Hot Take: PSU vs. MD and Tales of Black Coaches with Dr. Derrick White
In this HOT TAKE, Amira chats with Dr. Derrick White, Professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at U of Kentucky and co-host of The Black Athlete pod, about the upcoming PSU/MD game, Coaches James Franklin + Michael Locksley and the complicated careers of Black college football coaches.
Links
Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football https://uncpress.org/book/9781469652443/blood-sweat-and-tears
The dearth of Black coaches in college football is a disgrace. Michael Locksley wants to fix it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/08/08/michael-locksley-national-coalition-minority-football-coaches
'Silence Is Deafening Indifference.' James Franklin Releases Statement on Deaths of Floyd, Arbery and Taylor: http://www.statecollege.com/news/local-news/silence-is-deafening-indifference-james-franklin-releases-statement-on-deaths-of-floyd-arbery-and-taylor,1483341
Transcript
Amira: Hi flamethrowers, Amira here, and this is a Burn It All Down hot take. This weekend, Saturday, November 7th, Penn State and Maryland will meet on the pandemic football field, pitting coach James Franklin and coach Michael Locksley together in competition with each other. Now, coach Franklin and coach Locksley are 2 of the 4 Black college coaches in the Big Ten, and only 2 of 14 in the entire FBS which has like 130 schools. So I thought that this was a perfect opportunity to talk about Black college football coaches, and I know no better person to do that with than my good brother, Derrick White. To delve more into this topic I had to hit up the homie, Derrick White, who is a professor of history and African American and Africana studies at University of Kentucky, author of many books – most recently Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football – and also, of course, the co-host of The Black Athlete podcast with Lou Moore. Derrick, welcome to Burn It All Down.
Derrick: Thank you, this is like a crossover on network television where all the podcasts come together, [Amira laughs] like Supergirl and The Flash and Arrow all show up on the same show. This is it! So, I’m glad to be here, thank you.
Amira: Yes, yes. I’m really excited to have the conversation, so, in the midst of [laughs] the hell of the last week, right? It almost kind of slipped my mind that…Well, first of all, pandemic football is really not on my mind, but because they’re insisting on playing games apparently there is a game coming up this weekend with Penn State and Maryland that is gonna feature James Franklin and Mike Locksley as two of some of the only Black coaches that we have in the FBS, right? Of course, given your expertise on football and college football, on Black college football and on Black coaches – and also of course because you’re a Terp, I had to call you up to have a chit chat about this matchup and use it as a springboard to talk through some of the stuff around Black college football coaches, right? So partially what I wanted to start with is asking you when you think about what this matchup means for the two of them to come together and coach on these pandemic sidelines this weekend, when you look at two of the only Black coaches coaching in the FBS meeting in the Big Ten, doing this – what are your first thoughts that come to mind when you see these brothers coaching?
Derrick: I feel like a Black coach is gonna get a win this week. Week 1 was terrible in the Big Ten, I’m just gonna say this. It was 4 Black coaches in the Big Ten: Mike Locksley, James Franklin at Penn State, Mel Tucker at Michigan State, and Lovie Smith at University of Illinois. They all lost the first week. I was like, oh, this is not the way we should start the pandemic Big Ten football. I was like, James Franklin, you gotta win one for the Black Coaches Association! Especially, you know, and this is true for me, thinking about the kinds of criticism that Warren got as the head of the Big Ten when he chose to postpone, and I think that that was often very racialized as, you know, “let them play” and lawsuits and…It was ugly all the way around, but I think us who study race and racism in sports, it had a kind of racial tinge to it that left me very uncomfortable.
So, these coaches who are, I think, were very quiet during that period. They were not the vocal leaders of coaches talking about “we must play” as we saw at Nebraska and a little bit at Ohio State and others. So they were very quiet; I thought that that was a kind of version of solidarity that I think kind of went unaddressed. I know that the game and the Big Ten is about wins and losses, and they lost all week 1, so this week we know somebody’s gonna get a win. Penn State needs a win! [Amira laughs] Mike Locksley’s gotta win. It’s rare I can come on a podcast and talk about a Maryland-Penn State matchup where Maryland has the better record. [Amira laughs] But I’m gonna take it. I’m glad this is being recorded for posterity–
Amira: Right, right.
