College Coaching and Salary Restrictions: Using Law to Teach Current Events in the Classroom

Each year, the college football season ends with hiring and firing moves. These transitions raise questions about the million-dollar salaries prevalent in college sports. Current events like this tend to dominate classroom conversations. Navigating these issues and their relation to class content can be challenging. Although the amount of money spent on coaches is not surprising, any discussion to provide new strategies may not be legally viable. For example, when students propose ideas about limiting coaching salaries, they may not realize the legal implication of that action. This case study uses the legal case-study model to address questions related to intercollegiate athletic coaching salaries and the possibility of a salary cap. Providing legal application in other courses will address these questions for both students and for faculty members who might not have the legal background to answer these questions.

Racial Diversity Deficit in College Football: Fixing the Pipeline

A growing amount of research is being conducted on racial diversity in college football head coaching positions in the United States. However, very little has been conducted on the entry-level positions in college coaching: Graduate Assistants (GAs), Quality Control assistants (QCs) and restricted earnings coaches. These positions represent natural professional trajectories for student-athletes, who constitute the future pool of applicants for college coaching positions. In the United States, the majority of student athletes are nonwhite, but white coaches still dominate the world of college athletics. This paper investigates the pipeline issues that obstruct the matriculation of nonwhite student-athletes and produce what I call the diversity deficit in college football coaching. Existing analyses of empirical data from member institutions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) demonstrate the existence of racial inequality in the profession of coaching. This paper will explain the perpetuation of the diversity deficit by employing Critical Race Theory (CRT) to illustrate how whiteness, color-blindness and tokenism structure college football coaching. The paper then presents new research data that illuminate how power shapes NCAA member institutions and that can aid participants in addressing pipeline issues and the diversity deficit.

Where Does It Begin? Exploring Gender Differences in Student-Athletes’ Perceptions of Entering the Coaching Profession

The current study sought to trace the origin of gender disparity in the coaching landscape from student-athletes’ perceptions, framed through Social Cognitive Career Theory. To examine the cognitive-person variables in line with previous coaching and SCCT research, scales were derived for perceived social supports and barriers, perceptions of positive and negative outcome expectations, and perceived self-efficacy in coaching. Student-athletes were randomly selected online from 23 institutions across three Bowl Championship Series conferences, while data were coded into a MANCOVA. Results indicated male student-athletes reported greater levels for perceived barriers to enter the coaching profession, perceptions of positive outcome expectations, and for coaching self-efficacy than did their female counterparts. These findings suggest that gender differences within the college coaching profession may be, in part, due to perceptions formed before entry.