Discriminatory Undertones Pandemic to College Coach Firing Practices

As someone who has acted as an adviser and confidant to college coaches, I have had an opportunity to witness firsthand the ups and downs of one of the most challenging professions in all of sports. Between travel, recruiting, practice, game day preparation and a host of other responsibilities, 100-hour workweeks during the season are the norm. Additionally, coaches also face immense pressures from the media, fans and school administration to succeed both on and off the court. From the wins to the recruits to the number of tickets sold, coaches are revered one minute, only to be vilified the next.

A decade ago, the majority of coaches were given five-year contract terms, equivalent to the time it would take to recruit their own players and see them through their entire college careers and on to graduation.  As the stakes of success have risen in college athletics, so have the expectations on coaches to win, and win in the present. Consequently, over the last 10 years we have seen a startling hiring and firing trend amongst college coaches, in which the practice of coaches having more than a few years to revive struggling programs has become nothing less than obsolete.

By analyzing the hiring and firing data for coaches employed in Division I college basketball over the last decade, it was discovered that only one conference, the Atlantic Sun, out of 32, averaged exactly two coaches per decade, which would equal a base rate of five years per coach.  The average number of coaches a team in any one of the conferences had over the last decade was 2.73, which works out to be under four years per term. Because this data includes not only coaches that were fired, but also those that moved on to better opportunities as well, the data must be interpreted cautiously. For instance, all but one (the Big XII) of the conferences that averaged over three coaches in a decade are considered “mid-major,” and certainly a significant amount of the coaches in those conferences left for greener pastures at some point in their tenure.

One statically significant conclusion that can be made from the above data is that the two historically black conferences that are members of Division I, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) and the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), have an alarmingly high turnover rate of coaches at their respective member schools. In fact, over the last decade, of the astonishing 72 coaching changes that have occurred at the schools within these conferences, only two of them can be attributed to coaches leaving for jobs in other leagues. That means that 70 coaches (approximately 3.1 per-team) have been fired or forced to resign over the last 10 years!

We decided to focus our research on the hiring and firing practices as they relate to minority college basketball coaches. There has been much controversy during the last decade over the lack of minority coaches in college football. Although the numbers have increased significantly over the last few years, there is still much work to be done. Minority hiring practices in college basketball, on the other hand, have been considered to be at reasonable levels, with approximately 22% of the 340 Division I schools employing minorities in their head coaching positions over the last decade. These statistics do not include the SWAC and MEAC since they seem to only employ African-American coaches.

Of course, some conferences tend to do worse in this category than others; for instance, those with memberships primarily based in the Midwest and Mountain West employ very few minorities. The Big Sky and Mountain West conferences have averaged less than 5% minority employment of men’s basketball coaches during the last decade. On the other end of the spectrum, the MAC and Ivy League have done well, with minority hiring rates above 40%.  The mean of the conferences that compose the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) was 25.6%, or slightly above the national average.

Delving deeper, one can begin to look for racial disparities within each conference by analyzing the percentage of minority coaches fired or forced to resign during the period the data covers. In doing so, we see that, not surprisingly, the majority of  conferences that tended to employ minority coaches more often also tended to fire or force them to resign at a greater rate. Yet, if we begin to break down the data and perform some statistical analysis we begin to discover some startling information.

When working with numbers, in order to determine whether something is statistically significant, a regression analysis must be performed. Regression analysis is a statistical tool used in determining the relationship between variables. For the most part, one using the tool is attempting to ascertain the causal effect of one variable upon another – for instance the connection between the square footage of a house and their sale prices. In order to perform this analysis, one must assemble the primary variables of interest and then perform the regression to estimate the measurable effect of the causal variable upon the variable that they influence.

In the case at hand, to gather the data necessary to perform such an analysis, we looked at the percentage of total minority coaches in the conference over the last decade compared to the percentage of the minority coaches who were fired over the same period. So, for example, approximately 20% of the coaches in Big Ten basketball over the last 10 years were minorities, and yet they accounted for 50% of the total coaches that were fired.Now, the 30% difference in this instance is extreme and could be considered an isolated case with a number of explanations. In order to properly assess whether minority coaches were fired at higher rates than Caucasians overall, we performed a regression analysis for all 30 conferences (not including historically black colleges and universities). This also allows for us to determine whether a relationship is “statistically significant;” that is, the degree of confidence that the actual relationship is close to the projected relationship.

Our results are unambiguous; not only are minorities hired at considerably lower rates in Division I men’s college basketball, but they are also fired at a significantly higher rate. Yes, some conferences do a good job of hiring minority coaches, and, yes, the more minority coaches in a conference, the more they end up being fired, but overall the numbers show that minority head coaches also had a significantly higher chance of being fired than their Caucasian peers. In fact, a Chi-squared test shows that 70% of NCAA conferences fall above the baseline firing rate when it comes to minorities. That, in a nutshell, means that those conferences fire minorities at greater than the one-to-one rate we would expect in uniform hiring and firing practices.

Now before we jump to conclusions and cry racism and injustice, we must be logical in our assessments. There are many dynamics at play when it comes to hiring and firing coaches, and a number of factors that administrators take into account when making such decisions. Although the data shows a statistically significant trend, it is not so substantial that the only explanation is one based on prejudice. We cannot, as academics or even casual readers, take the data at face value and say that the Big Ten or ACC are the worst offenders because they have the largest differential; the data must be considered as a whole. That being said, the objective of this study was not to determine whether there is racism present in collegiate athletics (an accusation far more complicated than just statistics can explain) but rather whether there is enough data to support the hypothesis that there might be.

Jason Belzer is a member of the INSIGHT Into Diversity Sports Editorial Board.

Originally published in our February 15 issue (March 2012).