In Week 2 of searching for the first Black coach who might win a college football national championship, I was hit with a surprise blitz by Thomas Hammock, from the unexpected angle of Northern Illinois University.
NIU beat fifth-ranked Notre Dame, which is coached by Marcus Freeman, one of few Black coaches at schools with the resources, schedule and conference affiliation to regularly contend for a national title. Sherrone Moore at Michigan and James Franklin at Penn State also are on that list. Black coaches at UCLA, Purdue and Maryland have a conceivable path, at some point, to winning the newly expanded 12-team College Football Playoff. And you never know what might happen down the line with Deion Sanders, the coach at Colorado (for now).
But Hammock? In the Mid-American Conference? Who just a few years ago thought he would never get an opportunity to become a head coach?
Northern Illinois is still a long shot to make the playoff, let alone win it all. But regardless of where the Huskies end up, Hammock has made a huge statement about equal opportunity, and his unabashed tears after beating the Irish in South Bend, Indiana, showed that college football still has heart and higher purpose amid all the greed and destroyed traditions.
Tracking the “first Black” people can get tiresome – some say President Barack Obama rendered the topic moot – but I think we need to keep examining arenas in which Black people have been denied an equal opportunity to achieve. Only 16 of 134 coaches at the top level of college football are Black, compared with well over half of the players.
The fact that no Black coach has won a college football national championship means different things to different people. I asked Hammock: What does it mean to you?
“As a competitor it motivates me,” he said during a phone interview Tuesday. “It should motivate all Black coaches that have an opportunity to [be the first]. It’s something that we should strive for.”
Some Black coaches just want to coach without the extra burden or pressure of being held responsible for the progress of Black people in general. That in itself is a measure of equality, because white coaches are generally free of racial expectations.
Hammock is not one of those coaches.
“Of course, I want other Black coaches to have opportunities that I’m having,” he said. “I want to represent Black coaches in the right way and make sure I can help pioneer more guys to have opportunities. And I think that’s important for all of us, we do the right things, we handle ourselves the right way, and we put our teams in position to win so that others behind us can have a chance to be the first Black head coach to win a national championship.”
Hammock, who is 43, could do it himself. That would be tough at NIU, which to make the playoff would need to win the MAC and be ranked higher than winners of Conference USA, the American Athletic Conference, Mountain West and Sun Belt. Then NIU would have to advance through a bracket featuring marquee programs with bigger budgets and more expensive talent. Northern Illinois only has one former player on a 2024 NFL roster; Michigan, for example, has 41.
But Hammock can clearly coach. North Carolina State and No. 10 Miami are on his schedule this season, and if he wins one or two of those, other job offers might come. It would be ironic, considering that he almost didn’t get a chance to become a coach in the first place.
Hammock played running back at NIU, with two 1,000-yard seasons and two Academic All-American honors. In the first game of his senior year, he rushed for 172 yards and two touchdowns in an upset of Wake Forest – then was diagnosed with a heart ailment that ended his playing career.
“I never wanted to be a coach. I never wanted to coach people like myself. I was a knucklehead in college,” Hammock said. “But when the game is taken away from you, you realize how much you love it, you realize how much the team atmosphere is a part of your life, and I wanted to have an opportunity to get back around the sport.”
Michael Caterina/AP Photo
Hammock went to Wisconsin as a graduate assistant, where he was mentored by receivers coach Henry Mason. After stints at NIU, Minnesota, and Wisconsin again, in 2014 he moved to the NFL to coach running backs for the Baltimore Ravens. He also was mentored by Eric Bieniemy, who is Exhibit A for Black coaches who never got the head coaching opportunity that similarly accomplished white coaches have received.
Hammock wanted to become a college coach, but couldn’t get an interview, even at the lower FCS level of Division I college football.
“I really had in my mind given up on the opportunity,” Hammock said. “Just from the simple fact that there are a lot more gatekeepers now than there ever was before. … That’s just another way to stop you from having an opportunity, from getting closer to an opportunity, in my opinion. So I was like, you know what? I’ll be a career NFL assistant.”
Then the NIU job opened up. Historically, a major reason Black coaches have been excluded from consideration is because they were not part of the overwhelmingly white network of college presidents and athletic directors. In all walks of life, people tend to hire who they know. But the NIU athletic director Sean Frazier happened to have worked with Hammock at Wisconsin. And Frazier happened to be Black.
Hammock got his dream job, and has leaned into a throwback coaching mentality that prioritizes relationships, academics and personal development over the new transactional nature of college football.
“I never wanted to coach people like myself. I was a knucklehead in college. But when the game is taken away from you, you realize how much you love it, you realize how much the team atmosphere is a part of your life, and I wanted to have an opportunity to get back around the sport.”
— Thomas Hammock
“I really developed as a man at NIU and the impact that the coaches had on me and my development throughout college, I wanted to have that same impact on others,” Hammock said. “I spent five years in the National Football League. I fully understand what transactional means. But for 18- to 22-year-old young men, they need more. They are in a critical stage of life where they need to be developed so they can make great decisions when they become adults, when they become fathers, when they become husbands, when they become productive members of society.”
That would be hard to do at the top-tier programs, where players sign with the highest bidder and then flit from school to school. But those programs also provide the best opportunity to achieve one of the last “first Black” milestones in sports.
Is Hammock thinking about the next level?
“My focus is maximizing this season, right?” he said. “We just had a big win against Notre Dame. How do we get our players ready for the next game?
“I can’t predict what’s going to happen in the future.”
