After participating in a lively rant with my peers here at sportsrant concerning the reason for Ty Willinghams sudden dismissal from the beloved(or reviled) Notre Dame I decided to do a little research on who exactly is coaching our big time college football teams. I found the going very tedious when lo and behold I pick up the Boston Globe for September 21st and find they have done all the research for me. Front page and all!
You may remember that a couple of years ago the NFL began to require that their teams interview at least one minority candidate for every open coaching position. Matt Millen, the rocket scientist up in Detroit immediatly screwed that up by urinating on the commissioners shoes but that is another story. When you look at the NCAA their minority hiring record is worse than the NFL by a long shot.
There are 616 teams who play football under the NCAA umbrella. a total of 16 teams, or 2.6% are coached by African-Americans. In Division 1A there are 119 teams with five(4.2%) black coaches. In 1997 there were 8 black coaches.
When Washington University meets UCLA this Saturday 40% of the minority head coaches in Division 1A will be on the field. They are Ty Willingham and Karl Dorrell.
I will admit no small amount of surprise at this information. While admitting that I have never really given this a lot of thought, I never would have guessed there were only five black head coaches at the 1A level of NCAA football. There are supposed to be institutions of higher learning first and foremost, but we all know that when it comes to big-time sports that is a lot
of baloney(or whatever other term is appropriate). What are the reasons here?
The discussion the other day focused on Notre Dame and how Charlie Weiss came to become it's head coach. There is no doubt that something out of the ordinary occured there. The question was what. Is there an underlying race issue there? I sure as hell don't know. I do know this however, if there is a problem it is not with just one school, it is with the entire NCAA. Notre Dame has had one minority coach who of course they fired, but they at least have had a minority coach. The same cannot be said of most of their competitors.
Is the problem one of individual schools? is it a problem at all?
I am not all that smart I'm afraid. What to you guys think?
(all statistics from the Boston Globe, Boston.com)
