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Tuesday, February 03, 2009
National Media Has Wrong Focus
By Greg Archuleta
Of the Journal
Memo to specified members of the national media: The next time you're speaking out for black college football coaches rights, try it without jamming a fork in their heads.
Mike Locksley and DeWayne Walker, the two new coaches at New Mexico and New Mexico State, respectively, have raised the national profile of collegiate football in the state. We're the only state in the country whose Division I-A programs consist entirely of minority head coaches.
Not all that notoriety has been positive.
Over the past month, Charles Barkley —well-known for his college football analysis — and ESPN.com's Pat Forde have shouted about the injustices toward prospective black head coaches in college football.
Only seven have jobs among 120 Division I-A programs.
Yet, the words by Barkley and Forde lay the groundwork for failure by denouncing the programs that have hired the coaches.
Forde last week began a column extolling the virtues of Walker, the former UCLA defensive coordinator — and then proceeded to talk about the NMSU job in terms of an sitting in an “electric chair.”
Forde went into the same buildup and knockdown for Eastern Michigan coach Ron English and then starts on Locksley.
“Then he was hired this offseason at New Mexico where even Dennis Franchione couldn't carve out a winning overall record in six seasons,” Forde wrote. “The Lobos' ledger over the past quarter-century: 118 victories, 179 defeats.
“What do Walker, English and Locksley all have in common, beyond incredibly challenging first head-coaching jobs? They're all black coaches.”
Barkley threw Locksley under the bus in December as an aside to his outrage over Buffalo coach Turner Gill — a black head coach — losing the Auburn job to Gene Chizik, a former Tigers defensive coordinator who's white.
Chizik compiled a 5-19 record in two seasons as head coach at Iowa State.
“My biggest problem with the black coaches is they're not getting jobs and they're getting [expletive] jobs when they are hired,” Barkley told ESPN.com's Mark Schlabach. “They're not getting good jobs. They're not getting jobs where they can be successful. That's why I wanted Turner to get the Auburn job. He could win consistently at Auburn. You can't win consistently at New Mexico.”
Now there's a recruiting pitch Locksley can use. Thanks, Chuck.
Wait — Forde gave Walker an even better one:
“Hard work often goes unrewarded for black college football coaches. And sometimes even when it is rewarded, you wind up with a dead-end job in Las Cruces,” Forde wrote.
Granted, Walker has a tough job ahead, rebuilding an Aggies program that hasn't gone to a bowl game since 1960 — the longest drought in the country.
But NMSU did go 7-5 and finish second in the Sun Belt Conference in 2002, under, ahem, a black head coach — Tony Samuel. Had the Aggies been in the Western Athletic Conference then, they probably would've gotten a bowl bid.
And in Forde's rush to prove his point about the dregs that is Lobo football, he conveniently omitted that UNM was the only Mountain West school to be bowl-eligible from 2001-07 and had a 49-38 under Rocky Long during that span.
Franchione took over a program in shambles. Locksley isn't.
All that's left is for Locksley and Walker to prove they can win here. They're not asking for your help.
Just don't put them at a disadvantage before they even start — especially when you're trying to point out what a disadvantage they're already at.
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