post

The Washington Post
The athletic ability and charismatic appeal of African American youngsters account for much of the wild success that college football has enjoyed in recent years, as attendance records have been shattered, TV contracts have exploded in value and coaches' paychecks have ballooned.
But African American adults remain as scarce as ever on the game's sidelines, accounting for less than 5 percent of head coaches while black athletes account for 52 percent of all players.
Mississippi State's recent hiring of longtime NFL assistant Sylvester Croom has been hailed as an historic step toward closing that gap. Three decades after becoming one of the first black players recruited by Alabama's Bear Bryant, Croom becomes the first African American head football coach in the Southeastern Conference.
While his appointment has had seismic symbolic effect, it has created barely a statistical ripple in terms of diversifying college football's head coaching ranks.
Croom becomes the fifth African American among 117 football coaches in NCAA Division I-A. That's scant improvement over 15 years ago, when the issue of coaching opportunities for minorities first drew national attention due largely to the efforts of the Black Coaches Association.
Now, the BCA is trying a new tack: Issuing a report card on the job that NCAA Division I colleges do in filling their head football coaching vacancies.
Starting this season -- which has seen high-profile jobs open up at Arizona, Nebraska and Duke, in addition to Mississippi State -- the association will grade colleges on the fairness of their hiring practices. For the next three years, each school that hires a football coach will be given a letter grade based on five factors: Contact with the BCA during the search; efforts to interview candidates of color; the diversity of the hiring process; the time frame of the search; and adherence to the school's affirmative action policies.
"No one anywhere can tell anyone who to hire and when to hire them," concedes Floyd Keith, executive director of the BCA. "The bottom line is the search process. We feel -- and we are supported by the NCAA on this -- that it is flawed."
The hope is that getting a poor grade will either shame schools into doing better or become a stigma that will sway top high-school recruits as they're deciding which college to attend. The BCA's goal is to see African Americans account for 20 percent of all new coaching hires.
Why does diversity in college coaching matter? It's an obligation of higher education, says Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council of Education.
"Certainly when many of your teams are composed of minority student-athletes, there is an ethical and moral obligation to reach out and demonstrate to the extent possible that there are African American, Latino and minority coaches of all kinds who can perform at a Division I level," Steinbach says.
The NFL first confronted the lack of diversity in its coaching ranks 15 years ago and, from the outset, addressed the problem in business terms rather than as a racial or affirmative-action issue. Arguing the case for taking more aggressive steps was David Cornwell, then 27 and the league's assistant general counsel and director of equal employment.
"The point I made is that for whatever reason we had excluded from our league a significant portion of the talent pool," Cornwell recalls. "As a result, we could not say we had the best and the brightest leading our teams, and as a result, that was going to hurt our product."
So NFL owners created a minority coaches fellowship program patterned after one pioneered by the San Francisco 49ers. In which each NFL team agreed to bring in a minority coach as an intern during its training camp. The program accomplished two things: It gave NFL teams a first-hand look at the top candidates in the college ranks, and it gave the NFL a chance to impart some coaching techniques that helped the prospects improve their skills. Among the graduates of the program were Herman Edwards, now coach of the New York Jets, and Marvin Lewis, coach of the Cincinnati Bengals.
"It removed the myth that there was a lack of 'qualified' minority candidates," Cornwell says. "And it demonstrated with a commitment and some focus that there was a sensible was to address the issue to bring about positive results."
Meantime, college football has lagged behind.
Colleges were slow to integrate their player ranks and slower still to name African American youngsters as quarterbacks. African American coaches have been trapped in a similar bind -- hired reluctantly at first, then relegated to roles as recruiters and position coaches with limited responsibility and upward mobility.
The frustration of such stereotyping has been documented by sports sociologist Fitzgerald Hill, who is also football coach at San Jose State. Hill's research has shown that white and black coaches have radically different perceptions of the racial barriers in the college hiring process.
"Many believe that race is not an issue," Hill says. "Barriers are hard to remove when coaches have not come to grips with the reality of the problem."
When a black coach does get a Division I-A head-coaching job, it's typically at a school that's rebuilding or rehabilitating a tarnished image.
Hill learned so much about the long odds facing minority coaches that he decided if he didn't get a head-coaching job by the time he was 40, he would change professions. "I studied it long enough to realize that I didn't want to put myself or my family in that situation and keep chasing the dream because I realized the odds were not in my favor," Hill said.
When San Jose State, a school that hadn't been to a bowl game in 10 years, offered him its head-coaching job at age 36, several friends counseled against it. "They said, 'Are you sure you want that job? You don't have support. You don't have this or that.... "' Hill recalled. "So I told them, 'You think Ohio State is going to hire me?"
Tyrone Willingham won the coveted Notre Dame job in 2002. But even that came after a public-relations debacle in which George O'Leary, the school's first choice, was found to have lied on his resume and forced to resign abruptly.
The fear that fundraising will somehow suffer under an African American coach has also been a major, if largely unspoken, barrier. A university's head football coach is often a key player on the athletic department's fundraising team, and courting boosters, alumni, and local business leaders is deemed an essential skill.
"Football is the cash cow," says Ramapo, N.J., athletics director Eugene Marshall, chairman of the NCAA's minority opportunities and interests committee. "It drives the money. It is the most visible program in the institution, and most of the boosters want to get their hands involved in that. I don't think a lot of chancellors, presidents, athletic directors, boosters, alumni and boards of trustees feel comfortable with the poster child of their program being a person of color.
"They spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to recruit these same individuals to win national championships, take them to bowl games and having winning seasons. But when they graduate, they somehow cannot find them to become coaches and administrators."