<H1>Quota system for coaching ... boo hoo, performance doesn't count</H1>
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[url]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35971-2004Dec 4.html[/url]</H1>
<H1>In College Football, A Glaring Disparity</H1>
<H2>Only 2 Blacks Among 117 Head Coaches</H2>
By Liz ClarkeWashington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 5, 2004; Page A01
In an era in which expectations of success border on being impossible to meet, the University of Notre Dame's dismissal of coach Tyrone Willingham still managed to send shock waves through college football last week.
To those mindful of Notre Dame's tradition of honoring its coaches' initial contracts, Willingham's ouster three years into a six-year deal signaled an end to the notion that there is any delineation between universities that take the high road and those that take any route in pursuit of victory on the playing fields.
Former Washington Redskins quarterback Doug Williams believes it sent a more stark message to minorities with dreams of coaching college football: The doors to the big-time game may as well be shut.
Willingham's firing capped an eight-day span during which three of the five black coaches in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I-A, college football's highest echelon based on attendance requirements, resigned or were dismissed, leaving two among the 117 coaches. That's less than 2 percent in a sport in which blacks comprise roughly 50 percent of athletes -- the lowest percentage since 1992 despite decades of discussion about the need to diversify football's coaching ranks.
And the inescapable conclusion of growing numbers of young minority coaches is that they're better off in the bottom-line business of the National Football League, where blacks account for nearly one in six head coaches and, the numbers suggest, merit and equity have a better chance of holding sway than in the ivory tower of academia.
Says Williams, who took a front-office job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after his climb up the college ladder stalled despite a 52-18 record as coach of Division I-AA Grambling State University: "I would be lying to say that what happened to Tyrone didn't affect me emotionally, because Tyrone did offer some hope. It's a major setback to aspiring black coaches. If I'm an assistant coach on a Division I-A staff, you just told me that I cannot be a head coach in Division I-A ball. When you think about the numbers, the numbers are very staggering. The only out now that a black coach has is to try to make it to the NFL. It's like black coaches have hit a wall."
Notre Dame never alluded to race in firing Willingham, and the coach himself insisted that his failure to win enough (he was 21-15 in three seasons) cost him his job. The justice of his dismissal notwithstanding, Willingham got an opportunity few black coaches receive: a job at a program with a history of winning.
Fitz Hill, who resigned from San Jose State University last month after four losing seasons, is one of the 21 black men to ever coach in Division I-A football and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the topic. Hill's research showed that when I-A schools hire black coaches, it has typically been to rebuild troubled programs. While ousted white coaches often get re-hired by rival schools, no black coach who has been fired from a I-A school has ever gotten hired by another.
Another reason for the backpedaling in diversifying college coaching, some suspect, is the fear that donations from well-heeled boosters will drop off. Private money is crucial in football because the sport devours the bulk of an athletic department's budget with its huge rosters (Notre Dame's is 106), runaway salaries and proliferation of NFL-sized stadiums and training facilities; at many schools, football coaches are expected to be the athletic department's public face in fund-raising efforts more so than coaches of other sports.
"We may say it's about black and white, but in the end it's green," Williams says. "The big-time boosters and alumni are out there, and the [college] presidents and athletic directors are afraid to make a decision that might irk some of their big-time boosters."
Colleges willing to consider minorities won't find scores of prospects among the game's offensive and defensive coordinators, either, jobs that traditionally have been the steppingstones to head coaching positions because they involve more responsibility and administration. Blacks are as rare there, Hill found, as they are among head coaches. Most are hired as recruiting coordinators -- jobs that often lead nowhere other than the rough neighborhoods that produce so many top high school prospects.
"It's hard to shake that role," Williams says. "There are a lot of black coaches that are on staffs because they've got the gift of gab to sell the African American kid."
NCAA President Myles Brand has assailed football's poor hiring record as "unacceptable," as have his predecessors. But their calls for change have gone largely ignored.
Frustrated by inaction, the Black Coaches Association last year set a goal of seeing blacks account for 20 percent of football coaching hires in I-A. To that end, the group developed a report card to grade schools on the fairness of their hiring: Did they interview minority applicants? Query the association about potential minority candidates? Include a minority on their hiring panel? Extend searches long enough so that multiple candidates could be considered?
<H1>In College Football, A Glaring Disparity</H1>
Those report cards will be announced publicly every year, but the additional scrutiny hasn't made a difference to some early in this hiring season. No doubt, the University of South Carolina will get an "F" for ignoring all of the BCA's principles in signing Steve Spurrier as Lou Holtz's successor without interviewing anyone else.
"I consider that a slap in our face," says Floyd Keith, the BCA's executive director. "I would encourage student-athletes of color to think twice about attending an institution that doesn't even show respect for our association in terms of this search process."
Had South Carolina been an NFL team, the move would have cost the school $200,000. That's the penalty NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue assessed Detroit Lions President Matt Millen for summarily hiring Steve Mariucci in 2003 and in the process flouting the league's Rooney rule, named after Dan Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and head of the league's diversity committee.
Under threat of litigation over their poor record of minority hiring, NFL owners in 2002 adopted the rule by acclamation, agreeing to interview at least one minority candidate for each head coaching vacancy. Since then, the 32-team league has gone from two black coaches to a record five.
"It changed the culture, it has changed the way of doing business in the front office, and it has changed the outlook," says Washington-based lawyer Cyrus Mehri, who helped bring about the rule. "The record in the college level is disgraceful. But what's even more disgraceful is that there is a tried and true and tested mechanism that could get them on a much stronger path. There is no excuse for it after they have had two years of watching the Rooney Rule in effect. What's missing is the leadership to make something happen."
Former NFL executive David Cornwell is equally mystified. In 1987, he helped create the NFL Minority Coaching Fellowship program, convinced that pro teams weren't hiring minorities primarily because they weren't familiar with the candidates. So all 28 teams were required to take on a minority assistant coach during training camp. The young coaches learned techniques that made them more effective; the NFL teams, in turn, got to know promising candidates. Among the program's graduates are two current NFL head coaches -- Herman Edwards of the New York Jets and Marvin Lewis of the Cincinnati Bengals -- as well as Willingham.
"If the experience in the fellowship program made them more attractive as candidates in the pro ranks, why wouldn't they also have been more attractive for greater opportunities in the college ranks?" Cornwell asks. "That's the question that needs to be answered."
In the meantime, Hill has given up coaching to write a book about his experience as one of the handful of black coaches in Division I-A.
"It's disheartening when you think civil rights laws were passed 40 years ago, and the phrase at the time was 'with all deliberate speed,' " Hill says. "Well, what is deliberate speed? Is it 50 years? Is it 60 years? We have not done that. In fact, we've gone backward."
