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Chet Gladchuk sat back and observed Navy offensive coordinator Ken Niumatalolo for a year. He saw everything Niumatalolo did, from how he handled himself to how he learned from former Navy coach Paul Johnson.
So when Johnson departed for Georgia Tech, Gladchuk was prepared to fill the vacant coaching spot.
Johnson resigned on a Friday morning at 11. By Friday evening, Niumatalolo became Navy’s coach.
“We were not going to nationally search it,” said Gladchuk, the Naval Academy’s athletic director. “I was not going to open it up and waste people’s time by going through motions because I knew I had the right guy at the Academy, and it was nothing more than a promotion and a vote of confidence in his abilities to do the job.”
Niumatalolo is the first Polynesian head coach in the Football Bowl Subdivision. He also became another minority among college football’s head coaches – a group of people still small in number but fighting to become more prominent.
In 2007, college football had seven minority head coaches.
After the regular season ended, one (UCLA’s Karl Dorrell) was fired, and so far, two (Niumatalolo and Houston’s Kevin Sumlin) were hired.
And some groups are working toward increasing the number of minority hires.
Floyd Keith, the executive director of the Black Coaches and Administrators, and John Wooten, the chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, have met with the NCAA and the Division IA Athletic Directors Association at least twice in 2007.
Keith and the BCA have been active in the NCAA for years, publishing a minority hiring report card for the past five years. Wooten’s group, which helped institute the Rooney Rule in the NFL mandating every team interview at least one minority candidate for vacant head coaching positions, joined in this year.
“What our idea was that what we felt you needed to do is stay right on course and have the schools commit that when there is an opening, that they would have a diverse slate,” Wooten said. “That was the big idea, the major idea.”
Wooten established a list of 36 minority NFL assistant coaches and coordinators who would be interested in college head coaching jobs.
Keith makes a similar list, but there is no rule in place that colleges use these lists or interview a minority candidate.
The Division IA Athletic Directors’ Association executive director, Dutch Baughman, said his group wants to make people aware of viable minority candidates and establish coaching search guidelines, but the group doesn’t want to make minority interviews mandatory for college programs.
But Baughman’s group has yet to establish hiring guidelines.
“We have not set a timetable nor do we intend to,” Baughman said. “We have to be absolutely certain to make sure we do the best job we can in creating those guidelines.”
Baughman consistently referred to “institutional prerogative” when asked why a mandate would be impossible to impose.
Each school has its own criteria for coaching candidates. Plus, there are myriad people making the decision when a college coach is hired, unlike in the NFL where it is usually just the general manager and team owner.
On the college level there is the athletic director, the president, the board of trustees and others who need to green light any candidate.
“It’s one of those situations,” Hawaii athletic director Herman Frazier said, “where I’m not sure if it’s enforceable.”
Still, Keith wants to see progress. With jobs still open, minorities currently occupy 6.7 percent of the head coaching positions in the Football Bowl Subdivision. In the 2005 season, 54.1 percent of FBS players were minorities.
In basketball, as of 2005-06, minorities occupied 19.4 percent of the head coaching positions. The number of minority athletes playing Division I men’s college basketball in 2005-06 was 70 percent.
Keith said the main issue in college football is the low percentage of minority coaches. Keith said his group wants to see 18 percent to 19 percent of the coaches in the FBS be from minorities.
“This is not subjective opinion,” Keith said. “It’s objective. We have dispelled every issue. There should never be a question about the knowledge (of candidates).”
Now, it’s a matter of hiring them.
In almost every search this season – save for Mississippi and Texas A&M – there have been reports of minority candidates interviewed for positions.
Keith has no issue with the number of minorities on staffs, which is usually between two or three a school. This season, Miami (Fla.) had seven minority coaches, including head coach Randy Shannon, and Minnesota, under first-year coach Tim Brewster, had six. Most involved say they want more diversity in the hiring pools. Frazier said he would like at least one minority candidate to be in the pool per job vacancy.
Gladchuk said the best person should always be hired, and he wants to see more opportunities for minorities to move up the coaching ladders through experience, like Niumatalolo.
The Navy athletic director has hired minorities. At Tulane and Boston College, he hired the first minority coaches in both schools history in basketball coaches Perry Clark and Al Skinner.
“Some wish it could go faster, some wish it can go slower,” Purdue athletic director Morgan Burke said. “I just acknowledge the fact that it needs to move. You have to keep pressuring the system.”
Which is what Keith and Wooten are trying to do with their candidate lists and pushing for hiring guidelines.
“It is hard to talk about this in a real definitive manner because it’s not evolved yet,” Baughman said. “We’re real dedicated in this. We’re hoping to evolve.”
mrothstein@jg.net
