Racial Differences in the Career Patterns of College Football Coaches: An Optimal Matching Analysis
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
Objective: To better understand the documented racial inequality in access to high status positions within the American labor market, this study investigates job-level patterns of mobility within the college football coaching profession. Drawing on research and theory from the sociology of sport and sports management literature (e.g. stacking and tracking) as well as the more general sociological literature on job-level segregation and racial inequality in career attainment (e.g. particularistic mobility thesis, minority vulnerability thesis, and cumulative advantage/disadvantage), this study examines whether pre-career experience and job-level segregation explain black and white coaches different mobility patterns throughout their careers. The college football coaching profession offers a unique opportunity to investigate hypotheses regarding racial differences in career mobility as it is a high status profession with a large proportion of black workers (e.g. athletes) and lower-level managers (e.g. position coaches), yet relatively few in the upper-echelons of the profession (e.g. coordinators and head coaches).
Methods & Data Sources: Data on the complete career histories of 340 full-time college football coaches from the 2009 season were drawn from football program media guides and websites, NCAA official records, and various independent websites that track college football stats and records. In addition to individual-level demographic and pre-career experience measures (e.g. race, education, and playing experience), measures of the characteristics of every job coaches held throughout their coaching careers (e.g. specific responsibility, centrality, division, and competition/prestige level) were also constructed. Multi-channel optimal matching sequence analysis is used to describe the typical career patterns of these coaches and multinomial logistic regression is used to examine whether race, demographic, and pre-career experience variables predict the odds of following different career paths.
Findings: Descriptive results suggest that common career patterns exist within the college football coaching profession. While some coaches generally move up the career ladder in a fairly uniform way from lower levels of prestige and centrality to higher levels, other coaches get stuck in lower-level coaching positions. The results also add nuance to prior research on the college football coaching profession by finding that coaches can become stuck in stagnant careers characterized by positions previously thought to induce mobility (e.g. offensive line coach) and coaches can use positions previously thought to inhibit mobility (e.g. wide receivers coach) as springboards to future career opportunities. Evidence also suggests that the position one played as a football athlete prior to entering the coaching profession can have long lasting effects throughout coaches’ careers. Taken together, the results support processes related to the particularistic mobility thesis, minority vulnerability thesis, and cumulative advantage/disadvantage and suggest that mobility within the college football coaching profession is more complex than previously thought.
