This is a great development:
Sylvester Croom became the first black head football coach in the Southeastern Conference yesterday when he accepted an offer to take over at Mississippi State.
Croom, 49, arrives in Starkville, Miss., with 28 years of coaching experience, including the last three as the Green Bay Packers’ running backs coach. He’ll be introduced at a news conference today as the successor to Jackie Sherrill, who is retiring.
The SEC was the only Bowl Championship Series conference never to have had a black head coach. There were four black head football coaches among 117 Division I-A football schools this season.
“We went after the best football coach and he just happened to be a minority,” Mississippi State Athletic Director Larry Templeton said last night.
I wonder how this will impact the recruiting of talent in the SEC.
Ricky
Tubby Smith hasn’t had too much of a problem getting recruits at UK.
mark
Unfortunately for Croom, he is inheriting a near-impossible situation at MSU. His team is about to go on a two-year bowl ban, thanks to the crook Jackie Sherrill. Plus, unlike Kentucky basketball, there is no football tradition to speak of. In fact, they are normally a cellar dweller in the SEC, with the likes of Vanderbilt (Sherrill had them good for a few years, but before him they were horrible).
Ricky
Good points, but Tubby took a program that was in shambles (UGA) & turned it around in a hurry prior to getting his UK job. If he’s a good coach, there’ll be noticable improvement (which wouldn’t take much).
mark
I’m not questioning his ability to coach, Ricky, to be clear. That said, I do hope he fails in one respect: he loses every year to Ole Miss (my school)…
greg
Does Jackie Sherrill EVER leave a program better than he found it?
Chris Lawrence
Bear in mind there’s plenty of black coaches in the SEC… Croom is just the first head football coach.
It might attract a few recruits at the margins, but I think there are bigger issues–facilities, scholarship levels, etc.–that will weigh in a lot of recruits’ minds.
Bear in mind that State hasn’t been good during the high school careers of most of the kids Croom will be recruiting, and probably won’t be good again until the sanctions are gone (2006+).
That being said, I wish him the best of luck, and as many 10-1 seasons as he can muster (so long as they keep losing to Ole Miss in the Egg Bowl, they can win the national title for all I care).
mark
Greg,
Do you really have to ask that question about a coach who shows his players a cow being castrated as a motivational tool?
Slartibartfast
I think Florida’s going to lose Charlie Strong in the near future, unfortunately. It’s what happens when the assistant coaches (DC, in this case) become talented enough to be a head coach somewhere else. Florida lost a major part of the team when Bob Stoops went to Oklahoma. Makes me wish Spurrier had elected to go NFL a few years earlier.