The endless, aggrieved search for “enough” black football coaches

QR writes:

Ever since I’ve started reading your site, I’m getting synchronicity all the time. I followed a link from your site to another blog, then went to my email to comment, and this AP article was linked on the page:

“BCA: Minorities getting more interviews, but not enough jobs”

Reminds me of a joke I heard when I was a kid:

What do you call a white guy surrounded by 5,000 black guys? Social worker.

What do you call a white guy surrounded by 500 black guys? Warden.

What do you call a white guy surrounded by 10 black guys? Coach.

If the liberal orthodoxy on race was true, these wouldn’t be funny or accurate. But they are.

LA replies:

“BCA” stands for Black Coaches and Administrators. Here’s the opening of the article:

INDIANAPOLIS—Minorities are getting more interviews but are still not getting enough jobs in college football, according to the Black Coaches and Administrators.

The study released Wednesday by the group said almost a third of the candidates interviewed last year were minorities, but only four were hired among the 31 openings in the NCAA’s two levels of Division I football.

The rest tells in detail how every aspect of the hiring of college football coaches is followed statistically; the colleges are constantly under the gun to hire “enough” blacks.

Linked in the article is a column by Gene Wojciechowski. Notice his plaintive reasoning process. (Obvously the adjective “plaintive” is incommensurable with the noun “reasoning,” which is precisely the problem.)

He writes:

The number of African-American coaches remains unconscionable

Let me guess: You never saw the story. Or if you saw it, you didn’t care. Or if you did care, you don’t know what can be done about one of the most depressing numbers in major college football.

Four.

That’s it. Four African-American head football coaches out of 119 Football Bowl Subdivision programs, the lowest total since 1993. It used to be six—whoo-ee!—but that was before Washington pink-slipped Tyrone Willingham and Kansas State pulled the rip cord on Ron Prince’s purple parachute in recent weeks.

Do the math. Four out of 119 equals 3.36 percent (120 schools were studied, including one transitioning into FBS). That’s less than you tip the worst waitress in the world. Now compare that to the other numbers published in a recent study by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida:

• 54 percent of FBS players are minorities (50 percent of those African-American).

• 5.04 percent of FBS head coaches are minorities.

• 92.5 percent of FBS university presidents, 87.5 percent of FBS athletic directors and 100 percent of FBS conference commissioners are white.

Nothing changes. The numbers fluctuate slightly from year to year, but the simple, numbing fact remains that African-Americans still can’t punch a hole through the turf ceiling. They’re good enough to play the game, good enough to become offensive and defensive coordinators (31 of 255), good enough to become assistant coaches (312 of 1,018), but not good enough to become head coaches? [cont.]

So, the number of African-American coaches is “unconscionable.” Since the colleges are doing everything they can to find capable coaches who are black, and are not finding them, and since the process is under so much oversight that discrimination seems unlikely, and since the colleges have so many other black employees that discrimination seems unlikely for that reason as well, maybe there are simply not that many blacks qualified to be coaches. Calling the situation “unconscionable” would be like saying that it’s unconscionable that blacks are four years behind whites in reading ability. It would be to take a fact of existence that no one has been able to change, namely that blacks on average are significantly less intelligent than whites (sorry, I don’t mean to offend anyone, it’s just true), and considering this a moral failing on the part of society, or on the part of whites.

- end of initial entry -

Robert B. writes:

You don’t get it, it is whitey’s fault they aren’t intelligent enough for our society. You see, the liberal view (i.e. mythology) is that whitey deliberately bred them down when they were slaves to make them more compliant.

I kid you not, I have been told this many times—of course the fact that American blacks have 15 IQ points on average over their African “brethren” goes right past these fools. I guess they figure whitey was more successful in the down breeding in Africa than here.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 13, 2008 09:10 AM | Send