The BCS Embarrassment

How about giving a shout-out to the great state of Iowa? No state had a better 2008 season. Just a year ago Iowa launched Barack Obama on his way to the White House. And in November, just a few days after his election, the University of Iowa scored on a last-second field goal to upset undefeated Penn State, sparing us a third consecutive BCS Championship fiasco featuring a plodding and overmatched Big Ten champ.

As a result of the Hawkeye heroics, we get a swell pairing for the national title game tonight. Indeed, nobody has any reason to complain about Florida vs. Oklahoma unless, of course, they are fans of the University of Utah, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California or simply college football. Despite far more pressing matters on his plate, the president-elect managed to speak for all of us fans when he criticized the current BCS formula as arbitrary and inherently unfair, insisting it is past time for football to implement a playoff system like every other collegiate sport.

But as long as fans are engaged in debates over the BCS selection system, they are ignoring the far more egregious failure at the heart of big-time college football. On the eve of the Inauguration of America's first black president, in a sport where almost half the players are black, African-Americans are still largely excluded from the fraternity of college coaches. There are currently just six African-American head coaches among the 119 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly known as Division 1-A). While that number remains the same from the past season, it includes just one coach, the University of Miami's Randy Shannon, in a major football conference, compared with four last year.

Even if we don't believe the American presidency is quite as complex an undertaking as running a major college football team, it is hard to pretend any longer that coaching is beyond the capabilities of African-Americans. Last season the NFL, which probably takes coaching every bit as seriously as the college ranks, managed—with just 32 teams—to entrust seven men with that responsibility. I am not entirely comfortable positing the NFL as a bastion of enlightenment. But there's no contest when it's pitted against the college game. At the very least, the league's "Rooney Rule," which requires that a black candidate be interviewed for every head-coaching vacancy and which many critics dismissed as tokenism, has kept the issue visible. As a result, some black coaching candidates who might otherwise have been ignored have made it into the mix.

Last month Auburn demonstrated just how uneven the playing field is for black and white coaches when it comes to filling a vacancy in the college ranks. Sure, the school interviewed a black coach, Turner Gill, because all he did was resurrect a bottom-feeder program at Buffalo and lead the school to its first-ever bowl game. But it was hard for Gill to compete with the man, Iowa State's Gene Chizik, whom Auburn hired with remarkable haste. As the defensive coordinator of Auburn's 13–0 2004 team, Chizik certainly has ties to the school's good-ole-boy network, but his record of five wins and 19 losses during his brief tenure as Iowa State's head coach isn't exactly stellar. Charles Barkley may be better suited for the role of class clown than social critic, but he was right to be dismayed at the naked racial politics on display at his alma mater.

Nobody really believes that such choices are dictated by the grasp of X's and O's or familiarity with cutting-edge football theory or the ability to communicate with players of all stripes or indeed by anything but race. Too many top college football programs—including those of many public universities funded by your tax dollars—are held hostage to rich boosters. And these men don't believe a black man can recruit white athletes effectively, and, oh yeah, by the way, they might find it a little uncomfortable hosting him at their local Rotary, let alone for a golf date at their restricted country clubs.

On the cusp of the Obama era, with its new racial equation, we should be far more distressed that college football remains mired in a bygone era than that the BCS clings to a system designed to lavish money on the traditional football powers rather than to be fair and equitable. (The University of Utah could go undefeated into the next millennium and never reach the big game.) Still, it wouldn't be all that difficult for fans to convey their unhappiness over either or both. All we'd have to do is skip the championship game tonight. The economics of low ratings is about the only thing that can command serious attention at the top. Lacking that—and we almost assuredly will—let's not pretend that a playoff scenario would do anything more than put a brighter sheen on what should be, given the pretensions of American higher education, a national embarrassment.