Requiring interviews for minority candidates

The story was out this week about the lack of minority head coaches in college football. Much progress has been made in the college coaching profession with the number of minority assistants rising. The head coach is the high profile position. There was a state by state poll on ESPN.com and only North Dakota felt that schools should be required to interview minority candidates. I believe they have the rule in some sports and what it usually becomes is a sham. Isn't the token minority interview a slap in the face when the media has already reported a team is locked in on a particular candidate? A good argument for it might be that person gets the experience of going through the interview process.

This stretches into other social issues but the ultimate goal is that minorities don't need assistance. We aren't there yet but mandating minority interviews is not the way to move in that direction either. I say no mandate. As an alternative, use a potent form of action that would involve the players (minority or not) that make up collegiate sports. Instead of mandates, an organization could track and provide information to recruits on the background, hiring and firing records of any school. This organization could push this information to recruits and their parents to make it part of their evaluation process - if they so choose. We need to push more responsibility on our younger people - not less.

The same organization that collects and distributes this info to high school recruits should also gather feedback and report it back to the schools. If an athletic director sees a report that a number of high profile recruits eliminated his school partially due to the school's previous and existing record on hiring coaches (minority or not), over time changes will be made because they AD wants to win or he will be out of a job.

I hope we can agree that even though minority coaches may be behind in getting head coaching jobs because of their race, they are not getting fired because of their race. It's about record. Look around the country at plenty of white coaches getting the boot. Ron Prince and Tyrone Willingham. I offer Tommy Bowden and Phillip Fulmer. Fulmer won a national title and played in the SEC championship game just last year. People like to bring up the Willingham boot from Notre Dame. We are a society of speculators and the business of college football is no different as we closely project the future by analyzing recruiting classes. Maybe race did play a role but the comparison to Weis has to be met with some caution. It's not about Weis' race, it's about he and his agent pulling off the greatest coaching con of all time by artificially creating a market in the NFL for his services and thus Notre Dame paid up and signed him to a long-term extension out of fear. It's about timing. Think Weis would get that contract now? The Notre Dame AD has had to release a statement about his job security after an article in the Sun-Times raised some doubt.