With the spotlight on racial injustice nationally, the country is becoming more aware of circumstances across America’s institutional sectors, including college sports. The next step is to understand that systemic racism is a manifestation of other circumstances. Here’s that circumstance in revenue-generating college sports.
NCC’s LeVelle Moton (photo, WRALSportsFan.com)
Last week, NC Central’s highly successful men’s basketball coach, LeVelle Moton, called out his White peers for being silent in the wake of George Floyd’s death. On Friday, Donald Remy, the NCAA’s Chief Operating Officer, said that Division 1 hiring practices in college football are ‘not acceptable,’ and he called on universities to “double down” on efforts related to diversity and inclusion.”
Awareness. Speaking out. Taking stands.
On Saturday, reporter Luke DeCock wrote an article that got to the heart of at least part of the story. In a piece that appeared in newspapers across North Carolina through the NC News Collaborative, DeCock wrote about why he thinks Moton has not landed a head coaching job in the Atlantic Coast Conference. At the same time, former East Tennessee State coach, Steve Forbes, just accepted an offer from Wake Forest.
“One (Forbes) is 55, white, and has a Power 5 job. The other is 45, African American, and does not,” DeCock writes. He continued: “There are a lot of people who never had to confront the idea of systemic racism before who are now finding it unable to avoid, and for some, it is a difficult concept to absorb.”
True. And here’s another angle on the same story.
Moton has done a great job building a good program at a historically black college. But is the grass truly greener in the ACC? In some ways, it is. In other ways, it’s not–not because of the ACC per se, but because of how big-time college sports operate. Consider Duke’s admission policy: “Some admissions policies and procedures are the same for all sports. Some procedures are different for football and men’s and women’s basketball, and for exceptional cases.”
Mind you. Duke is arguably the conference’s top academic school.
What’s that telling us? It’s just one example of the rest of the story or–at the very least–another critical part of that story.
If we are going to take advantage of “this time of awakening,” let’s reform the way Power 5 schools organize and operate revenue-generating sports.
For coaches like LeVelle Moton, the grass over yonder may not be greener at all. A lot of it is being nurtured on cheap fertilizer. It shouldn’t be.
The college sports system is very much in need of reform. To fix what needs fixing, let’s get to the root of the problem.
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TSC Managing Editor, Frank Fear, contributed to this article.
