Marcus Freeman’s moment is significant for Black coaches: ‘It gives us validation’

Minutes after Notre Dame beat 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 be facing off in the Orange Bowl, assuring that a Black coach would advance to the national title game for the first time in history.

Jackson, 41, who was hired as Prairie View A&M head coach in December, has found himself trading texts and phone calls with fellow Black coaches at the start of every season, wondering who can be the one who coaches his team to the pinnacle.

“We look at the guys who have real opportunities and say who can it be?” Jackson said. “And as the season goes along, you’re all like, ‘Hey, I’m pulling for him.’”

Freeman, whose father is Black and mother is Korean, beat Franklin’s Penn State team for the right to make history. His Fighting Irish meet Ohio State on Monday night in Atlanta for the championship.

Standing on the stage after the Orange Bowl, ESPN reporter Molly McGrath used her third question of four to ask Freeman: “Coach, I know you’re all about team, but I want to give a moment for everyone here to be able to celebrate you, because you are the first Black head coach to go to a national championship game in college football.”

The crowd cheered.

“Just hearing that response alone, how much does this mean to you?”

“I don’t ever want to take attention away from the team. It is an honor and I hope all coaches, minorities, Black, Asian, White, great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this. But this ain’t about me. This is about us. We’re going to celebrate what we’ve done. Because it’s something special.”

“It is an honor and I hope all coaches, minorities, Black, Asian, white, it doesn’t matter, great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this.”

Marcus Freeman on becoming the first Black and Asian American head coach to make the FBS national championship 👏 pic.twitter.com/KHMksJUNdK

— ESPN (@espn) January 10, 2025

Clips of the exchange almost immediately went viral. The video posted by ESPN alone has 2.6 million views on X.

Much of the response there and elsewhere the clip was posted praised Freeman and criticized McGrath and ESPN for the question. Some believed ESPN was injecting race into a moment where it shouldn’t be present.

Black coaches across the sport can tell you why it should be.

“We’re talking about it because it’s real. What are you pushing when you’re telling me I shouldn’t be talking about this?” said Van Malone, the assistant head coach, defensive pass game coordinator and cornerbacks coach at Kansas State, who has worked with a variety of minority coach associations and serves as the CFO of the Minority Coaches Advancement Association.

“It’s a really, really massive deal,” said Archie McDaniel, who coaches linebackers at Illinois and serves as president of the Minority Coaches Advancement Association. “For me personally, it’s monumental.”

Said Jackson: “When you realize we’ve been playing football since the 1860s, you just go, man, look how far we’ve come. I’m rooting for Marcus like hell. Because it gives us validation.”

Across all levels of college football since it began in 1869 — FBS, FCS, Division II, Division III and NAIA — only seven Black coaches are believed to have coached a game that could have clinched a national title.

Rudy Hubbard won a Division I-AA title at Florida A&M in 1978.

Mike London, who won an FCS title in 2008 at the University of Richmond, is the only coach to hoist a national title trophy somewhere other than at an HBCU.

Jackson, 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 parlayed his work into the job at Prairie View A&M, a historically Black university that competes at the FCS level.

In his almost 20 years as a coach, McDaniel has lost count of how many times he’s heard it. He’ll sit down with a player and talk about life after football. Lots of them bring up coaching, but he’ll hear a familiar phrase from his Black players.

“I would love to be a head coach,” McDaniel said they tell 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 as to why there are so few Black coaches in a sport played predominantly by African Americans is that the history of college football is the history of America. Schools and conferences didn’t integrate until the 1960s and ’70s amid 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 moment, the league has four additional programs at 16 and one fewer Black head coach.

Opportunities are rare. Opportunities at good schools that are capable of reaching the national championship game are even rarer. Since 2000, the 48 spots in the national championship game have been occupied by just 17 programs. Seven of those have had a Black full-time head coach not in an interim role at some time in their history.

Much of the reason Freeman’s moment means so much to Black coaches in the sport is because they understand the math. They also know of playing the political game, Jackson said. Many don’t want to speak out about diversity publicly, Malone said.

“The older crowd never thought they’d see it,” Jackson said. “The younger crowd expects to see it and thinks it’s easy to get there.”

McDaniel said that a few years ago the Minority Coaches Advancement Association counted the number of minority head coaches by hand at the more than 500 programs at every level of the sport. They found 45.

“I’m a numbers guy. All I look at are numbers. And numbers and opportunity have a direct reflection on one another,” he said.

The National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches — founded by Maryland coach Mike Locksley in 2020 — works to expand schools’ applicant pools when openings arise and point them to candidates that might not be on their radar. One such effort from the group, which has over 2,000 members, paired up-and-coming coaches with athletic directors for an 18-month mentorship 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 addressed it more openly than he has during this Playoff run.

“Being a part of this coalition has been an important reminder that: Hey, you are a representation of a lot of people. And that’s what I want to be. I want to be a representation, but also more than that I want to be a demonstration,” Freeman wrote. “I want to be a demonstration of what someone can do, and the level they can do it at, if they are given the OPPORTUNITY. Because that’s what is needed: opportunity. We need more minorities to get the opportunity to interview — and we need more minorities to get the opportunity to do a job that they can have success in.”

Multiple coaches pointed to Black head coaches Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith going head-to-head in the Super Bowl in 2007 — Dungy became the first Black head coach to be crowned the NFL’s champion when his Indianapolis Colts won — and noted that Monday night might be remembered similarly, especially if Freeman’s Irish pull the upset.

“What this moment provides is hope for a lot of people that have had a lot of moments of being discouraged,” McDaniel said. “It’s really hard at times to imagine yourself accomplishing something that has literally never been done.”

(Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)