Racial Diversity Deficit in College Football: Fixing the Pipeline

Abstract

A growing amount of research is being conducted on racial diversity in college football head coaching positions in the United States. However, very little has been conducted on the entry-level positions in college coaching: Graduate Assistants (GAs), Quality Control assistants (QCs) and restricted earnings coaches. These positions represent natural professional trajectories for student-athletes, who constitute the future pool of applicants for college coaching positions. In the United States, the majority of student athletes are nonwhite, but white coaches still dominate the world of college athletics. This paper investigates the pipeline issues that obstruct the matriculation of nonwhite student-athletes and produce what I call the diversity deficit in college football coaching. Existing analyses of empirical data from member institutions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) demonstrate the existence of racial inequality in the profession of coaching. This paper will explain the perpetuation of the diversity deficit by employing Critical Race Theory (CRT) to illustrate how whiteness, color-blindness and tokenism structure college football coaching. The paper then presents new research data that illuminate how power shapes NCAA member institutions and that can aid participants in addressing pipeline issues and the diversity deficit.

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