When the College Football Playoffs reached a crescendo on Jan. 3 with the University of Notre Dame’s impressive triumph over the Georgia Bulldogs, a perennial powerhouse, it was inevitable that attention would turn to Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman’s history-making national title run. Freeman’s responses when asked about being the first Black head coach in the semifinals and then the championship game after his team wins thus far have been a disappointing negation of his achievement’s historical significance.
When interviewed on the field after Notre Dame survived its latest playoff battle in Miami, knocking Penn State out of title contention, Freeman again refused to unequivocally own or at least comfortably acknowledge it. Instead, the head coach of one of the most famous programs in sports said he didn’t want to take the spotlight off the team and he hoped there would just be more “opportunities” for deserving people to lead “young men” like his — Asian, Black and white, too. Say what?
Credit: david collins
Credit: david collins
My Aunt Joyce was the first to call. “That’s the only thing I don’t like that he’s done, not owning it. Doesn’t he realize it makes us feel good to seeing his accomplishments?” She’s lived within a 10-minute drive of Notre Dame’s campus for decades, and she and my mother have kept Coach Freeman in their prayers since he became head coach.
This smacks eerily of a dilemma the poet-writer Langston Hughes interrogated in his 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Though Hughes refers specifically to writers and artists, his cautionary note remains relevant for underrepresented Black public creatives, whether in art or sports. Hughes argues that artists should embrace the wealth and inspiration of their history and cultural reservoir and not worry about whether the white mainstream sees or tags them as “Negro” artists. Hughes writes, “But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America — this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.” Attention on Freeman’s racial identification and the politics of race that certainly have played a role in Notre Dame’s and college football’s history generally is clearly an uncomfortable point of focus for the coach. It shouldn’t be.
American sports politics today is a study of just how much history has shaped it. College and professional sports have been a microcosm of the legacy of racial and gender inequities in opportunity, whether in executive, head coach or quarterback positions. At Notre Dame, history is everything when it comes to football. Until recently, the program has remained relevant among far more dominant contemporary college football programs because of Notre Dame’s storied competitive and championship history — a reign at the top that has lasted for decades.
Freeman is Notre Dame’s second Black head football coach. The first was Tyrone Willingham in 2002. His run ended prematurely in 2004 amid much controversy about Notre Dame’s treatment of its first Black coach. Freeman, in just his third year, can make history in more than one way. If he wins the national title in his third year, he’ll follow several Notre Dame coaching legends: Frank Leahy in 1943, Ara Parseghian in 1966 and Dan Devine in 1977. This is not history-making to run from — and especially so considering how much more challenging it has been for coaches who aren’t white to attain elite program head coaching positions and get the time and support to succeed on their merit when they do.
Though all head coaches at champion pedigree programs face scrutiny and the threat of being fired sooner rather than later, it’s quietly understood that the timer for success or bust has tended to be shorter for Black coaches.
Coach Freeman is admirably winning big on the field and in the locker room, but not when it comes to owning this problematic history. Though his public platform is bigger than it’s ever been, he’s standing on some historical shoulders, joining the pantheon of other college and professional football sports history makers, from legendary football college coaches like Grambling State’s Eddie Robinson and Doug Williams, the first Black football players in formerly segregated elite NFL and college football teams like Notre Dame’s Wayne Edmonds (1952) to the NFL’s former Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy (Superbowl XLI winner), who, in another first in a Superbowl game, defeated a team led by another African American head coach, Lovie Smith, of the Chicago Bears.
This year, the College Football Championship game falls on the national holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and it’s being held in Atlanta, King’s hometown and a key site for civil rights activism. Freeman knows he has serious coaching credibility. Hopefully, win or lose, before or after the game, when the microphone is thrust into his face and millions are watching, Freeman will honor history and understand his own moment within it. He doesn’t have to be bold like Deion Sanders (Coach Prime) and call out specific inequities or declare himself a barrier-breaker nor attempt lofty philosophical platitudes.
King already nailed articulating the dream of being judged by the “content of one’s character.” Coach Freeman just needs to recognize that his getting here, to the most competitive height of college football, opens the door wider for other Black coaches. He should quell that desire to deflect attention from it. This, too, is a teachable moment for his players who are writing their own history.
When you write your own history, you are adding a footstep that others after you can step into and beyond.
Stephane Dunn, a University of Notre Dame alum, is a writer, filmmaker and professor at Morehouse College. She is the author of “Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films” and “Snitchers” and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Newsweek, Vogue, Ms. magazine, CNN.com, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Root, among others.
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