Constitutional Law

College Sports Still Struggling To Diversify Football Coaching Ranks

A recent Issue Brief distributed by ACS showed that while the National Football League has made some progress in hiring more minority coaches, work is still needed to diversify the League’s coaching ranks. Douglas C. Proxmire, a partner at Patton Boggs LLP, wrote that heading into the 2008 season, “only six of thirty-two (19%) NFL teams were coached by minorities,” up from two in 2002.

Although, Proxmire’s report, “Coaching Diversity: The Rooney Rule, Its Application, and Ideas for Expansion,” centered on the NFL’s work to diversify the coaching ranks of pro-football, it took note that college football has a lot of work to do as well.

Today in an op-ed for The New York Times, former Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy (right)notes that a lot of African American high school football players who are preparing to play football in college will not have the opportunity to do so for a black head coach.

“Of 120 teams in the NCAA’s Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of play, only seven have black head coaches,” Dungy writes. “One would think that our universities would be leading the way in progressive thinking. You wouldn’t think that in 2009 it would be more likely for an African-American to become president of the United States than to be hired as head coach of a top-20 football program. But that seems the case.”

Proxmire studied the NFL’s effort to diversify its profession, centering on the League’s adoption of a rule that requires teams with head-coaching vacancies to interview one or more minority coaches. (The rule was named after Steelers President Dan Rooney who headed a commission to study the League’s hiring practices.) But Proxmire said such a rule is needed in other sports divisions, such as college football. He concluded that college football “would appear to the next logical arena for adoption of the Rooney Rule, as some measure is desperately needed to address the woeful disparity between minority head coaches and minority Division 1A players.”

In his op-ed, Dungy said he asked college officials, during a seminar last year, why college football lags behind the NFL in hiring minority coaches. “The biggest factor, they said, was the involvement of other people associated with the universities,” Dungy wrote. “It was not just the president and the athletic director who made the hiring decisions – alumni and boosters were involved, and the presidents often felt pressure to hire coaches the boosters would support.”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on February 20, 2009 (boomark / email).