Derrick: Because this doesn’t happen too often. But yeah, no, I think in pandemic football this is a big weekend. I think this is an important weekend in part because at least from the side of Mike Locksley that he had taken this summer and the aftermath of George Floyd to really push this idea that his players were going to be community-oriented and talking about the Washington DC and Prince George’s County area – Prince George’s County is where the University of Maryland is. It’s only about, you know, six miles from the DC line. They have used this as an opportunity to talk about voting and education and to talk about the ways that they can use their platform to further and better their communities.
Now, they did not go so fas as the Pac-12 and asking for payment this summer and these kinds of things, but Mike Locksley is really gonna encourage his guys, and some of this comes in the aftermath obviously that Jordan McNair had died two years ago, tragically died during a practice under the previous regime. I just feel like he is always been in tune. He’s a DC guy, he worked at Maryland on and off for the last 20 years, and so I think that he really understood the role that he could play, and I think I was very proud as a Terp that he had done this, and then at the local level…Then at the second level he was like, I’m announcing this Black Coaches Association, which had fallen out of favor. There used to be the Fritz Pollard Association that had basically gone under, and Mike Locksley has now created a new version about improving the pipeline for coaches, and I think that for a guy who’s only won like 7 games as a head coach, to be perfectly honest he’s doing a lot and I’m pretty proud of what he’s taken on so far.
Amira: Yeah, I think that it’s so interesting. So, you know, I can say it’s very interesting to watch how James Franklin was doing some of this work and the Black college football players here at Penn State, so we’re in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania, we’re not in PG, you know? We’re not like a city they can kind of go into and help, but that doesn’t mean there’s not racism, right? Of course one of the big things that is happening and has happened here is that State College police department shot and killed a young man, Osaze Osagie, about a year and a half ago. First time in like a hundred years that State College PD killed somebody, and despite being like no percent of the population here they still found a Black man in a mental health crisis to kill, right? So out of that has formed the 3/20 Coalition on the day that he was murdered, and what we saw over the summer was a number of athletes led by Olivia Jack, who’s a swimmer here, but also with many members of the football team involved. We saw basketball players, swimmers, track and field, leading protests here, speaking out about this. They formed a Black College Athlete Coalition here at Penn State, and then of course the Big Ten has their own acronym for whatever they formed.
Derrick: Right.
Amira: And James Franklin of course has said all the right things and endorsed that, but the other part of what you said when you were talking about the tragic death of Jordan McNair is…I even had this question about pandemic football in the first place, you know, it’s so hard to even watch them take the field, right? I’ve had students like Micah opted out of the season, right? It’s just so difficult when you feel like they shouldn’t be playing. But I think to your point, a point that you mentioned to me earlier, is the coaches and the ecosystem of college football – some have a lot of power, right?
Derrick: Yeah.
Amira: And some have power that’s constrained. So that was one of the things that I wanted to speak to, but also that second point that I wanted to tee up for you, thinking about Locksley coming into this position after DJ Durkin and James coming into Penn State after their hoist of scandals is that they’re both coming into institutions that are rebuilding not only the program but are also doing a public relations rebuild, right? They’re also just trying to…They’re harmful institutions, and so you’re already kind of slotted into a place of harm, and then trying to do good in it. So it seems to me that both of these things together, thinking about the needing to get back on the field for pandemic football and the Big Ten and the way that the Big Ten especially got politicized towards the end of this presidential election, but also the fact that the both of them are coaching within institutions that have been harmful, and that they’re kind of the salve for that, they’re supposed to be the balm – strikes me as an incredibly hard position to occupy for both of these men.
