Minutes after Notre Dame defeated Georgia to clinch a berth in the College Football Playoff semifinals against Penn State earlier this month, Tremaine Jackson’s phone buzzed.
“Well, we’re guaranteed one,” the text message read.
Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman and Penn State coach James Franklin would face each other in the Orange Bowl, ensuring a black coach would advance to the national title game for the first time in history.
The 41-year-old Jackson, who was hired as Prairie View A&M head coach in December, found himself exchanging texts and calls with fellow Black coaches at the start of each season, wondering who could be the one to lead his team coaches to the pinnacle.
“We look at the guys who have real opportunities and say: who could that be?” Jackson said. “And as the season goes on, you’re all like, ‘Hey, I’m rooting for him.’”
Freeman, whose father is black and mother Korean, defeated Franklin’s Penn State team for the right to make history. His Fighting Irish meet Ohio State Monday night in Atlanta for the championship.
While standing onstage after the Orange Bowl, ESPN reporter Molly McGrath used her third question of four to ask Freeman, “Coach, I know you’re all about the team, but I just want to give everyone here a moment to celebrate. you, for being the first black head coach to go to a national championship game in college football.
The crowd cheered.
“Just hearing that answer, how much does it mean to you?”
“I never want to distract from the team. It’s an honor and I hope that all coaches, minorities, black, Asian, white, great people continue to have opportunities to lead young men in this way. But this isn’t about me. This is about us. We’re going to celebrate what we’ve done. Because it is something special.”
“It’s an honor and I hope that all coaches, minorities, black, Asian, white, it doesn’t matter, great people continue to have opportunities to lead young men in this way.”
Marcus Freeman on how he became the first Black and Asian American head coach to win the FBS national championship 👏 pic.twitter.com/KHMksJUNdK
— ESPN (@espn) January 10, 2025
Clips of the exchange went viral almost immediately. The video posted by ESPN alone has been viewed 2.6 million times on X.
A large portion of the comments there and elsewhere where the clip was posted praised Freeman and criticized McGrath and ESPN for the question. Some believed ESPN was injecting race at a time when it shouldn’t be there.
Black coaches from across the sport can tell you why that should be the case.
“We talk about it because it’s real. What are you pushing when you tell me I can’t talk about this? said Van Malone, the assistant head coach, defensive pass game coordinator and cornerbacks coach at Kansas State, who has worked with several minority coaching associations and serves as CFO of the Minority Coaches Advancement Association.
“It’s really a huge deal,” said Archie McDaniel, who coaches linebackers at Illinois and is president of the Minority Coaches Advancement Association. “For me personally, it’s monumental.”
Jackson said, “When you realize we’ve been playing football since the 1860s, look how far we’ve come. I support Marcus very much. Because it gives us confirmation.”
At all levels of college football since it began in 1869 – FBS, FCS, Division II, Division III and NAIA – only seven black coaches are credited with coaching a game that could have captured a national title.
Rudy Hubbard won a Division I-AA title at Florida A&M in 1978.
Mike London, who won an FCS title at the University of Richmond in 2008, is the only coach to hoist a national title trophy anywhere other than an HBCU.
Jackson, who was hired in 2022 as the first Black coach in Valdosta State history, led his program to the Division II national title game last month and lost. He combined his work with a job at Prairie View A&M, a historically black university that competes at the FCS level.
In his nearly two decades as a coach, McDaniel has lost count of the times he’s heard it. He sits down with a player and talks about life after football. Many of them bring up coaching, but he’ll hear a familiar quote from his black players.
“I would love to be a head coach,” McDaniel told him. “But I don’t know if that’s really possible.”
Currently, 18 of the 134 (13.4 percent) FBS programs have a Black head coach. In the SEC, that number is zero. The ACC has two. Deion Sanders is the only Black coach in the Big 12. Four Big Ten coaches are Black.
One answer to the question of why there are so few black coaches in a sport played primarily by African Americans is that the history of college football is the history of America. Schools and conferences were not integrated until the 1960s and 1970s during the civil rights movement.
The Bowl Championship Series debuted in 1998. Five years later, Mississippi State made Sylvester Croom the first black head coach in SEC history. Twenty-two years after that point, the league has four additional programs at 16 and one fewer Black head coach.
Opportunities are rare. Opportunities at good schools capable of reaching the national championship game are even rarer. Since 2000, the 48 spots in the national championship game have been filled by just 17 programs. Seven of those have had a Black full-time head coach at some point in their history who did not serve in an interim role.
A big part of the reason Freeman’s moment means so much to Black coaches in sports is because they understand the math. They also know how to play the political game, Jackson said. Many don’t want to speak out publicly about diversity, Malone said.
“The older crowd never thought they would see it,” Jackson said. “The younger crowd expects to see it and thinks it’s easy to get there.”
McDaniel said a few years ago the Minority Coaches Advancement Association manually counted the number of minority head coaches among the more than 500 programs at every level of the sport. They found 45.
“I am a numbers person. All I look at are numbers. And numbers and opportunities directly reflect each other,” he said.
The National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches – founded by Maryland coach Mike Locksley in 2020 – works to expand schools’ candidate pools when vacancies arise and point them to candidates who may not be on their radar. One such effort by the group, which has more than 2,000 members, paired emerging coaches with athletic directors for an 18-month mentoring program, according to Raj Kudchadkar, Executive Director of the NCMFC. Freeman was paired with Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez.
Notre Dame promoted Freeman from defensive coordinator in December 2021 after Brian Kelly left for LSU.
In an open letter to Notre Dame shortly after he was hired, Freeman talked about it more openly than he has during this Playoff run.
“Being part of this coalition has been an important reminder that: Hey, you are a representation of many people. And that’s what I want to be. I want to be a representation, but more than that, I want to be a demonstration,” Freeman wrote. “I want to be a demonstration of what someone can do, and at what level they can do it, if given the OPPORTUNITY. Because that is what is needed: opportunities. We need more minorities to have the opportunity to apply for jobs – and we need more minorities to have the opportunity to do jobs where they can be successful.”
Multiple coaches pointed out that Black head coaches Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith would face off in the 2007 Super Bowl — Dungy became the first Black head coach to be crowned NFL champions when his Indianapolis Colts won — and noted that Monday night might be remembered in the same way, especially when Freeman’s Irish pull off the upset.
“What this moment offers is hope for a lot of people who have had a lot of moments of discouragement,” McDaniel said. “It’s sometimes very difficult to imagine achieving something that has literally never been done before.”
(Photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)