The SEC loves black players, hates black head coaches
If I’m an Auburn fan, I wouldn’t understand why my team didn’t even bother interviewing Tony Elliott.
Tony Elliott has been in charge of one of the biggest, brightest offenses in college football for 2015-2019, and has coached NFL star in Deshaun Watson, and the next NFL star in Trevor Lawrence. He’s been a master – and has been prettily paid for it by one of college football’s most elite programs.
It’s easy to see why Elliott wasn’t even interviewed. The excuse from Greene (who by the way, is African-American) will be that he didn’t bother interviewing anybody, instead of going straight for Boise State’s Brian Harsin – a move which pissed off the already-crazed Auburn booster base.
But Greene – who is effectively led by the monstrously loud booster base – they have gone for him even if he had? History would tell us ‘no’. The Tigers haven’t hired a black head coach in their history.
But Elliott DID interview for the NFL’s offensive coordinator job – probably believing that he’d hit the glass ceiling in terms of hiring black head coaches of the NFL (hey, they at least interview black people for a job!). He failed to get it.
And although things worked out for Elliott financially – Clemson gave him a bump in pay (he’ll earn $2m next year and he had his contract extended to 2025) in the end – he must have be getting very frustrated at being consistently passed over for big jobs.
THE SEC LOVES BLACK PLAYERS, HATES BLACK HEAD COACHES
The SEC will have zero head coaches this season. Zero. Zippo. Nada.
I’m sure Tony Elliott isn’t the only black coach ever to be dissatisfied by the fact that the SEC has consistently turned its back on black coaches. The first black SEC coach, Buddy Croom, was hired by Mississippi State in 2003. Vanderbilt has had two black head coaches (James Franklin and Mason) while Texas A&M (Kevin Sumlin), Kentucky (Joker Phillips) and the aforementioned Mississippi State have all had one. Franklin is the only one to have moved on by his own volition (he took the Penn State job after turning around Vandy’s program). Croom never worked in college football or as a head coach again. Kevin Sumlin went to Arizona, had two awful seasons there, and was fired before the end of last year, while Phillips has managed to find SEC jobs as an assistant, but never as a head coach. Mason took the Auburn job almost immediately after being canned by Auburn.
This is ironic, since in 2020, 61% of all SEC football players are black. This percentage when the 2021 season starts will probably be higher, bearing in mind that 84% of the 336 football players who have committed as freshman or have come via the transfer portal in the Class of 2021 are black.
POSITIONALLY-SPEAKING
Of the major assistants (offensive/defensive coordinators), only Florida, Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee hired either a black offensive or defensive coordinator in 2020. In 2021, that number has improved to five, with Auburn, LSU, Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee all hiring black coaches (Florida OC Brian Johnson left for the NFL).
In all, 75 of 154 staff members (non grad assistants) at SEC schools in 2021 are black/non-white. The most black coaches at any school are Missouri (8), while the lowest is Georgia (4). Most schools are around the 50% mark.
Here are some key figures, bearing in mind that trying to work out who does what with certain combinations is a minefield in the College Football.
- 100% of all SEC defensive line coaches are black (14 of 14)
- 85% of all SEC running backs coaches are black (12 of 14)
- 78% of all SEC wide receivers coaches are black. (11 of 14)
- 26% of all SEC linebackers coaches are black (3 of 14)
- 14% of all offensive line coaches are black (2 of 14)
- There is one passing game coordinator/QB coach who is black – Garrick McGee of Florida.
At the grad assistant level (ie the lowest of the low, but the training ground for the future. The SEC Football Blog ran through every SEC staff list and Alabama (2 out of 5), Auburn (1 out 3), Florida (1 out of 4), Georgia (3 out 4) have all hired black graduate assistants. LSU, Ole Miss (although they have just 1 on offense at the time of writing), Missouri, Vanderbilt did not hire any minority grad assistants. Kentucky, Mississippi State, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas A&M and Arkansas has not listed them as yet.
The head coaches “lean on the one or two Black assistants,” said Dr. Leonard N. Moore, vice president for diversity and community engagement at the University of Texas to ESPN, “who, in addition to coaching, have to do all this mentoring and supporting, all this emotional labor that they don’t get rewarded for, while the white coaches can just sit in the film room working on their craft.”
To dial down Moore’s comment, the head and senior coaches are quite happy to appoint black coaches to do ‘grunt work’, but no – you can’t go anywhere near the film room, black people.
You have to feel that this exists at high school level, too. Only one coach in the Top 10 in the MaxPreps Top 10 is black, too (IMG Academy’s Don Acosta).