Derrick: I say this all the time that if you wanna see an opportunity for a Black coach to get an opportunity, especially in college football, it will be one of the extreme…There are kind of two trajectories now. For a long time there was only one; one was that we were so bad that we could hire a Black coach. This is how Dennis Green gets the job at Northwestern for instance, right? Like, decades ago, it’s that Northwestern was terrible and so, “We’re so terrible, let’s take a chance on a Black coach. We’ll get some positive publicity, maybe he can recruit.” Now we’ve got these two different cycles where you get…You know, every coach gets a start at a bad program, with the exception of Ryan Day at Ohio State who just takes over a juggernaut, or Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma. Those are few and far between. Most people’s first job is at a losing program. But Black coaches are often tasked with this additional public relations job that the program has come off some particular kind of scandal. So not only did they lose games on the field but something has happened usually off the field that has allowed for the board of trustees or the boosters or the athletic administration to say, like, what’s a quick fix? Let’s hire a Black person, a Black coach, and that’ll give us a little positive publicity and hopefully this negative thing that's happened will go away.
In the Big Ten this is of course I think particularly true, right? Where Locksley’s coming in after the tragic death of Jordan McNair, James Franklin’s coming in on the aftermath…It’s the second coach, I believe, after the Sandusky scandal, as well as still being on probation when he starts. Then you have Mel Tucker taking over this year at Michigan State after the scandal with the trainer that really captured their entire athletic department, and Mike D’Antoni gets caught up in that. So I think that there’s a situation that these three coaches of the four are all coming in on a particular kind of heightened scandal, and I think that that’s…You know, they are tasked with a really difficult balancing position. I think James Franklin is the apex of this because Penn State has such tradition; Joe Paterno is an icon and an institution, and in the Sandusky scandal it fell upon Joe Pa’s legacy as well as if he…You know, so all these are happening, and I’ll just be perfectly honest – I don’t think Penn State hires a Black coach without that scandal, right?
Amira: Absolutely.
Derrick: I don’t think that that’s even in the realm of possibility. I don’t think the boosters and the powers that be allow for that to come. I know Bill O’Brien was the immediate aftermath of the head coach, but I think that that possibility and James Franklin’s success at Vandy create a kind of perfect storm–
Amira: Yeah, but the other thing that did it, if we can just, you know…Let’s talk about colorism!
Derrick: Yeah.
Amira: But the other thing, right, is that I don’t think if James Franklin looked like Mike Locksley that he would also be hired as this coach, right? Because I remember very very vividly when we won Big Ten…I don’t know, whenever it was. I had just got to Penn State, like maybe the first year or two I was here. I remember they put the scrolling chyron under it and said, “James Franklin has become the first Black coach to do this,” and there was a number of people – boosters, people in the community – who were like, “He’s Black?!” Right? [Derrick laughs] Like, maybe you missed his daughters, maybe you missed his wife, maybe you thought it was just Fumi that made the girls look like that. [laughs] But there’s this way that he’s a PA boy, you know, he’s racially ambiguous but light enough that he could slide in. It didn’t quite feel like a complete 180 from Joe Pa, right? I mean, anything was gonna be a departure – Bill O’Brien was a departure, like you said. But with that buffer and because he’s a light skinned dude, I think that there was more possibilities, then otherwise I don’t see it happening.
Derrick: Well I think this gets into the broader…I mean, I think one of the things that we see in all kinds of sports, right, the assumption that Black athletic bodies are talented athletically but weak mentally. This is a longstanding stereotype that has plagued players and coaches for decades. So one of the reasons that I was so interested in historically Black college football is that – focusing on coaches – it’s because that’s a space where we can see coaching genius blossom without the kind of strains of white assumptions, right? So you get to see Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither and John Merritt and all of these great coaches who were a cast of characters who were very different, some of whom didn’t like each other, who were all shapes, sizes and colors and philosophies and politics, kind of come together in this milieu that was HBCU football. We don’t see that in PWI world, and I think James Franklin, I think the colorism works for him because it gives him the benefit of the doubt. He was at Maryland as wide receivers coach. I’m a ’97 graduate and so I’ve been a fan for a long time, and James Franklin was a wide receivers coach and then he worked his way up to offensive coordinator with Ralph Friedgen, and was the coach in waiting at one point at Maryland. Then Ralph Friedgen got fired and along with James Franklin severed all those relationships and both went on their way. Then Franklin’s up at Vanderbilt and then the rest is kind of history. So he has a certain kind of animosity, I think, to Maryland as an institution, because it felt like it did him wrong.
