Jackson State's Deion Sanders 'kicked down some doors' but where do HBCU sports go now?
In February for Black History Month, Paste BN Sports is publishing the series 28 Black Stories in 28 Days. We examine the issues, challenges and opportunities Black athletes and sports officials continue to face after the nation’s reckoning on race two years ago.
Kortne Gosha’s reaction mirrored the rest of college sports when Ashley Robinson, the athletics director at Jackson State, revealed in September 2020 that he was about to hire Deion Sanders as head football coach.
"He called me and said, ‘What do you think?’ " said Gosha, the athletics director at Florida A&M and Robinson’s longtime friend. "I said, ‘You’ll win the press conference.’ "
At best, hiring an NFL Hall of Famer and media star with a short coaching track record looked like a high-risk, high-reward bet on the force of Sanders’ personality bringing national interest to a program that had fallen into irrelevance. At worst, it could have been a publicity stunt doomed to embarrass everyone involved.
Instead, Sanders’ tenure has not only been successful on the field, it’s turned into a moment of opportunity for the entire group of football-playing Historically Black Colleges and Universities that have traditionally struggled for funding and exposure in the NCAA structure.
"I think we are as healthy now as we have been in quite some time," said Southwestern Athletic Conference commissioner Charles McClelland, whose league has become the most prominent hub for HBCU sports.
A large part of it, undeniably, is due to the Sanders-driven marketing machine that has brought mainstream intrigue to a niche product. The evidence of it showed up weekly in the large crowds Jackson State drew wherever they played and 2.6 million television viewers for the Celebration Bowl, which is considered the HBCU national championship. There’s also been an unprecedented impact in recruiting, where Sanders pulled off one of the biggest stunners in memory when cornerback Travis Hunter, ranked by some scouting services as the No. 1 prospect in the country, flipped his commitment from Florida State to Jackson State in December.
More: Travis Hunter commits to Jackson State: Are more Black athletes choosing HBCU sports?
More: Howard's Kenneth Blakeney, like Deion Sanders in football, wants to reawaken HBCU basketball
Though administrators and longtime observers of the HBCU scene acknowledge that Sanders is a unique phenomenon – and one that may not last long if he gets an opportunity to coach at a Power Five school within the next couple years – there hasn’t been this much optimism surrounding HBCU football in decades. Sanders may be a one-off whose formula can’t be replicated anywhere else, but rarely in the modern era of college sports have these schools been as well-positioned as they are now to capitalize on their appeal and potential.
"In terms of popularity and interest, it’s definitely the highest it’s been since I’ve been doing this," said Steven Gaither, who started the HBCU Gameday web site in 2012. "It’s at a really high point right now. Now everybody wants to touch it."
The evidence for that is not just about the splash of an uber-elite prospect like Hunter choosing to play for Sanders but rather a series of less obvious gains, whether it’s an uptick in three-star prospects choosing HBCUs over marginal offers from lower-level Football Bowl Subdivision programs or Florida A&M landing a deal with Nike last year to wear LeBron James-branded gear. There was even a stronger-than-usual candidate pool for the recent coaching opening at Prairie View A&M, which had some discussions with former Texas A&M and Arizona coach Kevin Sumlin before eventually promoting former NFL player Bubba McDowell, who had been an assistant there since 2012.
"The good thing that Deion has done is he’s come in and he’s kicked down some doors," Grambling State athletics director Trayvean Scott said. "It forces me to lead, and other athletics directors in our league and everywhere to up their game."
Scott believes he did that in December when Grambling hired Hue Jackson, who has twice been an NFL head coach with the Raiders (2011) and the Browns (2016-18). Though it’s not the exact blueprint as Jackson State hiring Sanders, or even Tennessee State hiring another former NFL star with little coaching experience in Eddie George, all three are connected in how they reflect a new level of ambition for schools that might not have had either the financial means or the vision to attract coaches whose names would resonate outside of the HBCU space.
