The Ongoing Shame of the NCAA

The Boston Globe has a disturbing feature today on the paucity of African American college football head coaches at all NCAA levels. The dearth is especially clear in New England, which not only has no black head coaches at the Division I or I-AA levels, but where there has only been one black coach at those divisions in the region's history. What is shocking is thatthese trends are pervasive across the NCAA. According to the Globe report:

The statistics are staggering, both nationally and in New England. Of 616 football teams affiliated with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, only 16, or 2.6 percent, are guided by African-American head coaches, even though an estimated 19,667, or 32.7 percent, of the players last year were black, according to an NCAA survey (the figures exclude historically black colleges and universities).

The landscape is even grimmer in New England, where all but one of the 54 head coaches for NCAA football teams are white, according to a Globe survey. The lone minority is Mel Mills, a former Arena Football League player who has taken over a fledgling Division 3 team at Becker College in Leicester that went winless last year in its inaugural season.

Back in December 2003 I wrote an article about this issue after mississippi State hired Sylvester Croom as its new head coach. Things seem not to be improving, and might be getting worse. I hate the idea of mandating change in this arena and would like to think that universities, of all places, would place a premium on seeking out good black coaches, of which there are many working at the assistant ranks and many more among former players who would love a shot at coaching. but the situation is not changing quickly enough if it is changing at all.