Carousel spins slowly for minority coaches
Minority advocate John Wooten is keeping one eye on college football's coaching hires and the other on a school and job that didn't change.
Where, he wonders, is the heat on Notre Dame's Charlie Weis?
While the sport goes through its annual coaching carousel — with 17 major programs changing coaches and two hiring minorities thus far, marking a modest gain — Weis and the Irish are picking up the pieces of a 3-9 disaster of a season that dropped his three-year record at the school to 22-15. It mirrors the 21-16 mark that got Tyrone Willingham fired by Notre Dame at the end of the 2004 regular season.
Willingham was the school's first black coach in any sport. Weis, who is white, still draws attention a month after his season has ended.
"It's very disturbing to me," says Wooten, a former college and NFL lineman and front office executive who is chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which promotes diversity in NFL team staffs.
"I'm not saying he (Weis) should be fired, but why hasn't he come under the same scrutiny that Tyrone came under? The same people are there. Why aren't they looking at it the same way?"
Notre Dame won its final two games, against Stanford and Duke, but endured the first nine-loss season in the program's storied history. Though Weis has taken criticism, there've been no serious calls for his dismissal, in part because two Bowl Championship Series appearances preceded this year's fall and in part for practical reasons.
Fearing approaches by NFL teams, Notre Dame gave the former New England Patriots assistant a new 10-year contract seven games into his first season. It runs through 2015.
Weis and his staff also have proved to be effective recruiters, lining up a projected top-rated class this year. One of Willingham's perceived shortcomings was a second- and third-year decline in recruiting.
Notre Dame athletics director Kevin White declined to comment on Wooten's remarks.
The founders of the Washington, D.C.-based Fritz Pollard Alliance were instrumental in the adoption of the NFL's 5-year-old Rooney Rule, which requires teams seeking a coach to identify and interview at least one minority candidate. The group has turned its attention to college football, where minority hiring has lagged and only seven of 120 Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) coaches were minorities this season.
That number will go up by at least one in 2008. Karl Dorrell was fired at UCLA, but former Oklahoma assistant Kevin Sumlin was hired by Houston and Ken Niumatalolo — believed to be major-college football's first Polynesian head coach — was promoted at Navy.
Openings remain at SMU, UCLA and West Virginia.
A number of major colleges have interviewed or considered minority candidates, from Mike Singletary at Baylor to Ron English at Michigan to Charlie Strong at Georgia Tech.
"I think some significant process has been made," Wooten says.
Floyd Keith, head of the Indianapolis-based Black Coaches and Administrators, is more reserved: "I know from the feedback I get that there seems to be more traffic. There are more interviews. Still, at the end of the day, I've got to keep score. And as we keep score, the numbers are still shallow."
He's further bothered, he says, by a growing number of schools that have designated successors to longtime coaches — Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, Syracuse and Arizona in basketball and most recently Florida State football, which tabbed Jimbo Fisher to succeed Bobby Bowden — and eliminated the prospect of searches.
"We've always been about the process," Keith says.
The Fritz Pollard Alliance has worked with major-college athletics directors on new hiring guidelines that would echo the Rooney Rule, encouraging schools to interview minorities. They're expected to go out after the first of the year.
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