Auburn's not color-blind when hiring coaches
Posted: Monday, December 15, 2008 4:05 PM
Charles Barkley has all the diplomacy of a dyspeptic warthog. He doesn’t come at anything from the side. If something annoys him, he just puts his head down and charges. And the first thought when confronted with such a sight is not to ponder whether his motives are pure. You assume he’s stark raving mad and you scamper up the nearest tree to save yourself.
But sometimes Barkley has a point, and this is one of those times. He says that his alma mater, Auburn, should have hired Turner Gill to replace football coach Tommy Tuberville instead of Gene Chizik.
He’s right. There’s a pretty good chance he’s also right when he said that the reason Chizik got the job is because he’s white and Gill isn’t. There are just three blacks left among the 119 had coaches in the highest level of college football. It’s impossible to explain that pathetic number without accepting that there is a racist factor at work.
“I believe race had a factor. Of course I do,” Barkley, a former Auburn and NBA star, said Monday in a phone interview with The Associated Press hours after Chizik was introduced. “First of all you can’t compare these two, their records. That’s not even close to being fair.
“I look at things from a commonsense standpoint, how do you interview Turner Gill and pick Gene Chizik over Turner Gill?”
There may be other factors, including Chizik’s prior service at Auburn as a highly regarded coordinator and his work at Texas in the same capacity. But Gill has some pretty good coordinator chops, too. And on the face of it, Gill, who took over the worst program in college football three years ago, is a better head coach than Chizik, who spent two years at Iowa State before accepting $2 million a year to replace Tuberville. As far as that goes, Charlie Weis is a better head coach than Chizik.
Going on the records, Gill has done more with less in his three years at Buffalo than Chizik did with more at Iowa State in two years.
In Chizik’s two seasons as a head coach at Iowa State, the Cyclones were 5-19, including a 2-10 record this year. In three years at Buffalo, Gill has taken a program that never had a winning record in Division I and took it to its first-ever MAC championship, and an 8-5 record that included a blowout win over previously undefeated Ball State in the MAC title game. As a result, the Buffs are going to their first bowl game ever.
OK, Chizik was in the Big 12, the same conference as Oklahoma, Texas and Texas Tech. But he was in the North Division with Kansas State, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. That’s the Big 12’s equivalent of the NFL North; the really tough schools are in the South Division.
Besides, the Cyclones had modest success before Chizik arrived. They won as many as seven games five times from 2000-2006, the year before Chizik arrived. In 2000, Iowa State went 9-3, so winning is not impossible and there is a history of moderate success.
What Gill did is far more impressive. He ended up in Buffalo only because no decent coach in his right mind would voluntarily take over a dreadful team in a depressed town on the frozen shores of Lake Erie, not even with a lifetime all-the-buffalo-wings-you-can-eat pass at the Anchor Tavern.
But Gill is black. When he started trying to get a head coaching job, he quickly learned that he had to take what he could get. And Buffalo was what he could get.
Here are the figures on the percentage of whites in various capacities in the Football Bowl Subdivision – the top division in college football – courtesy of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport:
"In FBS institutions, this includes 92.5 percent of the presidents, 87.5 percent of the athletics directors, 92.6 percent of the faculty athletics reps, 83.3 percent of the faculty and 100 percent of the conference commissioners. Only 3.5 percent of the faculty are African-American and 3.4 are percent Latino.”
It may yet turn out that Chizik can coach a top team. But when you hire a 5-19 coach over one who turned chicken manure into chicken salad – and held his players to the highest standards both as athletes and as men – it’s not about old school ties. Gill also lost out on the Syracuse job – to a white man. Race has to play a factor.
I picture the alumni and athletic directors at big-time schools worrying about a black coach schmoozing the good-old-boy fat-cat alumni for donations to the athletic department. I picture them worrying about a black head coach coming into the homes of white recruits in the backwater, red-state towns of the American heartland.
That’s got to play into the otherwise inexplicable dearth of blacks in college head-coaching ranks. The NFL has pretty much gotten over color in hiring coaches. It’s not perfect yet, but when a lunch-bucket town like Pittsburgh can embrace a black coach, white quarterback and Samoan defensive hero without batting an eye, you realize that fans just want to win, and they don’t care who’s calling and making the plays.
It would be no different in college. Gill is a hero in Buffalo, as well he should be. He was a hero as a player at Nebraska. And he’ll be a hero in any town where he wins most of his games and takes his team to big bowl games.
He’ll get a big-time job sooner or later. He’s too good not to. But Barkley’s right, he was the best man for Auburn’s head job, but he was passed up for someone with lesser credentials and a melanin deficit.
We elected a black president, and we can’t hire a black football coach? What’s wrong with this picture?