Amira: Right.
Derrick: I think he let us know because he beat us like a drum last year in College Park. [Amira laughs] It’s painful, it’s painful. But I think that there’s something about this thing, and I think Locksley is an interesting kind of counterweight to that, that they have very similar sort of trajectories – on the same staff in the early 2000s at Maryland, Locksley gets passed over for the offensive coordinator position and Franklin kind of gets tapped, right? So there’s a kind of…I say this all the time, that a lot of times in coaches’ hierarchy there can only be one kind of lead Black assistant, right? You can either have an offensive coordinator or a defensive coordinator. We can’t have both! One of those guys couldn’t be Black. So because they both worked on the offensive side of the ball there could only be one, and James Franklin for a number of reasons gets tapped.
Locksley leaves because he didn’t get the opportunity, he goes to Florida and literally wins a national championship, recruiting all those guys that Urban Meyer…Most famously, under Ron Zook, the offensive coordinator as well as the recruiting coordinator. Ron Zook recruited all of that talent that Urban Meyer walks in the door and wins a national title with them. So Locksley has this reputation as a great recruiter, he’s with Ron Zook at Florida, he’s with Ron Zook at Illinois. He comes back to Maryland eventually and I think that what was disappointing as a fan was to watch that same kind of argument happen, that James Franklin gets this chance both at Vanderbilt and at Penn State, and Locksley was in line to get the job when Randy Edsall got fired. He coached as the interim coach for the last couple of games of a terrible season. The kids played better, I watched those games – I’m like one of six people who watched them. They played better for him. We didn’t win but they played well. I felt like then that Locksley’s the only guy who could win, recruit well enough to give us a fighting chance.
They chose to get DJ Durkin, who had no experience. Again, a guy who had less experience than Locksley but, you know, was white, and seen as a defensive genius. We saw how that turned out. It literally imploded our program. A player dies under his watch, and the only way that we can even try to “save” football, honestly, is to hire Locksley. I think that that’s, to me…I think that one of the things I like about his National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches is that he’s trying to create a way that other coaches don’t have to get into this dire situation to get this role. I think that, you know, I think that there’s colorism, I think that the way the intricate behind-the-scenes networks in which coaches are tapped and not tapped, the way Black coaches are expected to only recruit and coach position groups that don’t have any…They don’t call plays and things of that nature. That both of these men worked their way up to the head coaching position, being offensive coordinators and then eventually head coaches.
Amira: Absolutely. I think one of the things that you point to, even that last point, we can expand beyond football of, like, part of that burden of being the only sometimes is that you have to push out the only others, right? You have to do this kind of jockeying of position. If there can only be one top Black offensive coordinator or defensive coordinator at a given time, who are you muscling out? Who are you bodying because you need to claim that space, and then how does that make it harder when you’re coach, to turn around and build the pipeline, right? Sometimes I think even the framework of this conversation is like, okay, they’re meeting and they’re 2 of 14, and this is a tight fraternity – but it’s like, how tight can it be if you have to claw your way…? Sometimes I think there’s a way that we don’t understand the lingering effects of white supremacist structure, right? And this is beyond football, because I think this is something that even in the academy we can talk about unlearning, or journalism or whatever field you wanna bring it to. Where I think about this a lot is we have been told over and over and over that the value and the novelty in our scholarship or even our very existence as Black scholars is because we’re “the one.”
Derrick: Yes.
Amira: I think so often that’s why when you have that panicky moment when you’re a grad student and you realize somebody else has written on your topic, you’re like, “Oh, no! This is a problem. I have my eye on you…” Etc. It’s like, you ever stop to think how many books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, right?
Derrick: Exactly.
Amira: You don’t have to do that same kind of justification. I think that that is part of what I see here, that so many of us have to kind of unlearn or stop and realize that those are the hidden burdens of white supremacy that sometimes we don’t even realize is sitting on us, that we can’t always have this kind of space, collective space, where we’re welcoming and we can say, “How can we build together?” because you’re jockeying to climb that ladder and you’ve only been given one route. So I think about that a lot and that example that you just gave, and like you I’m really impressed with what Locksley started with the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches because I think that that’s part of that work. That’s that path, that pipeline that’s so essential to lay down.
