After Black coaches Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith led their teams to the 2007 Super Bowl, college athletic directors of the NCAA’s top football division adopted a version of the NFL’s Rooney Rule in 2008, which requires teams to interview a minority candidate for head coach openings.
Also in 2007, Portland State University hired Jerry Glanville as its new football coach because of his NFL experience—without interviewing any other applicants. Activist and alumnus Sam Sachs was so upset that, in 2009, he lobbied through the Oregon Legislature the first and only state law that imposes a form of the Rooney Rule on public universities.
In one way, the 2008 standard of the Division-IA (D-IA) Athletic Directors Association is broader than the NFL’s rule because job interviews are to include “one or more minority candidates” for head football coach jobs. In another way, so, too, is the Oregon law. It applies to head coaching positions in all sports at seven state-supported universities.
The athletic directors and Oregon’s legislators did not adopt authorized penalties, a $500,000 fine in the NFL, for violations. Monitoring of compliance, by the athletic directors association and the state of Oregon, has also been inconsistent.
But both initiatives have contributed modestly to coaching diversity at the college level, though progress has been unsteady and halting.
Conflict in Oregon
In 2007, the year before the athletic directors adopted the policy, there were seven coaches of color in D-IA, also known as the Football Bowl Subdivision. That number climbed to a high of 19 in 2011-12, before dwindling each year to 14 in 2014-15, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida.
