#75. Lack of Black Head Coaches in College Football

Bear Bryant, whom many consider to be the finest football coach in history, will also be the man that Black people in the future "Black World" canonize as being the patron saint of making Southern football accommodating to Black people, and in large part, the nation.

It was 1972, and the University of Alabama's vaunted football program was struggling to win games with its all-white team, as other university's were employing Black people in great numbers on both sides of the ball. Having gone 12-11 in 1969 and 1970, Bryant decided what Alabama needed to lift themselves from barely above .500 was Black people:

"Before the start of the 1970 season, Bryant decided to take the initiative. At a January coaches meeting, he ran into his friend John McKay, the head coach of the University of Southern California Trojans, one of college football's most celebrated integrated teams. ... The Trojans would play in Birmingham to open the 1970 season, and Alabama would return the favor in Los Angeles the following autumn. Bryant must have known that his talent-deficient Tide team was no match for Southern Cal, and that proved to be the case. USC's two great black running backs, Sam "the Bam" Cunningham, who scored three touchdowns that afternoon, and Clarence Davis, who had been born in Birmingham, ran all over Alabama for a crushing 42-21 victory.

The one-sidedness of the defeat shocked many Alabamians... Cunningham, and proceeded to take him into the Alabama locker room, where he announced, "Gentlemen, this is what a football player looks like."

Bryant did go to the USC locker room to congratulate Cunningham, but the rest is fiction: The Alabama players didn't need to be told that the Tide had to integrate. Sam Cunningham, in Bear Bryant's words, "did more to integrate Alabama in one afternoon than Martin Luther King had in years."

Black people now comprise the majority of every Southeastern Conference (SEC) football team a mere 40 years later. Only lowly Vanderbilt dares trot out a majority white team, as the academic standards of the school leave Black people out of the admissions running in most cases, except for those who might be able to score a 22 on the Wonderlic Test.

Bear Bryant was so successful at integrating college football that now, 45.9 percent of Football Bowl Subdivision (DIA) athletes are Black people, even though Black people are only 14 percent of the population that is between the ages of 18-22 in the United States.

Almost all of the FBS schools that field majority Black football teams are comprised of nearly all-white student bodies. Black people don't mind this though, as the adulation of white people is one of their favorite things in life and with many future disingenuous white liberals being the bulk of those students bodies, its good practice for the future.

And yet, despite the multi-billion dollars that these athletes - many of them Black people - bring to their university's, there is a paucity of Black head coaches attempting to maintain order on campuses nationwide.

Right now, Black people are the head coaches of only seven of the 120 FBS college football programs:

DeWayne Walker, Ron English, Mike Locksley (New Mexico State, Eastern Michigan and New Mexico) join Turner Gill, Randy Shannon, Mike Haywood (Buffalo, Miami, Fl., Miami, Ohio) and Kevin Sumlin of Houston are the only Black head coaches in college football:

"In major-college football history, exactly two marquee jobs have gone to black coaches: Oklahoma hired John Blake in 1996, and Notre Dame hired Tyrone Willingham in 2002. Each was given three seasons before being booted."

Willingham, once the Token Black of head coaches, didn't fare well at Notre Dame and did even worse at Washington, taking that once powerful program into the lands only diversity could lead them, 0-12 in 2008 and a pathetic 11-37 in four seasons.

Mississippi State was the first SEC school to hire a Black head coach in Sylvester Croom, who was described as the Jackie Robinson of head coaching for breaking the color barrier in the deep south. His first season in 2004 saw him go 3-8 and he finished his career at MSU with a record of 21-38.

Why do we lump these men as failures together, when white coaches aren't held to the same monolithic standard? Because Black people that are coaches have the Black Coaches Association (renamed Black Coaches and Administrators), a place where Black people can lobby for more losing coaches to saddle the ranks of major college football with attempts at creating a racial balance quickly, as their mission is to:

• To address significant issues pertaining to the participation and employment of ethnic minorities in sport in general and intercollegiate athletics in particular.
• To assist ethnic minorities aspiring to have a career in athletics through educational and professional development programming and scholarships.
• To provide youth and diverse communities the opportunity to interact positively with the BCA as a corporate citizen and community builder through a variety of alliances

As SBPDL has shown, sports is only field where Black people surpass all other races - except incarceration rates - and show Black people in a positive light, given them access to complete entertainment domination and the adulation of white people everywhere.

Stuff Black People Don't Like will show in the coming week, as we prepare for the 2009 season, that Black people do not like their college athletes to graduate from college; they hate it when the lights to out on their careers; lack of Black mascots; Tim Tebow; White Running Backs; following team rules; and the media over-hyping Myron Rolle (because all Black people are capable of his intellectual acumen!).

However, for now Stuff Black People Don't Like includes the lack of Black Head Coaches in College Football's FBS division, for in the age of Mein Obama, only when a Black person is in control of all 120 FBS teams will the Black Coaches and Administrators organization be happy.

Black head coaches have failed at schools from Michigan State, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Washington, Mississippi State, UCLA, to Kansas State and a few others. White head coaches have failed at these schools as well, but they don't form groups to protect their interests. Perhaps that is why in the end, they will fail. To Black people, everything is about race. To white people, everything is about winning, regardless if white people lose in the end.