"It's not like anybody's asking for favors" (1971)

On college football's astonishing dearth of Black head coaches.

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I.

In 1971, some seven months after a new Georgia governor declared in his inauguration speech that “the time for racial discrimination is over,” five young men enrolled at University of Georgia. Their names were Richard Appleby, Chuck Kinnebrew, Horace King, Clarence Pope, and Larry West, and they were the first five Black scholarship players in the history of the Georgia football program, and one of the first things they saw upon their arrival on campus was one of their own teammates dressed up as a Klansman. It was, Pope would later say, like something straight out of a movie.

Wrote reporter Emily Giambalvo:

The freshmen were instructed to line up in front of the old McWhorter Hall. They stood on the sidewalk, while a few upperclassmen were positioned on an elevated tier of the staired entrance. One, who was wearing a hooded sheet, sat on a chair in the middle, Pope said. Beside him stood two others with shotguns, bandoliers and a Confederate battle flag.

Wearing the regalia that resembled that of the Ku Klux Klan, the upperclassmen asked the freshmen to bow. None of the African American players complied.

The First Five, as they became known, understood the burden they’d been saddled with. The South was changing rapidly as integration took hold in local schools. That new Georgia governor, a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter, would soon become the face of what was known as the “New South,” and the First Five were a powerful symbol of that change. Few things in the South were as popular as college football; a couple of years earlier, Richard Nixon had co-opted that relationship as part of his racist southern strategy to win votes from whites who were resistant to integration.

In order to keep each other in line, Giambalvo wrote, the First Five formed something called a “rat court.” If they caught each other getting out of line—if they treated a woman with disrespect, or declined to clean the shared pair of clippers they used to cut their hair—they would put the offending party in the center of a circle and discuss the implications of their actions. “Our view was we all needed to be role models,” Kinnibrew said, “because we were under the microscope.”

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II.

In 1987, sixteen years after the First Five enrolled at Georgia, a reporter named Ivan Maisel began writing about college football. Five years later, Maisel wrote his first article about the lack of diversity among major college football coaches, for The Dallas Morning News. And in 2020, Maisel—by now one of the most respected sports journalists and college football writers in the country—revisited the issue for ESPN, and found that very little had changed.

In 2020, Maisel wrote, 14 coaches out of 130 in the FBS were Black. Four years later, the numbers have barely budged: There are now 16 Black coaches in FBS football, and only seven of them in Power Four conferences.

And in the Southeastern Conference, fifty years after integration began to take hold and the First Five joined the Georgia football program—in an era where more than half the players on the field are Black?

There are no Black coaches at all.

In fact, there has never been a Black coach at Georgia or Alabama or Tennessee or Florida or Ole Miss or Auburn or at any SEC program that has won a national championship in the modern era of college football. College football is arguably the one thing that defines the New South above all else, and yet here we are.

“It’s not like anybody is asking for favors,” said Sylvester Croom, who was hired as the SEC’s first black coach at Mississippi State in 2003. “It’s very frustrating. You look around now, and nobody really says anything about it.”

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III.

It is easy to presume that in modern America, where the overt racism the First Five faced has receded into something more subtle, that this problem is no longer a problem at all. It is easy to presume that eventually, a pipeline of talented Black assistant coaches will produce more Black head coaches, including in the South. But as Maisel writes, this is exactly what people were saying three decades ago. And since then, very little has happened. The opportunities have yet to arrive. Black coaches tend to get funneled into specific jobs—among 65 Power Five programs in 2020, 49 of their running back coaches were black—and then struggle to transcend those positions.

On Thursday night in Florida—in the same city where Penn State, in 1946, cancelled a game against the Miami Hurricanes in protest of the city’s racial discrimination—college football will achieve a milestone it seems like it should have reached a long time ago: Two Black coaches, Penn State’s James Franklin and Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman, will meet in the Orange Bowl, with the winner becoming the first Black coach in college football’s 150-year history to compete for (and potentially win) a national championship. Perhaps it is coincidental that they both hail from northern schools; perhaps it is not coincidental at all. Either way, it feels like both a major milestone and a shameful reminder of how something is still just not right.

“You have this mindset that's been set in our country, in our minds, in our culture, why people aren't equipped to do certain things,” Ivin Jasper, an assistant coach at Navy, told Maisel back in 2020. “It spills right over into everyone's thinking. It's not right, but it has been the norm.”

Maybe Thursday night’s game will unlock the stasis that has plagued college football over the course of Maisel’s career. Maybe merely by seeing a pair of Black coaches on the sideline, those norms will begin to shift; maybe the success of Deion Sanders at Colorado will prompt a re-examination, as well. But in a country where its leaders speak openly of hiring people based on their “central casting” appearance—in a country where DEI programs have been rendered into a political cudgel—it increasingly feels like it’s not going to happen on its own.

“I don't want to be hired because I'm Black,” Jasper told Maisel in 2020. “I just don't want to not be hired because I'm Black.”

As of this writing, Jasper is in his 25th season at Navy, as an assistant coach in charge of fullbacks and quarterbacks. The Midshipmen won 10 games this season and were sixth in the country in rushing offense. Jasper has still never been a head coach.

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