Former Auburn and NBA star Charles Barkley has been known to speak his mind. Yesterday was no different, when the Round Mound of Rebound made it clear that he believed race was the primary factor in Auburn’s hiring of Gene Chizik to replace Tommy Tubberville as head football coach.“I think race was the No. 1 factor,” Barkley told ESPN. “You can say it’s not about race, but you can’t compare the two résumés [Turner Gill and Chizik] and say [Chizik] deserved the job. Out of all the coaches they interviewed, Chizik probably had the worst résumé.”
It’s hard to argue the resume point. Turner Gill is the University at Buffalo’s coach who took over a fledgling program in 2006. The Buffs had won 10 games the previous seven seasons before capturing their third MAC Championship this season with a win over previously undefeated Ball State.
The other interesting candidate was Rodney Garner, an Alabama native, former star player and assistant coach at Auburn. Garner is currently a highly regarded assistant head coach at Georgia where he’s considered a master recruiter.
And then there’s Chizik who’s on a 10-game losing streak as part of a three year 5-19 record at Iowa State. Huh?
Barkley said he was “shocked” by the hire and it’s easy to see from where Sir Charles is coming. But was it really all about race?
No doubt, this will start the debate again about Afro-American coaches in the NCAA’s D1 football. There are many fewer black coaches than there are black people in terms of relative population in the U.S. When you consider the number of Afro-Americans that participate in the sport and then count the number of coaches, the numbers are obviously disproportionately low. Same is true in the NFL.
So, let’s set aside the issue of acting responsibly even though any institution of higher learning should be mindful of all of these issues. So feel free to admonish Auburn, we aren’t here to defend them, they should have been a bit smarter or, at the least, a bit more sensitive to this issue. We’re just gonna take a broad brush look at, as we say here at TAH, “why things are.”
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