Making the fieldhouse look more like the White House

November 7, 3:41 PMCollege Sports ExaminerJacob Osterhout

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Randy Shannon, one of four black coaches in the FBS.

With Barack Obama's historic victory on Tuesday, which marks the first time the United States of America will have an African-American President, it is time to take a closer look at the issue of race in college athletics.

While diversity in college sports has obviously improved since 1961, when Ernie Davis became the first black football player to win the Heisman Trophy, there is still a quiet yet constant "hum of racism" in college sports.

This season alone, there have been three nationally publicized incidents of racial harassment, both subtle and blatant, in college athletics, which are each unique and yet, taken as a set, relay the far-reaching nature of bigotry on college campuses.

First, there is the example of race issues between student-athletes. In late September, two (former) Cal football players broke into a dorm room on campus in retaliation for racial epithets spouted by a crew team member at a party one week earlier. (They got the wrong room.) The football players were arrested and kicked off the football team. The rower who made the racist comments has also been suspended from the team.

Then, there is the issue of racism between students and student-athletes. In late November, three Quinnipiac University students were arrested and kicked out of school for racially harassing members of the school's basketball team. In two separate incidents, racial slurs were written on a cork board and poster outside the dorm rooms of three black basketball players and harassing phone calls were made to the same players.

And, most recently, we have a case of a student-athlete making racist remarks to the public via Facebook. On election night, after Obama had been declared the future President of the United States of America, a back-up offensive lineman on the Texas football team posted a message on his Facebook page that read, "All the hunters gather up, we have a [racial epithet] in the White House." The player has since been kicked off the team and has issued multiple public apologies.

Incredibly, here are three separate incidents of intolerance in college sports that have all taken place within a five-week span. The fact that one occurred between student-athletes, one between students and student-athletes and one between a student-athlete and the public, just exemplifies how wide-spread this issue really is.

And racial equality is not just a concern for players and students, but for administrators and coaches as well.

Ironically, in the same year that an African-American man is elected President, the number of black coaches at all 119 NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision schools will fall from six to four. At season's end, both Washington coach Ty Willingham and Kansas State coach Ron Prince will be gone, leaving Mississippi State's Sylvester Croom, Buffalo's Turner Gill, Miami's Randy Shannon, and Houston's Kevin Sumlin as the only black coaches at major football programs.

On top of that, every commissioner of a BCS conference is a white male.

As Michael McCann, a professor of law at Mississippi College School of Law, writes:

The college game is anything but the romanticized image often portrayed in film and by those who have financial stakes in seeing players not enter pro leagues. There is racism at the highest of levels. There is crime without deterrence. There is a glaring absence of positive social norms.

Even one of the most touching moments in this century of college sports has adopted ugly racial undertones. When Boise State running back Ian Johnson, who is black, proposed to his girlfriend, who is white, after the Broncos' stunning Fiesta Bowl victory over Oklahoma in 2007 there were so many racial threats that the couple had six police officers guard their wedding.

If, as FoxSports.com writer Ian O'Connor suggests, professional sports paved the way for Obama to ascend to the White House, then how is it that college sports still lag far behind? Do these teams not represent institutes of higher education that are supposedly contain the leading thinkers of our times?

Prejudice, whether incidents involving athletes, or even more subtly, lack of black coaches, is especially disconcerting in college sports. These are amateur athletes who are still young and impressionable and maybe even role models for future generations.

If politics can embrace a black man as President, why is it that college athletics seems to be lagging so far behind?