College football has an interim coach problem

Black coaches are often tasked with being caretakers of a beleaguered program, but are seldom hired to the role in a full-time capacity

Last Saturday, mere hours after Jonathan Smith had left Oregon State, his alma mater, to become the new head football coach at Michigan State, the Beavers appointed Kefense Hynson to serve as the interim head coach.

On a number of different levels, it made sense. Hynson had been with Smith for each of his six seasons at Oregon State and, during that time had forged strong bonds with the players that he coached, giving university administration a steady and respected hand to pilot the program during a time of turbulence.

“Coach Hynson is an integral and valued member of Oregon State’s renowned coaching staff,” Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes said in a statement announcing the move. “Known by coaches and players for his total commitment, not only to success on the field but also to the holistic well-being of student-athletes, Coach Hynson is ready to lead the program through this interim period.”

Just three days later, Oregon State had another announcement – it was promoting another member of the staff, defensive coordinator Trent Bray, to not be the interim head coach, but the permanent head coach.

For Black assistant coaches like Hynson across FBS football, it’s an all-too-relatable story.

The glass ceiling of being a temporary solution

Over the past month or so, college football’s annual coaching carousel has been in full swing, with universities firing underperforming coaches with the hopes of luring a savior who can launch the program to new heights. With the regular season over, that movement has accelerated and intensified, with vacancies being filled and new openings being created at a dizzying pace.

A necessary, yet often overlooked, step in that process is the appointment of an interim coach. In the days, weeks or sometimes even months between the former coach’s exit and their replacement’s arrival, a program needs a caretaker, particularly if, like Oregon State, its season isn’t yet over.

At the Power Five level, where just eight of 69 head coaches (11.6%) entering the 2023 season were Black, those interim roles go to minority coaches at a disproportionate rate. Going back to the 2013 season, there have been 62 interim head coaches at Power Five programs. While the majority of them were white, 62.9%, Black coaches accounted for 37.1% of them.

In theory, these are valuable opportunities for a historically (and presently) underrepresented group. Being an interim coach, particularly if they take over earlier in the season, is an extended audition that offers a close approximation of what that coach could achieve if they were handed the full-time role. If done right, it can turn someone who was previously an afterthought into the clear and obvious hire.

The problem is, it seldom works that way, at least for non-white interims.

Of the 39 instances in which a white man was an interim head coach, 13 of those coaches went on to get a full-time head coaching position in the FBS, a number of whom were handed the reins of the program where they took over on a temporary basis. By contrast, of the 23 instances in which an interim head coach was Black, only one of those men went on to become become an FBS head coach – Mike Locksley, who took over at Maryland after Randy Edsall was fired six games into the 2015 season, and was hired by the Terrapins three years later on a full-time basis.

Even in the case of Locksley – a sharp offensive mind and Washington, D.C. native with extensive recruiting ties in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia region, qualities that made him a natural fit for the job – he was only selected by Maryland after D.J. Durkin was fired in disgrace in the aftermath of a scandal surrounding the very easily avoidable death of a player.

Despite being placed into what seems from the outside like an advantageous situation, Black interim coaches are overwhelmingly placeholders, not candidates.

For some coaches, it happens more than once. Over the past 10 years, there have been three Black FBS coaches who have served in an interim capacity at an FBS school multiple times. Odell Haggins was the interim head coach at Florida State twice in a 24-month span, first after Jimbo Fisher’s departure to Texas A&M and then after Willie Taggart’s midseason firing in 2019. Bryan McClendon has been an interim at Georgia in 2015 and Oregon in 2021. In one of the more odd examples of this trend, Greg Knox was appointed the Mississippi State interim coach last month, marking the second time he had been placed into that role for the Bulldogs (the first of which came six years earlier). In between those momentary stints, he was the interim head coach for another SEC program, Florida, in 2021.

The reasons why the landscape is this fraught and seemingly rigged only require so much digging.

The first, and easiest, culprit is the lack of a robust bench. The professional backgrounds of FBS head coaching hires are only so varied. While there are occasional wildcards like someone from the NFL ranks or someone on television, a school is typically turning to a head coach from a lower level or smaller program, or it’s hiring a coordinator, someone who runs an offense or defense and is prepared to take the crucial next step to oversee an entire team. While we’ve already addressed the low number of Black head coaches in the Power Five, it’s only so much better at coordinator. Heading into the 2023 season, just 21.6% of offensive and defensive coordinators at Power Five programs were Black at a level of the sport in which a healthy majority of scholarship players are Black.

That dearth of Black coordinators means that Black coaches in college football are often relegated to oversee position groups, where they do important – and usually quite lucrative – work in trying to sculpt a team into a champion, but it’s the kind of job title that rarely leads directly to being a head coach.

It’s here where a more insidious, if unintentional, factor comes into play. 

