Black Men Can’t Coach?

Indiana State University is one of the few football programs to have a Black coach and Black coordinators. ISU head football coach Trent Miles has a simple philosophy when he hires assistant coaches for his staff; hire the best people possible. ISU is the only non-Historically Black College and University (HBCU) football program in the Football Championship Subdivision to have a Black head coach and Black offensive and defensive coordinators. And is one of only two Division I programs overall to have that distinction. Troy Walters is offensive coordinator and Shannon Jackson is defensive coordinator.

While the three men their skin color, they all acknowledged Black representation in football coaching ranks is important and has been a hot-button issue for a long time. The percentage of Black coaches is too far below the percentage of Black athletes in the sport. Excluding the HBCU schools, there are 224 Division I schools that offer scholarships in football. Among those schools, there are 10 Black head coaches, comprising only 4.4 percent. That's far below the more than 50 percent Black participation level in football.

Only six non-HBCU FCS schools currently have black head coaches and only three, including Miles, are at schools that offer scholarships. One of them -- Richmond's Mike London -- coached his team to the FCS championship in 2008. Mid-American Conference champion Buffalo is coached by Turner Gill with offensive coordinator Danny Barrett and defensive coordinator Fred Reed.

It's a crying shame that there's 119 (FCS) schools and there's so few minority head coaches. There are quality people out there who are only used as position coaches or looked upon as recruiters. And when an opportunity does come up, it's usually not with a program that's desirable for anyone to take. It's a difficult decision to take a job where one might ultimately fail and damage a career versus not taking a job at all and keeping one's career limited. With very few exceptions, usually the Black coaches are getting jobs on the lower end that need to be rebuilt. You're usually not getting jobs that are ready-made. A good example is Tyrone Willingham; it's generally forgotten that he was brought in to fix Notre Dame and to fix Washington. What happens is you put in the ground work in a tough situation and either the university runs of out patience and fires the coach, or, the coach runs out of patience and move on.

Miami's Randy Shannon is the only Black head coach currently in charge of a program that has made a BCS bowl appearance since the system came into place in the 1990s. Richmond’s Mike London is the only FCS coach in charge of a recent playoff program. Miles took over the ultimate rebuilding project at ISU, a program that is 1-50 since mid-2004.

In Coach Miles' case, he was a former ISU player and a Terre Haute native, and rebuilding the Sycamores appealed to him. Miles had peers question why he'd want to put himself in a position where the losing ways of a program that could drag him down professionally. Coach Trent Miles has coached at eight different Division I universities and was an assistant coach on the staff of Coach Tyrone Willingham at Stanford, Notre Dame and Washington.