Charlie Strong, the head football coach at Louisville, will be the next head football coach at University of Texas. The Longhorns are part of college sports royalty, maybe even the top of the list of elite programs. They generate more revenue than any other school. They have the biggest facilities, the biggest fan base and the biggest egos. Other big state schools like Ohio State and Michigan can claim to be the top of the list, but most people consider Texas the NY Yankees of college sports.
Their decision to hire a black guy obviously has cultural meaning, mostly because the mass media is obsessed with race. In fact, the media will care more about the race angle than the fact Strong has a very good resume and is actually qualified for the job. Coaches tend to kick around for 20 years as assistants and head coaches at small programs. Eventually, they get a shot at a major, but not elite, program to show they can compete with the best. If they win, they get a shot to man one of the elite programs.
Strong has done all of those things. The fact that he is black should be an enormous asset to him, but that has not been the case. Instead, he struggled to get his first head coaching job. The rumor was college presidents fretted over his race, thinking the fans would not embrace a black man as coach. Even after he got the job at Louisville and there were no white riots, the attitude among college presidents persisted. They were sure their racist fans would burn the school down if they dared hire a black to coach the football team.
In fact, that’s been the argument for decades now. There’s no evidence the fans care about the race of the coach. They just want to win. Boosters, who fund a lot of this stuff, would embrace a space alien if he could win games. If Strong was a bisexual, transvestite black Nazi, the Louisville fans would cheer him anyway. It’s fair to say sports are why America has as much racial peace as it does. White sports fans care more about winning than the realities of race, so they overlook it in order to have their sports.
Despite this, white college presidents still think their fans hate blacks. There are a growing number of black athletic directors, who would be eager to hire black coaches, but the number of black coaches remains very low. The fans actually think black coaches are a benefit dealing with black players. Again, the boosters just want to win so that leaves the school presidents as the primary obstacle to hiring clack coaches. That and the fact it is a long apprenticeship and blacks tend to have very high time preference.
These presidents are overwhelmingly white and liberal. They live and work in the least diverse parts of America. Anyone thinking the campus is diverse has never been to a McDonalds in the South. They also live and work in the most radically left-wing parts of America. Yet, they walk around thinking they are the friend of the black man and those others, those rowdies in the stands, black and white, are the bigots. It is a remarkable bit of cognitive dissidence. These people are strangely delusional.
It should also be noted that it is the southern schools that are leading the way with the hiring of black coaches. Here is where winning trumps all else. Vanderbilt is paying their black coach $3 million a year. Mississippi State had a black coach a decade ago. Charlie Strong started in the SEC and then went to Louisville. Miami had a black coach a few years back. The assistant ranks are ghostly white the further north you go, while the sidelines in the South have much more vibrancy.
Of course, the cognitive dissidence is not limited to the lily white leadership of American colleges and universities. When the Left sees all of these black coaches at southern schools, they believe it due to their heroic efforts to fix those bad whites in the south, even though the schools in the north remain ghostly white. It’s a reminder that for bad whites, race is a real issue to be dealt with in a serious way. For good whites, race is entirely about moral posturing in juxtaposition with the bad whites they detest.
