Miami University of Ohio has named Notre Dame offensive coordinator Mike Haywood their new head football coach. This is significant because Mike Haywood becomes the sixth Black head coach in Division I-A.

Haywood has a real opportunity here, because I think the Mid-American Conference (MAC), which the Redhawks compete in, is the best breeding ground for offensive-minded coaches in the country. Urban Meyer, Gary Pinkel, Bo Schembechler, Woody Hayes, Ara Parshegian, they all came out of the MAC. Miami of Ohio is known as the cradle of coaches; both Schembechler and Hayes were head coaches there before moving on to Michigan and Ohio State, respectively. Teams in the MAC often recruit from Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which means their defenses are often lacking in speed, which in turn results in explosive offenses being fielded in the conference.

The most interesting part of the ESPN article on Haywood's hiring is this:

Last week, before English was hired and after Gill had been passed over as a candidate at Auburn, the Black Coaches and Administrators group opened a national telephone hotline offering legal advice to coaches. That move could set the groundwork for a landmark case against universities under civil rights legislation over the lack of minority football coaches in big-time college football.

As I argued in another thread on Burnt Orange Nation addressing the issue of minority hiring, I don't think the lack of Black head coaches in Division I-A is due to racism or prejudice, I think it is due to a lack of Black coordinators. Consider that of the six Black head coaches in D-IA, five of them were a coordinator on either offense or defense before they became head coaches. Mike Locksley of New Mexico was the offensive coordinator at Illinois; Haywood, as we have mentioned, was the OC at Notre Dame; Houston's Kevin Sumlin was the offensive coordinator at A&M before becoming co-OC at Oklahoma; Ron English was the defensive coordinator at Louisville before taking the head coaching position at Eastern Michigan; Randy Shannon was the defensive coordinator at Miami before he was promoted to head coach; the only outlier was Gill, who was working as Director of Player Development for the Green Bay Packers and worked as an offensive assistant at Nebraska before becoming the head coach at Buffalo.

Locksley, Haywood, Sumlin, et al. have shown that if Blacks get the opportunity as coordinators, they can move up to head coaching jobs. Instead of filing lawsuits over the lack of Black head coaches in D-IA college football, the Black Coaches Association needs to work to make sure more qualified Black position coaches are being promoted to coordinator positions.