While there’s no guarantee any coaching hire will be successful – and name recognition, of course, does not always correlate to wins – it’s an interesting shift in how some HBCU football programs see themselves and what opportunities might be available to them that weren’t always apparent for the last few decades.
"Deion Sanders is a unicorn – he is one of one," said J. Kenyatta Cavil, a professor of sport management, sport studies and sports entertainment at Texas State who also hosts a podcast about HBCU sports. "But there’s also a thing we have to look at in terms of cultural and unique fit and as he raises the bar, you see what’s happening at Grambling with Hue Jackson and if you follow recruiting, you certainly see an elevation of schools like Alabama A&M, Alabama State to some degree and even Mississippi Valley State. It’s fair to say there’s only one Coach Prime, but there’s also a natural creep of other institutions elevating themselves, too."
Why not us?
Before the full integration of SEC football, which happened in stages from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, there is little doubt that the best players from the South largely ended up at HBCUs. Even the great running back Walter Payton never received an SEC offer coming out of Columbia, Mississippi, and instead went to Jackson State where a team loaded with future NFL players would have surely beaten the regional powers of the time.
"Some of the great players who ever played the game came out of these schools," Jackson said during a recent phone conversation in the middle of his first recruiting season at Grambling State. "People forget four Hall of Famers played (at Grambling). Not a lot of schools can say that, but we can. Some of the best players that ever played in the NFL played here, were coached here, went to school here and graduated from here so why can’t we do that again? I always believe life sometimes comes back full circle and I think football will too and (the) corner is starting to turn."
There are plenty of reasons why that's unlikely to happen. Starting with the landmark 1984 Supreme Court case that took control of television rights away from the NCAA and allowed schools and conferences to negotiate their own deals, college sports has evolved into a business with a relatively small number of financial winners and a lot of financial losers.
While the Alabamas of the world were building waterfalls in the locker room, hiring top-of-the-line nutritionists and strength coaches and supplying their football teams with significant academic support, Grambling State players held a week-long boycott in 2013 in hopes that the school would address their deteriorating facilities and working conditions. Even this past season, Alcorn State’s game at South Alabama was in limbo for a few days because the school’s part-time athletic trainers were not available to treat injuries, which meant the team wasn’t allowed to practice.
Even for a player who might have been interested in an HBCU experience, it is not easy to justify turning down what a large percentage of the FBS schools can offer to play for a school with such limited resources.
And that gap may well get even bigger with the NCAA recently adopting a new constitution that gives the richest and most prominent football schools even more power to write their own rules.
In the 2020 fiscal year, the highest operating expense total among HBCU athletics programs was Prairie View A&M’s $18.7 million with 12 others spending in the $10 million-$16 million range. By comparison the University of Connecticut spent $17.2 million on football alone, according to data compiled by Paste BN Sports in partnership with the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Data project at Syracuse University.
In other words, a Travis Hunter-level recruit playing at Jackson State will almost certainly remain the exception rather than the spark of a significant migration of talent toward HBCUs. But that reality is not going to stop Hue Jackson from shooting for the stars.
"I think we can go as far as our institutions will allow us to go," he said. "I want to scale our football facilities and everything we’re doing and take it to another level. Why not? The HBCU schools, I know everybody talks about it that way, but I want us to look at ourselves differently and if we look at ourselves differently, we’re going to have to do differently. We’re going to recruit the best players out there and give them an opportunity to come here and have them understand why would you not come to Grambling and get a great education and play big-time college football? I get it, there's a difference in resources, but why does there have to be a difference? Let’s see if we can move the needle for these schools."
Where careers went to die
The needle-moving may be as simple as HBCUs simply leveraging what they have to offer. Much of that responsibility has fallen to a new generation of athletics administrators in their late 30s and early 40s like Gosha at Florida A&M, Scott at Grambling State, Robinson at Jackson State, Alabama State’s Jason Cable and Texas Southern’s Kevin Granger who have brought aggressiveness and ingenuity into a space where their predecessors, perhaps, became disillusioned in the face of mounting financial hardships for their programs.