Much like how it is for assistant coaches in major men’s college basketball, some of these position coaches are often seen as recruiters. They’re there to instruct, sure, but their greatest value is getting players to commit to the school and ultimately arrive on campus. In a lot of instances, a program’s power-brokers want someone who can “relate” to players. Well-intentioned as some of these hiring decisions and task delegations are, they end with a predictable result – with a Black coach getting an opportunity to be on a Power Five staff, but not in the kind of position that leads them to their ultimate career goals.

When selecting an interim, those variables come into play, especially if a university is worried about what a coaching change and the instability it presumably brings will do to its incoming recruiting class. Before a permanent hire gets made, many athletic directors want to either buy time or offer some sense of calm to keep the recruiting class together by having one of the staff’s ace recruiters not only remain on board, but be given what at least appears to be a promotion. This was seen recently when Texas A&M elevated Elijah Robinson last month to interim head coach after Jimbo Fisher was fired. Of the eight five-star players in the Aggies’ record-setting 2022 haul, Robinson was the primary recruiter for four of them.

And when Texas A&M introduced its new head coach earlier this week, it predictably wasn’t Robinson.

An unlikely hero emerges

Despite the larger, disheartening statistics and anecdotes around this subject, there are some reasons for hope.

One of them comes from an unlikely source, at least based on what has surrounded him for much of the past year – Jim Harbaugh.

For all the ire and controversy he has attracted for much of his time at Michigan, along with his extensive history of genuinely baffling behavior and comments, Harbaugh has a lengthy and commendable track record of placing Black coaches in powerful, front-facing roles on his staff. 

At Stanford, he brought aboard David Shaw as his offensive coordinator, making it possible for Shaw to succeed him as the Cardinal head coach when Harbaugh left for the San Francisco 49ers after the 2010 season. After the 2018 season, he hired Josh Gattis as his offensive coordinator and two years later, he promoted Sherrone Moore to work alongside him as a co-coordinator. This year, two of his three coordinators are Black (Michigan has co-defensive coordinators).

With that sort of racial diversity among his top assistants, Harbaugh’s connection to recruiting violations and the ongoing investigation into in-person scouting and sign-stealing has actually been beneficial for those who work under him.

With Harbaugh suspended six games this season – three for COVID-era recruiting rule-breaking and three for the ongoing sign-stealing fiasco – the Wolverines have had to appoint and lean on interim head coaches for half the regular season. Moore has been Michigan’s acting head coach in four games this season while running backs coach Mike Hart occupied the role for the second half of the Wolverines’ Sept. 9 victory against UNLV. Of the 12 halves Michigan was without Harbaugh this season, the team had a Black head coach for nine of them.

Several of those games thrust coaches into meaningful, high-pressure situations leading a team with national championship aspirations. While Harbaugh was suspended for the final three regular-season games by the Big Ten, Moore helped the Wolverines earn high-profile victories against Penn State and Ohio State, both of which are top-10 teams. Those wins turned the 37-year-old Moore from a promising and highly regarded young assistant with a certain head-coaching future into a national figure, someone who excelled on the sport’s biggest stages and did so under unusual circumstances. Moore’s name has been floated for a number of vacancies this year, but at this point, he has one of the greatest luxuries an assistant can have – the chance to be picky about the next step in his career. With Harbaugh a frequent target of NFL coaching searches, Moore could very well be the best option for Michigan if it needs to hire a replacement.

Harbaugh isn’t some kind of savior for his hiring practices. All of the Black coaches on his various staffs were more than qualified. Shaw is the all-time wins leader at a Stanford program that has been coached by the likes of Bill Walsh, Pop Warner and Harbaugh over the course of its existence. In 2021, Gattis won the Broyles Award, given annually to the top assistant in college football. Moore’s a finalist for the honor this year and would seem to be a heavy favorite to win it.

When Moore tearfully shouted out Harbaugh during an expletive-laden post-game interview after the Nov. 11 win at Penn State, he was widely mocked for what (fairly) seemed like a hyperbolic reaction to someone who was suspended, not dead. But it revealed a deep allegiance and appreciation for Harbaugh, a genuine, heartfelt and profoundly human connection to someone who, again, appears to much of the outside world to be a humongous weirdo.

“I’m not saying I’m in a position of granting who a Michigan man is or isn’t, who a Michigan legend is or is not,” Harbaugh said earlier this week. “I’m not the maker of those two lists. But I have nominated people before, and I nominate Sherrone Moore as a Michigan legend.”

Interim head coaches are often tasked with overseeing hopeless, perilous and thankless situations, but in Michigan’s case, and because of Harbaugh’s staffing decisions, it allowed coaches from an underrepresented group to coach a top-five team with much of the country paying close attention.

Harbaugh’s not a perfect symbol, but he just might set the kind of example that could help put the sport and its coaching profession in a better, more equitable place.

(Photos: USA Today Sports