Is Charles Barkley Right About Gene Chizik's Hiring Being About Race?

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.”

We’ve always been white and we aren’t worldly enough to have a great deal of expertise on this subject, but we’ll take a stab. We aren’t convinced that the trend line is a grand conspiracy so much as a local issue. Each school, and each school’s administration, is a reflection of the folks that are running the place. Sixty-year-old plus white men in Alabama may be more comfortable with Gene Chizik than Turner Gill. That shouldn’t shock anybody.

That doesn’t make the folks at Auburn who hire a white guy anymore racist than the folks at Grambling who hire a black guy. It’s what people who were born in the 40’s, 50’s and even the 1960’s still do. Old habits are hard to break and comfort zones are developed over many years. It doesn’t make it right, but that’s the way it is.

The Auburn brass may simply have hired Chizik because of who they are, where they are, who their primary constituents are (who’s paying for all of this) and what their life’s experience has been up to this point. And the words “up to this point” are key.

Consider this. Why hasn’t Virginia Tech’s Bud Foster ever been seriously considered as a candidate for a major D1 job? He’s white and he’s extremely well qualified. So why doesn’t Auburn consider him? The answer is easy. The folks at Auburn don’t know him. Foster has been at Virginia Tech for so long that other school's decision-makers aren’t familiar/comfortable with him personally or professionally.

Black or white, Foster is a Hokie because he’s been a Hokie, and only a Hokie, for most of his adult life thus limiting his exposure to like-minded decision makers. Somebody at Auburn knew Chizik. They liked him and trusted him. They didn’t know Bud Foster and probably not Turner Gill. The rest is Barkley aggravating history.

In the end, it's a comfort zone issue. If you were asked to present four candidates to run your business, and ultimately determine your job security and paycheck, we wager that if you are white the majority of your candidates you pick would be white. Conversely, if you are black, the majority would be black. If you’re of Latin American, Asian or Eastern European descent we wager the trend would hold steady.

In addition, would you pick candidates you know personally that you know are qualified or ones others recommended? It would seem the answers are fairly obvious. (Again, setting aside the issue of institutional responsibility, you see the point as it relates to basic human behavior and daily frames of reference that impact each individual’s reactions and decisions.)

Yes, it’s slightly different depending on where you live and how old you are. But if you are over fifty and living in anywhere but a big American city or urban area, we surmise the comfort zone is still wrapped pretty tightly around you and yours. You can’t change who you grew up with, or with whom you went to school or church. You certainly can’t change who you work with, unless you’re the boss, and, ultimately, that's the point. The people in power have to be the agents of change.

Obviously, the situation is changing daily in places other than Auburn, and will no doubt change some more come January 20th when Barack Obama is sworn in as the President of this troubled country.

Our kids live in a very different world today and most are seemingly color blind. Until they’re running the show, there is work to be done, and old white guys will hire the folks they know and have worked with over the years. Fact is, so will old black guys. It’s what we old guys tend to do. Having owned up to that, wouldn't it be nice if the presidents of major universitities and thier athletic directors were a bit more enlightened?

Change comes slowly, but if Turner Gill keeps winning and Charles Barkley continues to speak his mind, change will continue to come.

(AP Photo/Jamie Martin, Reuters, AP Photo by Luis M. Alvarez, Getty Images)