"When most people thought about HBCUs within the industry it was like, ‘OK that’s where you go for your career to die,’ " Gosha said. "Normally, the AD is the old football coach who has been there 30 years, and I think that in itself has changed. I think at the AD level you’re seeing more operating in best business practice versus tradition. When we signed the six-year Nike/LeBron deal, everyone was like, ‘How the hell did that happen?’ You have to challenge the norms.
"The dynamics have changed. I think we were in some bad deals. Ten years ago, HBCUs were happy to get some type of media coverage and being on ESPN 3,000."
It’s also fair to say that thanks to technology, schools now have better metrics to understand how big their audience is and where it’s coming from. That information allows them to take the unique entity that is Black college athletics with dedicated fan bases in big Southern cities and turn the appeal of these traditional rivalry games like the Southern Heritage Classic in Memphis, the Bayou Classic in New Orleans or the Magic City Classic in Birmingham into new revenue.
"We can do some things, business-wise, that we weren’t necessarily able to do from a previous standpoint," McClelland said. "Our fan base has always been loyal, it's just been a matter of getting our product out to the mainstream. We think our brand is significant. We have shown where that brand has grown, and I think the media partners we have, they recognize the extreme value in what we bring to the table and we’re trying to capitalize off of it."
After all, there are a lot of FBS schools – even in some pretty high-profile conferences – that would kill for a crowd of 54,000 like Florida A&M and Bethune-Cookman drew for this year’s Florida Classic in Orlando where both schools can walk away with more than $1 million in gate receipts.
"By virtue of geography and by virtue of some of the things that HBCUs have to offer which are ancillary with the dance groups, the tailgating, the overall environment, I see the Southwestern Athletic Conference being probably the second-most viable conference outside the Southeastern Conference," Scott said. "We’ve got something interesting to sell. My head is spinning right now with the amount of opportunities we have to advance the brand that is Grambling State – anything from shoes to apparel, video games, and those opportunities have increased significantly over the last three months."
Sanders as inspiration
Whatever impact Hunter’s commitment to Jackson State has on HBCU recruiting, it’s unlikely to match the significance of Sanders potentially becoming a Power Five coach after winning at Jackson State.
At first blush, that might be a contradictory thought. But the reality for HBCUs is that good players follow good coaches, and Sanders’ biggest impact might be opening the door for more talented coaches to view HBCUs as a viable career path.
Whether it’s rooted in racism, lack of curiosity or simply fear of hiring coaches from a lower level, FBS schools have generally not looked to the HBCU ranks for up-and-coming prospects. The first HBCU coach to get a Division I-A job was Willie Jeffries going from South Carolina State to Wichita State in 1979. It didn’t happen again until 2016 when Southern Miss hired Alcorn State’s Jay Hopson – who is white.
"It's really been a place where guys have careers and even if you win, there was a glass ceiling there,” Gaither said. "A lot of black coaches at HBCUs got that stigma that they’re just an HBCU coach or can only coach in this realm. But these guys who have name cachet, I think they are far less likely to get boxed in with that."
At the FBS level, administrators and search firm executives often complain that the pool of minority candidates they can draw from isn’t very big. Perhaps the reality is they just weren’t watching HBCU football and it will take somebody like Sanders to force them to expand their horizons a bit.
On the flip side, Sanders’ success and someone with Jackson’s experience coaching at this level could inspire more up-and-coming Black coaches to look seriously at HBCU jobs. Given the frustrations of Black assistants at the NFL level at being systematically passed over for jobs, why couldn’t this be another avenue of opportunity?
"When you think of the HBCU schools, we're all minority men and that’s really eye opening to me," Jackson said. "It says, this system gets it. They’re giving these opportunities. I think coaches in general need to maybe open their thought process a little more so maybe this is where we need to be and maybe this is where we need to show and showcase our talent and ability and let people see we are just as good as anybody in the world."
Follow colleges reporter Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken