James Franklin’s dream is to be the first black head coach to win a major college football national championship.
So says Devyn Ford.
How does Ford know? Because that’s his dream, too.
Ford is the nation’s No. 3 high school running back out of Virginia who gave a verbal commitment to Penn State on Friday.
‘What took the lead with Penn State was James Franklin and what he dreams of,” Ford told Brian Dohn of 247sports.com. “I hooked onto his dream and I felt it and I believed in it. That’s what really got me…
‘He’s going to be the first black coach in NCAA history to win a national championship,’ Ford added. ‘That’s what I hook onto.’
You have to like Franklin’s chances.
GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS
The good news for CJF: He is on a roll, having gone 22-5 over the past two seasons, with a Big Ten championship and two Top 8 rankings while riding a wave of recruiting successes.
Plus, David Shaw at Stanford and Willie Taggart at Florida State are the only other current serious contenders. Both coach in the Power Five at high-profile schools with a track record of serious national success over the past decade (Florida State was national champ in 2013) under Jimbo Fisher, since departed to Texas A&M.
Shaw is Franklin’s most immediate contender. At age 45, he’s entering his eighth season at Stanford, with a 73-22 overall record, five seasons with double-digit victories (12, 12, 11, 11, 10), five Pac-12 division titles, a 2-1 record in the Rose Bowl and a final No. 3 ranking in 2015.
Taggart, 41, is more of a long shot. This season is his first at Florida State, after head coaching stints at Western Kentucky (16-20), South Florida (24-25; 10-2 in 2016) and Oregon (7-5). He has youth and tradition on his side, plus a home state full of prospects.
The bad news, on a more global and important level:
Franklin is just one of 12 head coaches at the nation’s 130 major college football programs who is black, according to HitHighlights.com. That’s just 9.2%. It’s a startling number, especially when you consider that at least 57% of major college football players are black, according to a 2013 report by the University of Pennsylvania, “Black Male Student-Athletes and Racial Inequities in NCAA Division I College Sports.”
AT PENN STATE
Counting Franklin’s full-time assistant coaches, Penn State’s staff is near that 57%. Six of Penn State football’s 11 full-time coaches (54.5%), counting Franklin, are African-American. That includes January 2018 hires Ju’Juan Seider (running backs) and David Corley (wide receivers), who succeeded former PSU assistants Charles Huff and Josh Gattis, both of whom are African-Americans and who departed in the off-season for Mississippi State and Alabama, respectively.
As he heads into his fifth season at Penn State, Franklin has had a total of seven black full-time assistants. Comparatively, Bill O’Brien (2012-13) had four black full-time black assistants, while Joe Paterno had a total of 10 black fulltime assistant coaches during his long tenure, beginning with wide receivers coach Booker Brooks in 1972. Two of Paterno’s black assistants — Ron Dickerson and Jim Caldwell — went on to be head coaches. (Important to note here that Paterno’s staff rarely turned over.)
Here’s why the numbers — and, especially the people behind the statistics — matter:
In Tom Junod’s recent terrific piece, “In Search of the Real Mike Tomlin,” for The Undefeated, he wrote about the importance of a black head coach in a sport where the majority of the players are also African-American. Junod writes:
“Talk to white players who play for a black coach and they will tell you that the color of their coach’s skin does not matter. Of course it doesn’t matter, why should it matter? It doesn’t matter one bit.
“Talk to African-American players who play for a black coach and they will tell you that the color of their coach’s skin matters deeply, powerfully, necessarily and unavoidably. Of course it matters, it has to matter, it’d better matter, you’re dam right it matters, because it matters, just for starters, to them.
“And this is the insoluble paradox at the heart of the racial conversation in the United States, circa 2018: That white America speaks of race as a consideration to be transcended, and black America speaks of race as a force to be acknowledged; that white America believes the purpose of about race is to one day end the conversation, and black America believes the purpose of talking about race is to one day get the real conversation started.”
WHAT FRANKLIN SAYS
James Geoffrey Franklin rarely talks about race in his public pronouncements.
He did so three years ago on the Coaches Caravan, however, while at a stop in an airport hotel ballroom in Lithincum, Md., with just two reporters (Nate Bauer of Blue-White Illustrated and I) and a few staffers present. Of the 150 or so CJF media sessions I’ve been present for before and since, it was by far the best.
There, Franklin shared that the “James” in his name is after his father, an African-American from Pittsburgh who met his wife — and James’ Caucasian mother — while a U.S. serviceman in England. The “Geoffrey” is in honor of his late mother’s brother, a British uncle he never met.
Franklin and his sister Deb were raised by his white mother in suburban Philadelphia and by several black aunts — his father’s sisters — in Pittsburgh, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and at the family homestead in North Carolina.
“I have a unique background. It’s not so unique these days, but it was growing up,” Franklin said that May day in 2015 (read the full story here). “Being biracial is not unique these days, which is a powerful thing for this country in many ways.
“In a lot of ways, it’s probably going to change our country for the better, in terms of eradicating racism in our country. I’ve seen some interesting pictures on the Internet what a person is going to look like 50 years from now. It’s just going to be this blend of all these different people.
“It’s given me a really unique perspective,” Franklin added. “I can relate with and be comfortable in so many different settings because of the way I was raised.”
No surprise then, that experience molded has him to this day.
Which, in his mind — and that of Devyn Ford’s — is another day closer to that national title.