Derrick: I’ll say this too for Locksley – and I’m a homer, so just take this with a grain of salt. [Amira laughs] I think the one thing that I’ve appreciated about Locks as a fan, like, not knowing who Locksley is, that he hired multiple Black assistant coaches. One of the things…This has never gotten any kind of, I think, enough attention from people, sports writers. So I’m giving…I don’t have time to write this, so if they’re listening to this fantastic pod, please take this up. But one of the things that he did was in creating and developing his staff at Maryland he hired Scottie Montgomery as the offensive coordinator, who was fired as the head football coach at East Carolina. He has Joker Phillips, who was the former head football coach at the University of Kentucky where I now work. He’s got these former head coaches, Black head coaches, on his staff as position coaches, as coordinators. All up and down the positions as his assistants. I think that to me is a very valuable piece for him in developing not just how we run the program or how do we…You know, what do we do in preparation for this individual game? Those three men in particular all know the burden of being the Black head coach, right?
Amira: Yes.
Derrick: And what failure could possibly mean. I think that there’s a lot of risk, right? There's a risk that you’re creating people who could replace you. Like, your AD could be like, “Oh, Locksley, you’re not getting it done, well maybe that other guy in the locker room could do it better than you if we wanted to, so we avoid this controversy.” So I’m actually pretty appreciative of that as a kind of early signal for this National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches. That’s something he also delved into in his roster. James Franklin too has a very diverse roster, I think his defensive coordinator…Is Larry Johnson still there? Is Larry Johnson still defensive coordinator?
Amira: I think so.
Derrick: So, that’s an old holdover. Larry Johnson’s been there forever. It’ll be interesting to see, you know, I think they do both have very diverse staffs that I think is an important thing to point out, but I also note that Locksley has these former head coaches, Black head coaches, which is an unusual thing, with both Joker Phillips and Scottie Montgomery.
Amira: Absolutely. So the last thing I’ll ask you is [laughs] probably not a fair question. It’s not a fair question. It’s so hard, when people have these conversations about Kaepernick, right, and the goal would be getting him back in the league. For me it’s like, that can’t be the goal if we know how destructive the league is, right? We know that they’re not paying well, we know they’re not protecting players, we know they’re not giving good healthcare, we know that they’re not giving a damn about CTE. That can’t be the mountaintop, right? In some ways I think that this is really hard for me in college football too, I feel this about the students that I teach that also play, because I want what’s best for them and I cheer for them and I love to see them shine, and also they’re in a system that I find really morally repugnant a great deal of the time, and also I like sports, so of course I enjoy the games. But it’s been so hard this year to watch pandemic football. I barely…I looked up, you know, just not even getting to the product on the actual field, like, games have not also been good, right? [laughs] But I mean, compelling of course, but not…We haven’t been playing well.
But then the other day I flipped on the last maybe 10 minutes of the Ohio State game to see Jaxon’s great catches down the stretch, right? My 7 year old – or is he 8? Whatever. My middle child [laughs] said, “Can you explain,” – he calls the pandemic an ‘environment.’ But he goes, “Can you explain environment football to me?” And I’m like, yeah, whatchu wanna know? Da da da, x’s and o’s. He was like, “How are they playing in the environment? Because they’re not 6 feet apart.” I was like, yeah…And he was like, “So, does the environment not apply to them?” I’m not even being one of those people who like, posts their kids being brilliant on Twitter for likes or whatever, but literally I could not answer him.
Derrick: No.
