Stuck on the Sideline: Race, Segregation, and Mobility in the College Football Coaching Profession

Although becoming increasingly diverse over the last 50 years, American occupations remain highly segregated and black workers are still underrepresented in managerial and professional occupations. To better understand the documented racial inequality in access to high status positions within the American labor market, this study investigates the effects of job-level segregation on promotions and authority attainment within the college football coaching profession. Drawing on research and theory from the sociology of sport and sports management literature on stacking---the racial segregation of athletes into positions based on their responsibility for controlling the outcome of competition---as well as the more general sociological literature on job-level segregation and racial inequality in promotions and authority attainment, I investigate the extent to which the documented disparity in black and white coaches' career achievements results from their differential access to or returns from certain types of positions prior to and upon entering the college football coaching profession.;By studying the college football coaching profession, one 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), this study is unique in its ability to examine the effects of race-typed jobs on both white and black workers' careers. In doing so, I find that racial differences in coaches' access to executive positions---those with authority over the entire team (i.e. head coach) or the offensive or defensive divisions respectively (i.e. offensive and defensive coordinators) as well as differences in coaches' general patterns of mobility throughout their careers result from both black and white coaches' differential access to and returns from occupying non-central (those with less outcome control) and central (those with more outcome control) positions.;Using data on complete career histories of 320 full-time college football coaches at the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision level, I apply two longitudinal techniques---event-history analysis and sequence analysis. Both techniques find that the negative effects of occupying non-central positions do not extend to white coaches. When occupying noncentral coaching positions, white coaches are as likely to move into a high status and high authority positions and be on a high mobility career track as black coaches with central playing experience or who occupy a central coaching position. Such findings contribute to prior research on racial inequality in the college football coaching profession. As the first study to investigate the entirety of college football coaches' careers it offers a more complete picture of how black and white coaches' careers develop differently over time. Furthermore, by drawing on theoretical ideas from the more general sociological literature on the effects of occupational- and job-level segregation on subsequent mobility (e.g. particularistic mobility, racialized jobs, and glass escalators), the results presented here place the college football coaching profession within a more general context of high status, professional and managerial professions. As a result, the findings have important implications for similar managerial and professional occupations as well as contemporary labor markets that emphasize general experience and subjective skills over firm-specific experience and formal credentials.