NOW, ABOUT THE MONEY
It’s startling to note – according to the USA Today Assistant Coach Salary – that there are no black assistant coaches in the Top 10 of college football assistant pay, and out of the 27 coaches earning $1m+ per ear, only three black assistant coaches made the list of coaches earning that amount (Elliott (No.11, $1.6m), former South Carolina DC Travaris Robinson (No.16, $1.2m) and former Tennessee DC Derrick Ansley (No.24) earned over $1m-per-year).
This year, Mason was added to the list with a $1.5 million by becoming Auburn’s DC.
We’d like to note that the SEC – as a whole – contained the best-paid jobs for assistant coaches, thanks to the SEC Network money.
- In order of best-paid SEC assistant pools: Alabama ($8.85m) led the way, followed by Texas A&M ($7.5m), LSU ($7.46m), Georgia ($7.2m), and Auburn ($6.7m) are the top payers. Tennessee ($6.3m), Florida ($6.3m), Kentucky ($5.78m), South Carolina ($5.1m), Arkansas ($5.036m), Missouri ($4.8m), Ole Miss ($4.75m) and Mississippi State ($4.3m).
- Alabama had the most expensive pay pool for assistants, but they sure as hell didn’t pay RB coach Charles Huff ($550,000) what he should have done for coaching the running backs talent (Huff, by the way is now the head coach of Marshall, where he’s being paid $775,000 – a middling salary in terms of Conference USA pay, but not a bad start for his first head coaching job).
- Georgia’s Dell McGee was the best-paid RB coach in the SEC, earning $675,000.
- Vanderbilt hasn’t revealed anything about how much its assistants are paid (it doesn’t have to, it’s a private school).
AND THE SEC’S NOT ALONE
Sadly, the SEC’s not alone in its lack of diversity. The Big 12 hasn’t hired a black head coach since Charlie Strong was fired at Texas in 2016. Half a decade ago. The ACC has one black head coach, while the Pac-12 (5) and Big Ten (4) have shown to be far more inclusive amongst Power-5 schools, although Illinois – one of those Big Ten schools – fired Lovie Smith before the end of the 2020 season.
For the 2021 season, the amount of black coaches fell further, with the aforementioned firing of Lovie Smith at Illinois as well as Kevin Sumlin in Arizona, dwindling the amount of black head coaches to 8.
Currently, there are 12 black head coaches in the whole of FBS.
The SEC had one black offensive coordinator in 2020, which was the same as all the other conferences bar the Big Ten, who had 2. There were seven black defensive coordinators at the end of 2020.
The running backs coach position is a place which is dominated by black coaches. There were 49 black running backs coaches in the Power 5 (led by the SEC and ACC with 11), nearly quadrupling every other position.
SO WHY HAVEN’T WE SEEN MORE ‘MINORITY HIRING’?
“College coaches are expected to fundraise and schmooze with alumni as well as coach. The rich alumni, most of whom are white, feel more comfortable with people who look like them. So long as alumni dollars drive college football funding, white coaches will have a huge hiring advantage.” – Mark Naison,
In my opinion – I’m no expert – this comes from a few factors. The first one is pretty simple in Division I: The boosters control the narrative. They do that even more in the SEC than anything else. The boosters are generally rich, golf-playing, right-thinking (in all manners) former frat boy types who have old school Southern values and are probably not the most progressive types in terms of hiring people of color. I have consistently asked people or tried to research (via internet, tweeting to college football experts etc) whether there are major black sports donors in the SEC or at Power-5 schools, and I am yet to find anything or note (if anyone knows anything, please tweet me).
They are used to the crowd they hang out with, and their relationships are with old, white head coaches. Of course, they will help to pay for black position coaches (they aren’t stupid enough not to acknowledge that the best running back coaches are black), but they will be damned if a black head coach is going to be running things on their watch. It’s the sort of: “We like to see you at the party, but we’ll be damned if you’re going to date our daughter” mentality that is both maddening and true.
And athletic directors won’t do anything about it, because they live in fear of recrimination, which can lead to an end to their million-dollar jobs.
IS THERE ANYTHING THAT CAN BE DONE TO IMPROVE MINORITY HIRING?
The SEC itself could do something. Why couldn’t they push a ‘Rooney Rule’, which that every school has to interview a black coach for a head coaching job? That might get the ball rolling somewhat. After all, the SEC is the biggest conference in the NCAA, and has the biggest voice. If Greg Sankey would come out and put something together, maybe that would make the rest of the country notice.
The SEC could also do something like the Baltimore Ravens have done, who developed a Ravens Fellowship for Diversity in Football?
I mean, they created a SEC Council on Racial Equality and Social Justice – a so-called “league-wide body consisting of a diverse group of student-athletes, administrators, coaches and SEC staff (Ironically, Derek Mason was on that council as the lone football head coach’s voice).
The point is this: It’s important to get black SEC head coaches. And offensive coordinators. And defensive coordinators. Because otherwise, anything claimed about diversity beyond the playing on the football field is an absolute joke.