Amira: I actually had no response. I said, “I couldn’t tell you. That’s a great question, Jackson. I cannot tell you.” That’s part of, I think, what’s so hard about this season, is I’m watching the coaches that we’re talking about in the system, the players especially, which is always where my heart is gonna lie, playing pandemic football. I think about this, I wrestle with this all the time. The same thing is when we had this conversation about Deon taking over at Jackson State, is like, we sit and we like that murkiness, that complication – you’re a historian, I am, we really like that kind of mess. I really think of this as one of those messy situations where it’s like how do we think about pathways to the sideline, to diversify and do that, and also understand that that sideline is still ensconced in an institution that is so harmful for multiple reasons, and that coaches – especially college coaches – tend to be super paternalistic and about power and control, and how can you keep your team playing hard and unpaid [laughs] and all of these things. How do we hold all of these things togehter? I’ve always wanted to ask you, as somebody who studies Black college football and studies Black coaches and is looking at this: how do we hold these messy inconvenient truths togehter, where at one time we to expand this representation, and on the other hand is that expansion, is diversifying the sideline and that in and of itself gonna disrupt some of these other mechanisms of harm within these systems that they occupy?
Derrick: So, I actually think…I think about this all the time, because I think I get this question from my work a lot of times is framed, “Should these elite athletes in basketball and football, should they come back to HBCUs?” I’m like, you know that HBCUs are in the same system as the PWIs, right? I think they get something that happens outside of the football office differently than they get at PWIs, but the actual football question of paternalism and coaching and all that stuff is really, x’s and o’s…A lot of that stuff is the same kind of logic and the same kind of structure. I think that there’s two things: I think that, you know, one of the things that we never ask college football coaches anymore, is should players get paid? Most of the time college football coaches punt on this question, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for the handful of coaches who have been brutally honest about this situation. I remember…This is over a decade ago, when Steve Spurrier, who’s not always known as the most racially forthright person–
Amira: Right! [laughs]
Derrick: They asked him this question and he said, you can take an extra million dollars of my salary and we can pay the players. It was at that moment I realized that there's always money to pay the players, it’s just gotta come out of coaches’ salaries, right? There’s a whole conversation about that, right? Because we work in the same institution…I tell people, I work on the same campus as the football coach. I may teach this year between my class of 100 level with 300…I may teach 300+ students. He’s got 100+ football players. I do very well as a professor; I don’t do as well as he will, and he will win less than half of his games this year.
Amira: Right. Right.
Derrick: Right? It’s just like, that’s the thing. We work on the same campus, we have to wear the same University of Kentucky stuff. So I think there’s something about that. There’s money in the system, and I think that we have to encourage and give these coaches power. I think Black coaches are often undermined because there’s such small positioning, that they don’t get a lot of opportunities. So if they say something controversial like that that may close a number of doors in particular kinds of ways. So Steve Spurrier can say that…Randy Edsall never won a lot of games but he was always like, “Kids should be paid.” I always appreciated that part of his personality. Coach Cal, he's the basketball coach here at Kentucky, University of Kentucky Coach Calipari, he always says when a kid is thinking about coming back to school, he says, “You should go pro, because if you stay an extra year you make me money instead of making your family money.” He thinks when a kid is ready to go he pushes them out the door and says that they should go pro, especially if they’re gonna be in the first round. I think that's a level of honesty there that I think one can also observe.
So I see the answer to your question of how we get this messy is it requires a multi-tier approach. One is we gotta find coaches both publicly and/or privately – hopefully Black coaches – who are gonna take this stand to say, look, how do we make this a more equitable and just system? We know that’s not gonna fix CTE, that’s not gonna fix the injuries, that’s not gonna fix the educational questions, etc. But how can we make this a more just and equitable system in terms of compensation for these student athletes, right? So, taking that position, that’s one. Two, we need a Black coach to be…Actually, probably a couple of Black coaches, to be the most powerful coaches in the business. That's the only way.
Amira: Yes.
Derrick: So, as long as Dabo Swinney and Nick Saban and a handful of other coaches – white coaches – are the most powerful coaches in this system, they have all the sway over the way the nation thinks about these kinds of issues. So, let's use a hypothetical and say that Locksley and Franklin are the two most powerful coaches in the country and all the five star recruits that are going to Ohio State or Clemson or any other school are basically battling out in this three hour distance between one another, right? Between College Park and State College, right?
