Hypocritical NCAA Gets Bad ‘Report Card’ on Hiring African Americans and Women

The National Collegiate Athletic Association gets poor grades when it comes to racial and gender hiring practices in college sports, according to a recent report.

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics issued its annual report card to the NCAA, grading the organization a C+ for racial hiring and a C for gender hiring.

Last month, the nationwide organization that governs college sports made a huge spectacle of how concerned they are of protecting individual rights by pulling the March Madness tournament from North Carolina because of the Tar Heel State’s bathroom privacy law HB2. Now, it turns out the NCAA falls way short of practicing what they preach.

The new study reveals that college sports has had severe challenges in hiring minorities and women, and showed decreases from last year in both gender and racial hiring. Of all the categories studied by the institute, only college sports received less than a B for racial hiring.

For the 2016 season 86.1 percent of Division I, 88.1 percent of Division II, and 91.7 percent of Division III men’s coaches were white.

Women’s sports showed roughly the same numbers at 84.5 percent, 87.5 percent, and 91.6 percent respectively for Divisions I, II, III.

African Americans were so under-represented as head coaches in Division III that the percentage of women coaching men’s teams was greater than African American men coaching men’s teams.

As far as Athletic Directors go, whites held the overwhelming majority of the decision making position, maintaining 87.6 percent for Division I, 89.4 for D-II, and 93.6 for D-III.

The self-righteous hypocritical posturing and carrying on by the NCAA and such coaches as Mike Krzyzewski of Duke and Roy Williams of North Carolina about how offended they are by North Carolina’s HB2 law is laughable and intensely hypocritical given the racial and gender statistics cited in the above report. If they are so disturbed by the marginalization of transgenders in North Carolina, you would think they might be a bit more concerned about the marginalization of African Americans and women in their own organization.