(ThyBlackMan.com) It hasn’t been that long ago since the Georgia Bulldogs won the College Football Playoff and South Carolina State defeated Jackson State to win the Black College Football National Championship. Over the past couple of years, Jackson State football has gotten a lot of the HBCU football attention due to the hire of college football and NFL great Deion Sanders as their head coach. Sanders has brought attention and results to Jackson State football and was one of the reasons last year was a big year for HBCU sports. Late last year, Grambling State football hired another NFL connection, Hue Jackson, for their head football coach position hoping that he will be successful for that proud program. It was a questionable hire beyond football reasons and since being hired Jackson has made athletic director Trayvean Scott look even worse for hiring him in the first place.
“I understand there is a lot going on in the world. I like to just keep it here. What we deal with, we try to deal with as a team in our closed environment. We talk about things.” said Hue Jackson as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns in 2017. He was asked about his Browns players potentially protesting during the national anthem one season after Colin Kaepernick’s public demonstration. While it was tough for many NFL head coaches to take on a “polarizing” topic, Hue Jackson as a Black man himself, didn’t take a stronger stance in favor of player expression, and those comments happened shortly after the racial strife in Charlottesville, Virginia back in 2017. It was telling that Jackson was uncomfortable discussing issues of race and now is one of the most prominent faces at a HBCU at Grambling State University years later.
In the months since being hired as the Grambling State head football coach, Hue Jackson has been in the headlines for a couple of embarrassing moments, one that made him look bad and one that made the university look bad. On February 2, 2022, Jackson claimed that he was offered monetary bonuses by the Cleveland Browns ownership for losing during the first two years of his head coaching tenure with the Browns which led to his 1-31 record during the 2016 and 2017 seasons. According to ESPN, Jackson said he “wasn’t offered $100,000 for every game, but there was a substantial amount of money made within what happened in this situation every year at the end of it.” If Jackson’s claims are true, the question is why would a man of integrity and competitive drive continue to work at a job where they were trying to pay him to lose? Both the Browns and Jackson look bad with the accusations.
Later in February 2022, Jackson’s hiring of former Baylor head football coach Art Briles as Grambling State’s offensive coordinator was an even worse look for him and Grambling State athletics. Despite leading Baylor to many of its best football seasons ever, Briles was fired in 2016 following the university’s investigation into campus-wide allegations of sexual assault. Grambling State got a lot of media blowback once Briles was announced as joining Grambling State and he and athletic director Trayvean Scott defended the decision at the time despite Briles’s terrible history at Baylor of having a number of football players on his team with numerous assault allegations against women. Days after the hiring was announced, it was decided that Briles wouldn’t be joining Grambling State.
The Hue Jackson era at Grambling State has been a failure before he has even coached a game as he stands as the polar opposite of the man who put Grambling State football on the map, legendary head coach the late Eddie Robinson, who ranks as one of the most successful and character-driven head coaches in college football history. Robinson once told a high school player’s mother that, “I will coach him like my very own. He will get a college degree. He’ll go to church on Sunday and he’ll make a difference in society.” Due to Robinson’s legacy, Grambling State should always make sure that any head football coach who becomes the head coach there wants to develop people of character in society and not just football skills.
Staff Writer; Mark Hines