Amira: These names are so dumb, of these towns, when you say them next to each other! [laughter]
Derrick: But if all the talent is there they can make the claim, because if you’re the most powerful coach and you have all the best players you can make the claim that, look, these kids should be paid. Because, one, all your assistants are still getting the jobs now, the way Nick Saban’s assistants get jobs, right? Or Dabo’s assistants are gonna get jobs.You open up the entire network and people are gonna defer to you in a way because you have been so good on the field, and so part of it is...This is probably too much to ask of high school students and high school parents, but it’s really on talented Black players’ parents, to be honest, that they have to intervene in this question about where to send their child. If they are making the decision to send their kids to schools where the coach is clearly paternalistic and clearly self-serving and not in the best interests of not only their professional athletic development but also their personal development, especially around these issues of race and opportunity, then you are contributing to a system that may individually benefit you while you’re playing but it means that the path to be a coach, the path to be offensive coordinator, the path to be an athletic director are not the same for you as it would be for the white star quarterback. Trevor Lawrence, he can get hurt two years from now and be the head coach, the offensive coordinator at 25 at Clemson or whatever.
Amira: Right.
Derrick: Right? That’s the way it's gonna work. Whereas Justin Fields, that’s not gonna happen, just to be perfectly honest. So, you know, it’s a multi-tiered system in which these coaches have to accumulate power, and there’s risk in that because there's always risk when football coaches have too much power, but then they have to be willing to use their power to challenge the very system that could undermine their own power situation, and that requires talent. It’s a lot of moving pieces.
Amira: That’s a tale as old as time, right?
Derrick: Right.
Amira: I think about the historical work that you do, and when we talk about these Black institutions that had to strengthen them, but knowing that strengthening their institution was also building the foundation for its destruction, you know? The other thing that’s the tale as old as time – even as I’m listening to myself asking this question and you answer it, it's like, damn, just like we've seen this week electorally. Black people just have to keep saving everybody from themselves. [laughs] Why do they have to reform an entire system that they're barely a part of, you know what I mean, that they’re trying to work up. But again, tale as old as time.
Derrick: There’s nothing fair or just about it, right? But I think that…You know, I work in the SEC now and college sports are gonna be here to stay in some form or fashion, especially college football, and the way I look for the path forward is really figuring out a way for these student athletes to be compensated. I think, one, it’s that. I think, two, we should really have a robust conversation about giving college football players the opportunity to go to the NFL at some earlier point if we're not gonna pay them in college, there’s no use keeping them for mandatory 3 years. I think there's a really interesting kind of question there. That requires a two league solution. So, it’s not an easy answer. Every year, because I’m a fan, I hope the best players in college football end up at either HBCUs or Black colleges, like, I wanna see Mel Tucker or Franklin or Locksley – preferably Locksley – or David Shaw get the #1 recruiting class in the country and have all this excitement around their program and have a class of these top young mostly African American men who are gonna lead their coach to this. Because we still haven’t had this question of a coach winning a national title, right?
To me that's the messaging that I want, and I want someone to be…You know, I like James Franklin. I describe him as slick, he’s polished and he says the right things. Locksley is kind of a grinder, you know? You got Herm Edwards as kind of the old, grisly…Him and Lovie. Kevin Sumlin is like, I got these great ideas but hasn’t fully…David Shaw is like, I’m at Stanford, I’ve got a certain kind of guy, hard no’s. I actually want us to have a Black coach that is really good at their job but has this undeniable Black charisma. I think we don't really have the big charismatic Black coach. There’s never been a Black football coach like John Thompson or Nolan Richardson. Those who walk out and you’re like, I don’t know what that's about but I like that. [Amira laughs] I think some of it is just the structures of college football that don’t allow those guys to kind of rise to the top of a program, but I think if you ever got that person…I think this is what Jackson State when circling around Deon was trying to do. If you ever got that person, that charismatic person who can be an exhorter and could get these kids in and could win…Ah, man. That is the magic formula that could possibly get us to that place.
Amira: Break it open, yeah. Alright Derrick, we’re not betting people, but if you had to make a prediction for the game this weekend?
