Why Marcus Freeman making history as a Black and Asian head coach matters

As Notre Dame football players tossed oranges and waved to the crowd after their thrilling 27-24 win over Penn State, Fighting Irish head coach Marcus Freeman was asked a question by ESPN’s Molly McGrath. The game between Notre Dame and Penn State was the first one in the College Football Playoff Semifinal that was a matchup between two Black head coaches, and with Freeman winning he became the first Black and first Asian head coach to make a national championship game at the FBS level. Freeman had this to say about it after the game:

There are going to be people that tell you this shouldn’t mean as much as it does, that Freeman’s race shouldn’t matter in what gets called a “meritocracy”. I’m here to tell you those people are lying directly to your face. Marcus Freeman making history means so much more than hacks like Brett Favre will try and tell you.

Most call coaching a “meritocracy”, where the ones that do the best work get picked. However, the fact that we’re 155 years into the game of college football and a Black head coach or an Asian head coach is just now getting this opportunity is damning of the entire concept of a meritocracy. The player pool is much more diverse than the people that universities employ to coach them, and that in itself is the problem. Per SI’s Pat Forde, there are only 16 Black head coaches out of 134 FBS football teams, but if you constrict it to only power conferences there are only seven. If you want to expand to include all people of color, there are only 20 people of color in head coaching positions at the highest level of the sport. Compare this to the near 50% of the player pool that’s Black and you get a group of people that rarely look like the players they coach. That’s a reflection on the people making the decisions.

Think about this: there are 36 programs in college football that have never had a Black coach in their entire history. Programs like Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Ohio State and Nebraska have never had a Black full time head coach in their entire program’s history. We can talk circles around pipelines and giving access to minority football coaches but the fact of the matter is that these pipelines exist, but the people in power and making decisions are too lazy to actually try and find these pipelines. The National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches was founded during the pandemic and has hundreds of members at every level of the sport. It’s not about making pipelines anymore, it’s about getting people in power to actually go and do the work to find these pipelines.

Marcus Freeman making this history means so much for entire groups of people who were shut out of positions like head coach because of racist stereotyping that said they weren’t smart enough to hold positions of power. Coaching pipelines favor offensive coordinators or QB coaches, and with the stereotyping that Black people aren’t smart enough to play QB (based on a concept called ‘racial stacking’ ). This would affect their ability to get those jobs in roles like QB coach or offensive coordinator, which is the popular pipeline for head coaching.

This is for coaches like Eugene Chung, coaches like Norm Chow and Sylvester Croom. Tyrone Willingham was the first black head coach at the school Freeman currently coaches at, and Freeman making this history is a reflection of the work put in by those before us, but also a sign of how much further we have to go.