African Americans and College Football, Part 3: Integration

What’s next?

There is no “Rooney Rule” in college football. Not that the rule works in the NFL — it doesn’t — but university presidents and athletic directors are not held accountable when they don’t interview black coordinators or assistants for head coaching positions.

The “heir apparent” has been part of the college football hiring culture for decades. While football prognosticators have derided the NFL for years about the poor hiring practices of blacks in head coaches — when almost three-fourths of NFL players are black — there has been little commentary about the even poorer practices in hiring black head coaches at the collegiate level.

Consider this, the Southeastern Conference has played college football for 87 years. In those 87 years, they’ve hired four black head coaches. Sylvester Croom was the first black head football coach in SEC history in 2003. Joker Phillips was hired at Kentucky in 2010, James Franklin at Vanderbilt in 2011 and Derek Mason became the fourth when he was hired at Vanderbilt in 2014.

Ironically, SEC basketball has fared far better in its hiring practices as seven of their 14 coaches are black. This should not be a surprise. Willie E. Jefferies became the first coach of a D1 program when he became the head coach at Wichita State in 1979 about 110 years after the first college football game ever played.

Dennis Green was the second black head coach at the D1 level and the first at a Power Five program when Northwestern hired him in 1981. Jefferies and Green began a thematic narrative of black head coaches: “They can’t coach elite programs.” Northwestern was in terrible condition as a program when Green took it over.

This is what made both Tyrone Willingham and Bobby Williams so significant. Willingham is the first “recycled” head coach — he had jobs at Stanford, Washington and Notre Dame while Williams coached at Michigan State. They were the first two coaches of prominent football programs.

Willie Taggart has a unique space in the coaching continuum. He’s the only black head coach to be the first everywhere he’s been (Western Kentucky, Oregon, Florida State). He is also only the second coach at a university — Stanford’s David Shaw is the first — to be part of a staff with a black athletic director, black basketball coach and black football coach.

When he was hired, then-athletic director Stan Wilcox did a revolutionary thing. He hired the black guy among a long list of equal candidates. Washington head football coach Jimmy Lake is as important to black head football coaches as anyone. He’s the first to get the job through the “heir-apparent” culture of hiring. Former coach Chris Petersen wanted Lake to succeed him at Washington. Lake might be in the best position to win a national title as well.

That’s what’s needed to prove black coaches are as good as their counterparts, right? In a culture of commodities, a black coach winning the college football playoff proves their worth, doesn’t it?