Photo by Erich Schlegel/Getty
U.S. NEWS
01.10.14
Black College Football Coaches Don’t Get Second Chances
Charlie Strong’s hiring earlier this week as the University of Texas’ new head football coach is significant. He becomes, after all, the first African-American to lead the nation’s richest college athletic program and has a great opportunity to become the first African-American to win a national title, potentially changing the complexion of his profession as John Thompson did in 1984 when he became the first black head coach to win the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship.
For sure, that complexion is already changing. A decade ago, African Americans held four percent of the 120 head coaching positions at college football’s highest level. That has risen to more than 10 percent. Last year, Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin became the first black head coach of a Heisman Trophy winner. And Strong’s hire means Texas follows Kentucky as the second state in which its two largest universities are led by black head football coaches. Strong and Sumlin’s vast platforms will alter perceptions in the minds of millions of young Texans of what a prototypical college coach looks like.
It seems inevitable that one day the fact a black head coach was hired at such-and-such big-time college program won’t matter. Just look at other sports. Hardly any sportswriters found it worth mentioning last week that Lovie Smith became the third black head coach of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “Eventually we’ll get to the point where this is not an issue anymore,” Floyd Keith, the former executive of the Black Coaches and Administrators, told the New York Times. “We’re not there yet. What’s missing is a national championship.”
But there’s more missing. Yes, John Thompson’s title at Georgetown was a game changer, opening the doors for subsequent championship-winning coaches like Nolan Richardson at Arkansas and Tubby Smith at Kentucky. Likewise, in the NFL, Tony Dungy became the first African-American head coach to win a Super Bowl in 2007. That win, along with an 11-year-old rule mandating NFL teams interview at least one minority candidate for open head coaching positions, have helped more black coaches get a foothold in the pros.
Still, while a championship accelerates progress, it wouldn’t signify the ultimate breakthrough for minority coaches in college football. That won’t happen until black head coaches, like white head coaches, get second and third chances, says Dr. Fitz Hill, a former San Jose State University head football coach who has studied the issue for decades. “Race will no longer be an issue when the day comes that an African-American football coach is unsuccessful, but you still go and replace him with another African-American football coach.”
While a championship accelerates progress, it wouldn’t signify the ultimate breakthrough for minority coaches in college football.
According to Hill, in the history of major college football, 28 black head coaches have been fired or forced to resign—usually because of losing records. In each of these 28 instances, the school hired a white coach as successor. That includes Hill’s own 2001-04 tenure at SJSU, where he went 14-33 before being let go. Hill believes this primarily comes from unconscious bias, not deliberate discrimination, on the part of the mostly white administrators and boosters involved in these hirings. He believes college football athletic directors tend to judge the performances of black coaches more collectively than they do for white coaches. The reason boils down to familiarity: powerful white men looking for tips during a coaching search are less likely to run in the same social circles as black coaches than white coaches—or the people who know them. A Charlie Strong at Texas, or David Shaw at Stanford, has the chance to influence deeply entrenched good old boy networks, but change along these lines can take years if not decades.
In the meantime, minority coaches “have a more difficult road to tread,” former Colorado head coach Bill McCartney said in November 2012. McCartney was speaking out on the early termination of his former protege John Embree, who had been fired after a 4-21 record at Colorado. “We don’t get second chances,” Embree said after his dismissal, speaking for all African-American coaches.
Hard to argue his point. Consider Tyrone Willingham is the only black coach to be fired at one major college program and hired at another one. That happened when he landed in Washington nine years ago after flaming out at Notre Dame. Everybody else leaves the business or resurfaces as an assistant.
The situation is different in Division I men’s basketball, where in the 2011-12 season 18.6 percent of head coaches were African-American. There, programs are far more likely to hire a black coach after firing a black coach. Arkansas, for instance, tabbed Stan Heath to replace Nolan Richardson in 2002. Five years later, Arkansas fired Heath. But he immediately got the head-coaching gig at South Florida, where he replaced another African-American who had been fired—Robert McCullum. Or look at Ray McCallum, who coached Houston to a 44-73 record in 2000-04. He was removed from that job, but resurfaced after two assistant stints as head coach of the University of Detroit Mercy, which he led to the NCAA Tournament in 2012.
College football isn’t as advanced as its basketball counterpart when it comes to coaching diversity. Charlie Strong’s new gig shows steps are being made, but its the non-success stories which will signify the goal has been reached. The most true sign of progress won’t be how high African-American coaches can climb in their profession, but how long they are allowed to fall without being yanked from the game altogether.
