Now that the football season is winding down, it is time for the annual season that sees coaches getting fired and new interviews taking place. With this annual process comes the discussion of: Do black coaches get their just due when it comes to the interview process?
College football does it differently than the NFL, as there is no “Rooney Rule” where NFL teams are required to interview minority candidates in their search for a new coach. The college game is made up of a few search firms who are well tied to the coaching agents. They look at where the candidates have coached before and their recruiting records.
Then comes the family. Not if the coaches are married but who they are married to. Yes, there have been coaches that have been overlooked because of that fact. In some parts, a black coach who marries out of his race is frowned upon. And while some coaches have spoken on the subject, there seems to be a potential changing of the unwritten policy.
It was not that long ago when former University of Kansas coach Turner Gill, along with new Texas coach Charlie Strong, were at the center of an embarrassing firestorm that saw them overlooked for jobs only to be told off the record or through third party that their marriages would not go over well in the eyes of alums and boosters who write the checks to support the program. Both made mention of it, and over time were eventually hired at Kansas and Louisville. Gill was fired early in his tenure at Kansas when the results were not as positive as the school had hoped for. The university took a bigger step back in hiring Charlie Weiss who has made a living of blaming the guy he replaced on why he cannot get the job done. (also see Ty Willingham at Notre Dame) As for Strong, he put Louisville on the map on a national level in three years. Strong was so good, Texas could have cared less what color his wife was.
There are other coaches on the college level who have the sledding tough to even get a quality interview, as the NCAA has yet to mandate a process to give minorities a better opportunity. The other issue at hand is stereotyping when it comes to coaches on the college level. They are viewed as recruiters more than coaches and play callers. This has been a long standing issue that black coaches seemed to be mired in with no relief in sight.
When it comes to the NFL, the term “here we go again” should be in play. While Lovie Smith was quickly hired by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, one could have made the argument that he should have never had to sit out a year after being fired in Chicago. So what next for the NFL as Detroit, Cleveland, Tennessee, Minnesota are all looking? Whenever you hear a minority being interviewed first, just mark it up as a team satisfying the Rooney Rule requirement so they can get back to business of looking for their real guy. Sad but true.
The league has tried to talk up a few minority coaches on the college level as legitimate candidates, but only time will tell if they stay in college and not become part of one of the great hiring shams in sports.
Stanford’s David Shaw and Vanderbilt James Franklin have emerged as two minority coaches that are on the fast track. The question is: will it be the NFL or a college program that they have a chance to win in? In the NFL, many owners have shied away from giving coaches mega millions and total control only to see themselves going through another interview process three to four years later. They settled on coordinators who were glad to be a head coach and would work for less. If you start with the Scott Linehan and Steve Spagnulo failures in St. Louis, many teams have made this costly mistake.
The college game has no problem paying Nick Saban $5 million or more. College football is turning out millionaire coaches at a good pace. While the headaches may be similar, it easier to get back in line on the college scene than in the NFL if you are minority compared to their white counterparts who seldom find the end of the line.
All will be good with the coaching world in football by the end of the Super Bowl if not sooner. If you decide to track this process, count the names of minorities who get interviewed and see how many get hired. Surely they cannot all be that bad in the interview.
