Regarding black players in rural very-white state schools: let's take for example the University of Wyoming. It's a public university,
ranked #220 academically by US News. They have an undergrad student body of ~8,500. The acceptance rate is 97%, which is basically community college. You're not going to lure the "talented tenth" or whatever class of black college students, especially to a place in the middle of nowhere with no other blacks around!
In
2020, just 1% of students identified as black (76% declared as white, 12% "multiracial" or "prefer not to say"). That's exactly 85 black Wyoming Cowboys, but let's open up that figure to somewhere between 65 and 120 to account for rounding.
At a glance,
the football roster officially lists ~43 blacks. This would account for between 1/3 and 2/3 of the entire black student body population. I imagine plenty of the rest of them play other sports.
Although Wyoming is a conservative state, this and many others like it are still "liberal arts" colleges with a board of regents chock-full of academia lifers. Is any administrator anywhere going to suggest that the football program improve itself marginally by recruiting more white male athletes, in turn cutting the
total black student enrollment in half? I would say it's much more likely they'd suggest exactly the opposite.
** I admit I have absolutely no idea how Pell Grant accounting works for low-income students on athletic scholarships. In theory, the US government pays schools the tuition money they miss out on by subsidizing poor students. If this class of smaller D1 universities on relatively shoestring budgets can be compensated on top of their athletic scholarships, all the more reason for them to recruit the hood.