Photo by Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters
WORLD NEWS
01.10.14
Egypt’s Arab Spring Gives Way To Spring Of The Patriarch
January 25 is a date that Egyptians celebrate—and fear—and it’s coming on fast. Most people today associate it with the beginning of the 2011 popular uprising in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that ended President Hosni Mubarak’s three decades in power. And for those bloggers and liberal activists who played starring roles in that first act of Egypt’s revolutionary drama, it’s still a day to commemorate and to celebrate. But for many others, it has come to seem the precise moment when their country started falling apart.
Since then Egyptians have suffered successively the caprices of a military junta, a year of disastrous rule by the elected Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohamed Morsi, then another popular uprising last summer—the biggest ever—to oust Morsi and his cronies. But that led to a de facto takeover by a military strongman, Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, the current defense minister.
Ever since, al-Sisi and his officers have been hell bent on crushing the Brotherhood—forever and at any price—even if it means stripping rights away from liberals, secularists, journalists, and just about anyone else who might want to question the authority of men with peaked hats and eagles on their shoulders.
Meanwhile the economy is in tatters and the future looks damn bleak. “A lot of people are going to be going to Tahrir this January 25,” says a once-prosperous Egyptian businessman who’s had to fire half his employees, “but this year they are going to be protesting against January 25.”
Unfortunately, protests against protests won’t solve the country’s problems. The same businessman, who attended a meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry and other prominent Egyptians last November, admitted that, amid all the complaints, none of the Egyptians had a clear democratic strategy to rescue this country of 85 million people. Kerry just said he’d ponder what he’d heard, and went to bed.
The nightmare that looms ahead now is likely to be a pseudo-democratic process meant to legitimize a popular dictator. To turn the title of a classic Gabriel García Márquez on its head, this will be “The Spring of the Patriarch.” The first milestone: a referendum on January 14 and 15 to approve a new constitution. The next will come around the end of the month—most likely after the January 25 anniversary—when General al-Sisi is widely expected to resign from the army so he can legally run for president in April or so. (We could make a nod here to the will-he-won’t-he equivocations about his intentions in the Egyptian press, but why bother? His country is calling him. Or so he’ll say.) The fix will be in. But Al-Sisi’s pharaonic style is genuinely popular with many of his countrymen. There’s really no doubt he’ll win.
As the electoral spectacle moves forward over the next few months, the remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood will operate underground, which is where many of them are most comfortable. After all, the organization’s clandestine structures date back 80 years. The military and security apparatus will continue to do all it can to crush what it has branded a terrorist organization. The trial of Morsi, now due to begin February 1, will be just a sideshow. The real action will be among lesser figures in the prisons, where torture has always been commonplace, and now is likely to have free rein.
The nightmare that looms ahead now is likely to be a pseudo-democratic process meant to legitimize a popular dictator.
Blood will be shed so often at street demonstrations and in small-scale attacks on the army and police that it will cease to make headlines in Egypt or internationally. But aprocess of radicalization among the Brotherhood’s people will intensify, and whether in the name of their old organization, or Al-Qaeda, or as-yet-unheard-of “groups” and “fronts,” “brigades” and “companions,” they will do their worst to make Egypt ungovernable. They can also be counted on to work with the formal and informal networks of radical jihadists that now stretch across Africa and from the Sinai to Syria and Europe.
Some investors will bet that al-Sisi’s iron fist can calm things down. Indeed, many already have. Billions of dollars in support from al-Sisi’s backers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have helped shore up the economy. The Cairo stock market jumped 10 points when the military ousted Morsi in July, and the index is now as high as it was on January 24, 2011, the day before this all began.
Tourism—especially European and American tourism—will be slow to revive. But Egypt, with all of its ancient monuments and the white strands of sand next to crystalline waters on what’s now called the Red Sea Riviera, is one of the world’s great destinations. In the 1980s, Palestinian terrorists repeatedly struck Egyptian targets, but after a lull the tourists returned. In the 1990s, jihadists fought a savage little war to try to overthrow Mubarak, and in 1997 they slaughtered 58 sightseers at a temple in Luxor. But after a few months, tourists came back. (One of ex-President Morsi’s signal stupidities last year was to name a former head of the group behind that massacre as his appointed governor of Luxor.
Egypt is eternal, one might say, but its problems are infernal. No wonder Kerry said he had a lot to ponder before going to bed. It would be a miracle if he’s been able to get any sleep since.
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