ATLANTA (AP) — Notre Dame football coach Marcus Freeman felt more comfortable talking about the national championship his players have a chance to win Monday night than the history attached to it. they succeed.
Still, it’s hard to ignore the connections between Freeman’s destiny: he attempts to become the first African-American coach to win a college title at the highest level in America’s favorite sport – and everything that happens in the United States on the day of the big game.
Monday, January 20, is National Title Day, but also the day the United States celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. and inaugurates Donald Trump for his second term as president. King dedicated his life to fighting for inclusion and equality, and today diversity initiatives are increasingly scrutinized on college campuses.
“The timing of Marcus Freeman and Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a powerful symbol that should be viewed with cautious optimism,” said Joseph Cooper, director of the Institute for Innovative Leadership in Sports at UMass . “And with the new administration and its stated commitment to dismantling DEI policies, it reflects the peril and long journey we still have to travel, beyond simply breaking down barriers with the pioneers.
The fact that Freeman’s potential breakthrough comes more than 40 years after a black basketball coach did the same, and that it comes against a backdrop of poor minority recruiting that has shadowed college sports for decades, is a sign of how far these sports have come. go.
“Today’s black coach is the black quarterback of the ’70s,” Rod Broadway, who coached at historically black universities Grambling State and North Carolina A&T, said of the once-rare sight of ‘an African-American in the most important position in sports.
Recent trends make the path forward for Black coaches unclear
There has been a backlash against affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that reached a crescendo following the Black Lives Matter movement following the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Since then, the The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in the college and university admissions process; Florida got rid of funding that public universities can use for DEI programs; laws governing transgender sports have proliferated across the states.
It is in this context that football arises and the question of whether it is a reflection of society, an agent of change for it or neither.
Heading into this year’s playoffs, black men held 11.9 percent of head coaching positions at the highest level of college football. That was nearly 7 percent less than in the NFL, where the Rooney Rule was adopted in 2003, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for open positions.
There is no such rule in college sports, aside from an initiative by the West Coast Conference, which does not play football.
Freeman, whose father is African-American and whose mother is South Korean, was thoughtful 11 days ago when asked about the historic nature of his semifinal victory over Penn State. and his coach James Franklin, also black.
“It’s an honor, and I hope that all coaches, minorities, black, Asian, white, whatever, great people continue to have the opportunity to lead young men like this ” Freeman said.
Freeman knows his success goes beyond football
The coach’s most incisive statement on race and its role in opening up opportunities came not during Notre Dame’s current playoff run, but rather in 2021, when he became the first black coach in the school’s rich history.
“I want to be a demonstration of what someone can do and the level at which they can do it, if given the OPPORTUNITY,” he said. “Because that’s what it takes: an opportunity.”
Yet 41 years after Georgetown’s John Thompson became the first black coach to win the national basketball title and 26 years after Purdue’s Carolyn Peck did it for the first time on the women’s side, these opportunities in the football are relatively rare.
One of the watchdogs for minority recruiting in American sports gave colleges a “C” in its latest annual report card.
“It was inevitable” that a black coach would reach a football title game, said Richard Lapchick, founder of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at UCF. “But the inevitability has taken a lot longer than most people would have imagined a long time ago.”
HBCU coach questions if there’s momentum behind Freeman moment
Now retired and living in South Carolina, Broadway was filled with mixed feelings watching this play from afar.
He said he was asked to interview for the open head coaching position at a major university in the early 2010s. Broadway said he got off an escalator at the airport on his way to the interview and that he saw television cameras covering his every move.
He recalled his unwavering belief that the cameras were sent there solely to document that the school was interviewing a black applicant, not that it was taking that interview seriously.
“As God is my witness, I started to turn around and go up the other escalator,” he said. “It was the most (exhaustive) interview I’ve ever done in my life.”
His view on the reality of black coaches landing big jobs in college football hasn’t changed much since then.
He says he remains discouraged by the lack of a thriving pipeline of young black coaches.
And just as no one knows whether Freeman’s rise marks a moment or a sign of progress, Broadway is asking the same question about the recent rise of Deion Sanders and the hirings of black former NFL players Michael Vick (Norfolk State) and DeSean Jackson (Delaware State). Are they opening doors or just filling vacant spots?
“I know there are a lot of African-American coaches who, if given the opportunity, would be in it,” Broadway said. “But there are some brilliant coaches who just don’t take advantage of their opportunities.”
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