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media type="custom" key="3942879" In February 2007, a Super Bowl was played to decide who would become the first African-American coach to reach the pinnacle of football prestige. Tony Dungy, of the Indianapolis Colts fought many forms of adversity and achieved something no other black coach had done before. This summarizes the success of African American coaches in the NFL over the last decade of so. So why then are black head coaches in Division I football [college] having such a hard time? The most prevalent answer is prejudice. I believe that racism is the biggest contributing factor to hiring of college coaches in the NCAA today. 1997 saw the peak of success for African American coaches, and with 8 hired and holding their jobs, all was good with the world. Then, as the years passed, several lost their jobs and black coaching teetered on the edge of it’s existence. It hasn’t all been for good reasons either. Many black coaches have been fired without a reason as to why and it has become evident that many programs just don’t want black coaches. Take UCLA for example; in 2003 they hired Karl Dorrell, a black man, as their head coach. He saw a rise in academic progress with players, he cleaned up the program and he took the Golden Bears to five bowl games in five years. He was then fired without so much as a goodbye. They then hire a white man, Rick Neuheisel, and he leads the team to a 4-7 record and the bottom of the Pac-10 ranks. He still has his job, which is a mystery to many. With a African-American in the White House, you’d think out of 119 college football coaches, there would be more than 3, but in reality by 2020 there is predicted to be only 2. Many use the excuse that they are only picking the best resume for the job but there is no way that a sport that is dominated by black players, can’t even have 10% of it’s coaches being black. The final example of this ridiculous trend is the hiring of Gene Chizik as head football coach of the Auburn Tigers in December 2008. He was one of the last two candidates for the job and he (a white man) won over Turner Gill (a black man). If Auburn had looked at the resumes of the coaches and hadn’t seen their faces of ethnic backgrounds, Gill would have been hired instantly. Buffalo had won 10 games combined in the first seven seasons in Division I. When Gill took over, they won 13 in two seasons and in 2008 they went 8-5 and defeated previously undefeated Ball State in the MAC championship game. Chizik on the other hand went 5-19 as the head coach of Iowa State and his defense has declined significantly since he arrived. This example is essentially the underlying event that brought this racism to the national stage, courtesy of Charles Barkley, NBA Hall of Famer, current TNT Basketball Analyst and Auburn Alumni. This topic was prompted by a love for the game of football, and a concern that racism is influencing coaching prospects. With the progress in other sports with racial bias, NCAA football should not be the last one with problems. Problems that were encountered during this research is that there were not many sources that weren’t articles because this issue was tackled by sports writers. When the subject is mentioned in the media, it is only a brief mention. Overall, there are so many examples of racism in division I football today that it is an issue that cannot be overlooked. There should be something done about it and if it doesn’t come in the next 5 years or so, there may be no black college coaches left. And we don’t want to start from scratch again, do we?