More on racism in college football.

Much has been made of the relatively small numbers of black head coaches in NCAA 1A football. While I remain skeptical of how much racism is a factor, I certainly concede that it's a possibility, and despite my skepticism, I generally don't make much of this discussion. The big difference between this case and the Auburn case is that even though fingers were pointed in both, nobody was targeted specifically, and since there's no target, it's hard to make a case one way or the other.

As evidenced by the last three Super Bowls, there are clearly good black head coaches (although it might be a stretch to assuming good NFL coaches are roughly equivalent to college coaches). Like the Auburn case though, I started looking for other instances in which possibly more qualified black coaches were overlooked. Several web searches later, I hadn't come up with anything substantial.

About 25% of Americans are black, so you'd expect around 30 black coaches based solely on that. Furthermore, only six coaches in division 1A haven't had college playing experience, and easily more than 25% of college football players are black. It wasn't always this high, but in 2001, over 55% of college football players were black. Honestly though, it's a little strange to be talking about racial breakdowns at all in my opinion. If it were that simple, we could also say that black players actually benefit from racism. Saying that blacks are more fit to become football players isn't entirely different than saying whites are more fit to become coaches.

Being an SEC fan, I rarely pay attention to up and coming coaches. Most SEC schools don't have the patience to take chances on unproven coaches, although it happens on occasion. Looking just over the major conferences, no recent coaching hires have stuck out to me, at least from a racial perspective. Most schools take a conservative approach and hire the most successful head coach they could land from Div 1A. Occasionally, a top coordinator gets a head coaching shot. For the most part though, new coaching blood comes from the non-BCS conference schools, and I don't really know where those coaches are coming from.

One thing that I have noticed though is that there haven't been many decent black coaches in the mid-major schools lately. I can list several of the most successful mid-major programs of the past few years, and none of them have had black coaches. On top of that, perhaps the two black coaches with the most impressive resumes were fired last season. I think I'd still rather have Tyrone Willingham or Sylvester Croom than Turner Gill.

Perhaps I'm naive, but it still seems strange to me that head coaches could be chosen by any other criteria than the number of games they would be expected to win. I know there are academic considerations, but race has nothing to do with that. If I'm an athletic director, the one thing I'm asking is, "How many wins can you get for my program?" With most football programs more than paying for themselves, more wins equals more money and more prestige for the university. If there's a coach that can get one more win every couple of seasons, or even every fourth season, than the next best guy, I don't care what his race is. As far as I'm concerned, if he's black, you even get good press coverage as a bonus.