Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman seeks breakthrough for Black coaches on an historic day in America

By Canadian Press on January 20, 2025.

ATLANTA (AP) — Notre Dame football coach Marcus Freeman felt more comfortable talking about the national championship his players have a chance to win Monday night than the history attached to it if they pull it off.

Still, it’s hard to ignore the connections between Freeman’s fate — he is trying to become the first African-American coach to capture a college title at the highest level in America’s favorite sport — and all that’s happening in the U.S. on the day of the big game.

Monday, Jan. 20 is national-title day, but also the day the United States celebrates Martin Luther King Jr., and inaugurates Donald Trump to his second term as president. King devoted his life to fighting for inclusion and equality, and today diversity initiatives are increasingly under scrutiny on college campuses.

“The timing of Marcus Freeman and Martin Luther King Junior Day is a powerful symbol that should be viewed with cautious optimism,” said Joseph Cooper, the director of the Institute for Innovative Leadership in Sport at UMass. “And with the incoming administration and their professed commitment to undo DEI policies, it reflects the peril and the long journey we still have to go, beyond just breaking barriers with pioneers.”

That Freeman’s potential breakthrough comes more than 40 years after a Black basketball coach first did the same, and that it comes against a backdrop of a mediocre minority hiring record that has shadowed college sports for decades, is a sign of how far those sports still have to go.

“Today’s Black coach is the ‘70’s Black quarterback,” Rod Broadway, who coached at historically Black universities Grambling State and North Carolina A&T, said about the once-rare sight of an African-American playing the sport’s most important position.

Recent trends makes path for Black coaches unclear

There has been a backlash against affirmative action and the diversity-equity-inclusion initiatives that reached a crescendo in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Since then, the Supreme Court has struck down affirmative action in college and university admissions process; Florida has gotten rid of funding for public universities to use for DEI programs; laws governing transgender sports have proliferated across the states.

Against this backdrop — football, and the questions of whether it is a reflection of society, a change agent for it, or neither.

Heading into this year’s postseason, Black men occupied 11.9% of the head-coaching positions at college football’s highest level. That was nearly 7% less than in the NFL, where the Rooney Rule was adopted in 2003, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for open spots.

There is no such rule in college sports, beyond an initiative in the West Coast Conference, which does not play football.

Freeman, whose father is African-American and whose mother is Korean, was thoughtful 11 days ago when asked about the historic nature of his victory in the semifinals, where he was going against Penn State and coach James Franklin, who also is Black.

“It is an honor, and I hope all coaches, minorities, Black, Asian, white, it doesn’t matter, great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this,” Freeman said.

Freeman knows his success goes beyond football

The coach’s most trenchant statement about race and his role in opening up opportunities came not during Notre Dame’s current playoff run but, rather, in 2021 when he became the first Black coach in the school’s storied history.

“I want to be a demonstration of what someone can do, and the level they can do it at, if they are given the OPPORTUNITY,” he said. “Because that’s what is needed: opportunity.”

Yet, 41 years after Georgetown’s John Thompson became the first Black coach to win basketball’s national title and 26 years after Carolyn Peck at Purdue first did it on the women’s side, those opportunities in football are relatively few and far between.

One of the watchdogs over minority hiring in American sports, gave colleges a “C” on its last annual report card.

“It was inevitable” that a Black coach would reach a football title game, said Richard Lapchick, the founder of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at UCF. “But the inevitability took a lot longer than I think most people would’ve guessed a long time ago.”

HBCU coach wonders if there’s momentum behind Freeman’s moment

Now retired and living in South Carolina, Broadway has been filled with mixed feelings while watching this play out from afar.

He told a story of being asked to interview for the open head-coaching position at a major university in the early 2010s. Broadway said he came down an escalator at the airport en route to the interview and saw TV cameras covering his every move.

He recalled his unshakable belief that the cameras had been sent there solely to document that the school was interviewing a Black candidate, not that it was taking that interview seriously.

“As God is my witness, I started to make the U-turn and go up the other escalator,” he said. “It was the most (expletive) interview I’d ever done in my life.”

His take on the realities of Black coaches landing big jobs in college football haven’t changed all that much since then.

He says he remains discouraged by the lack of a thriving pipeline for young Black coaches.

And just as no one knows whether Freeman’s ascent marks a point in time or a sign of progress, Broadway has the same question about the recent rise of Deion Sanders and the hires of Black former NFL players Michael Vick (Norfolk State) and DeSean Jackson (Delaware State). Are they opening doors, or just filling vacant spots?

“I know there are a lot of African-American coaches who, if they had the opportunity, they’d be in the game,” Broadway said. “But there are some brilliant coaches who just don’t get their opportunities.”

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Eddie Pells, The Associated Press