Derrick: Ah, man…
Amira: [laughs] So, we’re coming in, like you said, Maryland’s 1 and 1, Penn State’s 0 and 2. The spread is huge for this, like, Penn State’s really favored for this but they're still gonna struggle and everybody on the team right now that's gonna have playing time this week is gonna be young, young, young. So I actually think it’ll be much tighter.
Derrick: So, I think we’re gonna cover. I think we turned a corner. Our defense is not very good; we played really really good offensively last week, I was super excited. We still gave up 44 points and a win. [laughter] I’ll just say we’ll cover. We’re like 25 point underdogs, is that what it is?
Amira: I think it was 24-25 points last time I saw.
Derrick: Yeah, I’m gonna take us as really gonna cover.
Amira: Yeah, I think that's a good bet. [laughs]
Derrick: Because I’m not quite ready to go on there and take the money line just yet. [laughs]
Amira: Right. I completely agree with you in that, I mean, I’ll be looking to see if we can get our ground game going. I mean, set aside the Indiana game which was a whole bunch of mess. But the Ohio State game to me was exactly how we always play Ohio State, which is like we’re asleep for three quarters and then decide, oh yeah, there’s football being played, then do this furious race to the finish only to come up like 5 points short. Where you always feel like, oh, this was a blowout! Then you look at the score and you're like, oh, we were actually not that far away from the game. This is very confusing. So that was kind of a quintessential Penn State game as long as I've been here watching them, seriously. So it'll be interesting to see what goes down this weekend, if I can get myself to stomach watching some pandemic football.
Derrick: No, I said this last week, I am very uncomfortable watching football.
Amira: Yeah.
Derrick: I told my wife, I said if Maryland's gonna play then I'm gonna want them to win. [laughter] This is just how it goes, right? I would prefer them not to play, because that’s the right, I think, moral positioning, but that is not my job to determine if they play or not.
Amira: Right. It’s above us. [laughs]
Derrick: It’s above my pay grade. So if they’re gonna play then I’m gonna root for my team to win.
Amira: Yup.
Derrick: So I hope we pull off the upset against Penn State, you know, it is hard to beat Penn State. We are not very good, and as for this thing I think we’ve won like there times in the last–
Amira: Ever. [laughs]
Derrick: Can I finish with a quick story?
Amira: Yeah!
Derrick: Freshman year we played Penn State; this is 1993.
Amira: I won’t tell you how old I was. [laughs]
Derrick: 1993, freshman year. It was parents’ weekend, I’ll never forget. We played, we were feeling good, like 2 and 1 or something. Penn State comes to town – we used to be regular rivals back in the old days, and they beat us 70-7. [Amira laughing] I thought…You could’ve never told me that Ki-Jana Carter was not gonna be an NFL Hall of Famer. He must have ran for like 300 yards that day. Every time we line up against them I can only see the scoreboard of that game in my head, so let's just hope it’s better than 70-7.
Amira: [laughs] You know, I think that that's a good goal to have. You know, I went to Temple undergrad and our football team, their season rested on if they beat Penn State – or if they came close, right? That was it. That was it. I think it was my senior year at Temple, so 2010-2011-ish, and they won, or almost won…Oh, they won. It was the year we finally beat them, like, the first year they were sanctioned, right? [laughs]
Derrick: Yes.
Amira: And they won! And they had fireworks going up, everybody was doing this, and I was like, this is how you know. This is just embarrassing at this point. So I have to say I’ve enjoyed at least being on this side of many of these rivalries [Derrick laughs] for the last four years. Which is basically my way of telling you that I will be talking shit randomly. [laughter] Only because that’s my competitive setup. But I’m looking forward to it, and I appreciate you coming on and chopping up with me about this. Everybody please check out The Black Athlete podcast, check out Derrick’s work, follow him. You’re on…What’s your handle?
Derrick: @blackstar1906.
Amira: Yeah…Y’all always have to put your damn 1906 there. [laughs]
Derrick: You earn it. [laughs]
Amira: Yeah, true. So hit Derrick up, follow him. Thank you again for joining us on Burn It All Down.
Derrick: Thank you.