San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Beyond time to level minority coaching field
Head coach Van Malone.
That will be his official name soon.
For a man who has done what he has, been where he has been, it already should have been. But just because you have earned it doesn’t mean you will get it. Not as a college football coach.
As a 22-year coaching veteran, Malone, who is currently the assistant head coach and passing game coordinator at Kansas State, knows that all too well.
What he wants more than taking over his own program is to ensure the minority coaches who come behind him have more and better opportunities than those who came with and before him. And that they are prepared to succeed when they get the chance.
Hence the formation of the MCAA, the Minority Coaches Advancement Association, which has a stated mission to provide “essential professional development opportunities” to help minority coaches navigate the inequitable playing field in college athletics.
How unfair is it?
Almost half the coaches in college football (43 percent) aren’t white. On the surface that sounds
OK, but when it comes to positions of leadership, the numbers fall off tremendously.
According to the MCAA, there are 584 white head coaches at 624 footballplaying colleges and universities (93.6 percent). A mere 13 of the 128 schools that play in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the Division I level of the sport, have a black head coach.
“Race, the characteristic that should be at the bottom, is often at the top,” Malone said.
Few minorities occupy the most direct pipeline to head coaching positions, with just 195 minority coordinators out of some 1,300 positions, and only 30 percent of those being offensive coordinators.
Before you ask, the MCAA isn’t seeking preferential treatment based on the color of one’s skin. They would prefer the opposite.
The history of college football tells us that race has always been a factor in the hiring of coaches. How else could there have been 110 years of the sport before a black man was hired as head coach at a predominantly white school?
“The opportunities are not as open as they look,” Malone said. “At this point in our history we would hope to be farther along than we are.”
Malone might be a veteran coach, but he isn’t an old man. He has yet to turn 50.
But college football is so behind that Malone was 9 years old when the first black man was hired as the head coach at a Division I school. It didn’t happen in the NFL until 10 years later (1989).
The Waltrip High School graduate, who played at Texas, came up with the idea of an organization to increase minority opportunities, along with Archie McDaniel, the former Bay City and Texas A&M linebacker, who coached with
Malone at Tulsa and SMU, and Tremaine Jackson, who played for Malone at Waltrip and is now the first-year head coach at Colorado Mesa University.
Long before the global pandemic reached the U.S., the MCAA planned a symposium with perhaps as many as 400 coaches to be held in Houston. The event will now be virtual ( July 10-11), but the organization’s issues are very real.
“If there was ever a time where minority coaches are getting ready to get more opportunities, it is going to be now,” Malone said. “We’re talking about breaking down systems.”
Fewer than 5 percent of colleges have a black head football coach. That’s half the percentage of blacks in Congress. And they are paid less for the same positions.
“That doesn’t happen by coincidence,” said McDaniel, the co-defensive coordinator at Texas State and president of the MCAA. “I’m going into my 15th year and from what I can see, the numbers aren’t any better from when I started.
“Getting a minority in the door, that’s not difficult. Schools find a way to get one in the door just so they can say they have one in the building. But having one and saying he’s a guy in a decision-making role or in a position of leadership, that’s where the opportunities are few and far between.”
Through the years, black coaches have heard a host of excuses to explain away the pitiful numbers.
Simply, if schools stopped hiring white coaches because, well, they’re white, there would not be a need for the MCAA.
As it is, the organization is absolutely necessary. Its founders believe attacking the set of pretexts about qualifications is a “pathway to opportunity.”
“The one part we are in control of is prepping for that opportunity,” McDaniel said. “Our symposium is strictly geared toward knowledge and education.
“This is the time to challenge that. This is a time for athletic directors, college presidents, donors, to challenge themselves. To broaden their thought process. To broaden the spectrum of candidates.”
It is beyond time for that to happen.