Ivy league's Pioneering Coaching Pair Spotlight Progress, Problems

NEW YORK -- Neither Norries Wilson nor Tom Williams had circled the date when, respectively, the Columbia and Yale football schedules had come out. But Dr. Keith Harrison had. So when two African-American coaches met in an Ivy League game for the first time ever on Saturday, Harrison -- the associate director of the Institute for Diversity in Sport at the University of Central Florida -- made sure not only that he was at Columbia's Wien Stadium, he was on the field before the game to greet both men.

"I wanted to take a picture,'' Harrison said, as what was eventually a stunning, come-from-behind 23-22 Yale victory unfolded. "It's history.''

Harrison did, in fact, get a snapshot of the pair: the 44-year-old Wilson, in his fourth season at Columbia, and Williams, 39, hired in January at Yale. Wilson ended up introducing Williams and Harrison, who helps put together the annual hiring report card on coaching and administrative hiring by the institute and its director, Richard Lapchick. The moment was weighted with meaning, they all acknowledged at day's end, yet at the same time none of it was bigger than the job at hand.

"The significance of the day was not lost on either of us. We're both proud of our heritage, it's something we're ... very proud of."
-- Tom Williams,
Yale Head Coach "That's more of something for our kids to talk about when they grow up,'' Wilson said. "They don't put in the paper, 'The black coach won.' They put in the paper, 'Yale won.' It's an issue, just not an issue for me and Coach Williams. We just have to go out and be the best coaches we can be for the young men that we have a responsibility for.''

"The significance of the day was not lost on either one of us,'' said Williams, whose team scored two touchdowns in the fourth quarter to claim easily the most dramatic win of his inaugural season. "We're both proud of our heritage, it's something we're very strong and very proud of -- but at the end of the day, it's Yale at Columbia, it's not Tom Williams vs. Norries Wilson.

"We're proud to take this win home with us. We're proud to represent the African-American community, but this is about two universities and two football teams.''

Williams' hiring -- to join Wilson, the Ivy's first black head football coach -- is considered a step forward, as is the fact that the number of head coaches above the Ivy League's classification, in the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A), doubled last offseason, from four to eight. None, however, were at a so-called BCS school; Randy Shannon at Miami is the only black head coach in that category this season.

The way Williams and Wilson approach the topic reflects the still-precarious state of African-American head coaches in college football. Getting the jobs are one very big thing; keeping them is not only as important as it is for any coach, but vital to the continued progress of the cause -- because their place is not so secure that failure by one coach won't still mean a setback for every future candidate.

Which makes meetings like Saturday's not as pleasant as they could be, because somebody has to lose. In this case, Wilson's Lions dropped their fourth straight. Harrison recalled a high-level assistant at another BCS school lamenting playing Miami because, he was told, it meant having to root against Shannon, even as it meant more to coaches trying to reach Shannon's level if he continued to win.

With that sort of unavoidable conflict, Williams and Wilson represent a necessary, yet bold, option. Wilson came to Columbia from the Big East, where he was offensive coordinator at Connecticut; earlier in his career, he had served minority coaching internships with three NFL teams. Williams had been an assistant with the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars for two seasons before taking the Yale job; but before that, he was an assistant on the rise at four previous schools, including a stint as associate head coach at Stanford, where he had played under Bill Walsh.

Being in position to stay on the major-school radar as a coordinator could have led to bigger things -- except that historically, they have not. So they moved down to the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) level, as the four FBS newcomers also chose head-coaching jobs after leaving major programs such as Notre Dame and Michigan. While it doesn't put them in the spotlight, Harrison offered as a reminder, "Five and six years ago, those jobs weren't even being offered.''

That the Ivy League schools did offer those jobs was no small coincidence. The athletic directors who hired both made it clear that they never set out to hire a coach of color; rather, the coaches made an indelible impression on them and their colleagues immediately and made the choice easy. Dr. Dianne Murphy at Columbia and Tom Beckett at Yale both emphasized the magnitude of the job at their schools, where winning is not elevated above teaching, maintaining the academic standards and keeping the football program connected to and in-step with the entire school and the rest of the teams.

Beckett sat in on the postgame interviews and heard the Yale players credit Williams for pressing on them the idea of giving full effort on every play from beginning to end -- which they applied in overcoming a 14-3 deficit entering the fourth quarter, particularly when Bulldogs cornerback Adam Money chased down Columbia running back Leon Ivery at the 2-yard line after a 75-yard run with five minutes left and the Lions up 22-17, saving what would have been the clinching touchdown. Yale then scored the game-winning points with 58 seconds left on a 10-yard touchdown pass from Pat Witt to A.J. Haase.

"The feeling you had as you walked away [from the player interviews] was the feeling the whole Yale community felt when they were introduced to Coach Williams at the beginning,'' Beckett said. "They knew immediately that he was the right fit. He's an educator, a communicator; he inspires people.''

When Murphy hired Wilson in late 2005, over more than a dozen candidates, she made it clear to her staff that she had no intention of making a big deal about him integrating the league coaching ranks. "That is not the story; do not go there with me,'' she recalled telling her staff. "Our story is that we've hired a football coach at Columbia, and he's the right man for the job.''

Within that, though, she admitted that coaches in both men's positions might be torn about taking a job at that level: "Unfortunately, a lot of times, people are so anxious to get a job, to finally get that head coaching or athletic director's job, that they take a job that isn't a good fit or doesn't give them the resources to be successful.'' In reaching for any head coaching job, she said, minority coaches "tend not to get the jobs that everybody wants.''

That was the major issue in the offseason, while five black coaches were being hired in the lower levels, the likes of Auburn, Tennessee and Washington, for example, went elsewhere for their head coaches.

Yet neither has ever hinted that he was settling by going to the Ivy League. The Lions are now struggling at 2-5, but Columbia's only non-losing season since 1997 was Wilson's first, when he went 5-5 in 2006. Meanwhile, at 4-3 Williams has a chance to be the first Yale coach to have a winning season in his first year since 1963.

Winning, of course, is the ideal result for both coaches. But in the grand scheme of the ongoing quest to level the field in college football coaching, days like Saturday are a sign of progress.

"I feel good,'' Harrison said, nodding toward the field where earlier he had taken photos with the two coaching pioneers. "This is some powerful imagery here."