A Black Mark on the NCAA?

Jean-Jacques Taylor isn't just playing the race card in his combaination tribute to Eddie Robinson and lament of a lesser legacy.

Taylor points out that there are 119 Division One NCAA head football coaches and only six of them are black. Not only is that "shameful," as Jean-Jacques put it, it's shocking.

Jacques sees the trouble this way:

Now, however, is the time to honor Coach Rob by demanding university presidents and athletic directors ignore their big-money boosters and move outside their comfort zone and hire more black coaches.

Don't miss the point.

This isn't about establishing quotas or instituting some affirmative action plan. This isn't even about establishing some college version of the Rooney Rule, which forces every NFL coaching search to include at least one minority candidate, though you must vigorously question any college coaching search that doesn't include a minority candidate.

I'm talking about hiring quality black coaches. Don't act like they don't exist. And don't act like you don't know how to find them.

I am glad Taylor resisted the urge to call for quotas and affirmative action. Too often the knee-jerk cure is just as debilitating as the perceived disease. He puts the onus on school administration...where it belongs! He calls onthem to stop catering to big money boosters. That is a good idea on so many levels.

It's bonehead boosters who so often cause the kind of trouble Rhett Bomar found for himself at Oklahoma. It's bonehead boosters who put on undue pressure on Athletic Directors to prematurely pull the trigger on an embattled coach.

A jerk is just a jerk, no matter what he's worth. NCAA football is still way too influenced by redneck jerks sitting on piles of cash.

The NCAA could certainly stand a drastic increase in black head football coaches. I don't know about you, but I am so ready for the day that we can move past this. Wouldn't it be great if black men with pens and an audience, men like Taylor and Blackistone, could just rip what needs ripping and hail what need hailing and never feel compelled to hoist the banner for their black brethren?

Since this is the Easter season, we might remember that Jesus Himself started the movement for racial equality. His church was the first "melting pot" of nations. The New Testament, two thousand years ago, declared, "there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek" (go ahead and throw in the black and the white and the mexican and the asian...and so on).

We still can't get there, can we? We just can't get to King's utopia, where men are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

And that is a shame.