Report card

BCA to grade schools on minority hiring

Dennis “Coach Fran" Franchione has slipped out the backdoor in Alabama, leaving the Tide faithful not only coach-less once again but also feeling a bit betrayed. So ponder this delicious question: Might Alabama, the program of Paul “Bear" Bryant, be in the market for an African-American coach?

Stop the laughing, please.

It isn’t happening in Tuscaloosa -- not now or any time in the near future. But academic institutions like Houston, Baylor and Michigan State are also shopping for a football coach. Like Alabama and programs coast-to-coast, they rely mightily on the talents of African-American recruits. You wonder if any will hire a black head coach.

Michigan State just let go a black coach in Bobby Williams, and ex-All Pro linebacker Mike Singletary is on the short list at Baylor, so it wouldn’t be a shock to see a minority coach hired this offseason.

Whatever they decide, the schools will eventually have to justify the hire -- if not to alumni, then at least to African-American recruits.

Because coming next August is something called the Hiring Report Card. It’s the long overdue brainchild of the Black Coaches Association, a group understandably frustrated by the abysmal hiring practices in college football, where half the players are minorities.

What qualifies as abysmal, you ask? Well, you don’t need a degree from MIT to grasp that three African-Americans out of 117 Division 1-A head coaches is weak. And 12 coordinators out of 334 isn't much better. By comparison, the NFL looks like an enlightened bunch.

The BCA's grand scheme to fight this isn’t anything radical. Nobody is making threats or suggesting a boycott. They just intend to publish an annual report card that rates the minority hiring practices of individual schools, with a range of grades from A to F.

“Our whole purpose here is to provide a measurement for recruits who consider diversity an issue in their decision," says Floyd Keith, executive director of the BCA. “And we want some accountability. I don’t think any significant change in this country has ever been achieved without some element of accountability. And if you don’t hold the hiring process accountable for being equitable and fair and being representative, then we’ll never have positive change."

Right now, the overall college football grade is an F, but some programs obviously fare better than others if you get beyond the head coaching position. So the report figures to delve into coordinator positions, assistant coaching jobs and administration -- where less than 4 percent of athletic directors are African-American.

Recruits, if they’re so inclined, can already study NCAA graduation reports to get a read on where academics fit in. This would just be some more hard numbers to see if the program truly walks the walk.

“Hey, we’re not telling kids they should go to a [certain] school over another school," says BCA board member Paul Hewitt, the Georgia Tech basketball coach. “But if for some reason a young man decides he wants to stay in the game as coach, or professional football doesn’t work out, where does he go? You usually go to your alma mater first. And just so he knows, here is what history suggests are your chances of getting into the loop as a coach at your alma mater.

“And if it influences a kid not to go to a school because that school or that conference hasn’t had a history of giving opportunities to people of color, then kids need to know that, especially if you are black. If kids see a pattern with certain schools where you’re good enough to play but not good enough to coach, then maybe it starts to sway a few top recruits and there is some influence there."

Perhaps the most troubling aspect in all this is seeing colleges lag behind the opportunities afforded in the pro ranks. Pro ball is supposedly about nothing but money. Meanwhile, the high-minded overseers of college athletics blabber that it’s all about the student-athlete, education, fairness, opportunity.

And why is it you find more African-American coaches in the NFL and NBA, where winning is paramount?

If there is an encouraging sign, it’s the 93 African-American head coaches working the sideline in college basketball-- a sport where almost two-thirds of the players are minorities.

This is called the John Thompson effect. After Thompson won a national title at Georgetown in 1984, it opened more doors. It became fashionable to hire a black coach, in part because he’d give you a leg up in recruiting African-American athletes.

“All of a sudden, you had [black] coaches popping up left and right," Hewitt says. “In sports, copycatting is big. If one team uses the West Coast offense and they win the championship, the next year 12 teams in the NFL are using the West Coast offense. It shouldn’t be like this, but if you have an African-American coach win a national championship, believe me, people will follow suit.

“I don’t care where you are, even in the South, if there are guys doing something that you are not doing and they are beating your pants off, people change. Even people who are protective of their sport because that is their heritage, they want to win, too."

Mike Fish is a senior writer for CNNSI.com.

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