Ugliness in Florida A&M coaching search belies Black colleges’ sense of community

The current fallout at Florida A&M University surrounding its search for a new football coach reminds me of a dark time in the program’s history less than 18 months ago.

Florida A&M’s National Alumni Association executive board passed “a vote of no confidence” on Wednesday evening in Fort Valley State University coach Shawn Gibbs, the potential successor to former Rattlers coach Willie Simmons. The board then passed a second vote of no confidence in Tiffani-Dawn Sykes, the university’s vice president and director of intercollegiate athletics. These actions pale in comparison with the embarrassment of the academic ineligibility saga that plagued the team in the fall of 2022.

For me, the low point of that episode in 2022 wasn’t a missed opportunity for standout edge rusher Isaiah Land to play against Power 5 competition in the University of North Carolina, or Florida A&M’s 59-3 loss to Jackson State University in the Orange Blossom Classic a week later. The low point was an exposé by The New York Times, with a headline that foreshadowed the “scandal” and “mismanagement” surrounding the team: For Florida A&M, Getting on the Field Is Just One of Many Problems.

In October 2022, a month after that article was published, Florida A&M announced the hiring of Sykes to her current position, her hyphenated name a harbinger for the dawn of a new era. The next calendar year, she and Simmons became the architects of a remarkable turnaround that yielded the school’s first Celebration Bowl title.

The goodwill created by game, along with Florida A&M’s deft use of the transfer portal at the expense of nearby Florida State University, has waned thanks to the ugliness that has surrounded the Rattlers’ coaching search. It is understandable players and alumni want familiarity in a future coach. What is particularly unfortunate is how the high stakes of college athletics have yielded a decided lack of grace.

The National Alumni Association executive board’s 19-1 vote of “no confidence” in Gibbs, along with the subsequent 18-3 vote of “no confidence” in Sykes, is jarring and not because of anything having to do with football. “No confidence” votes at Florida A&M will forever shake me because of the 29-month tenure of former university president Elmira Mangum, who took the reins in 2013 in the aftermath of the hazing death of Marching 100 band major Robert Champion in 2011, among other profound challenges. Her term ended in 2016, also because of petty politics.

When looking at the treatment of Sykes and the scrutiny of her decision-making, which some are correctly calling misogynistic and sexist, Mangum’s words seem prescient.

“Monday morning quarterbacking is always an option. It doesn’t affect the game,” Mangum told a reporter in 2015. “The decisions that were made in the time that they were made, I believed to be the best decisions.”

While I love sports and have worked as a journalist in this capacity for 20 years, I love historically Black colleges and universities even more. Our rabid desire to be “competitive” has infringed on our schools’ reputations for being spaces of concern and care. I certainly understand the irony of how important football revenues are to maintaining our institutions, but at what cost? Before he left to become running backs coach at Duke University, Simmons touted Florida A&M’s single-year Academic Progress Rate on social media, which was certainly admirable, as the APR numbers for HBCUs and Black athletes in general remain a point of concern.

There is a direct way to rectify a number of challenges that face our beloved institutions, at least those of the land-grant variety. We should take the ire from social media and boardrooms and direct it outward, toward the state governments that continue to underfund – no, steal – from our HBCU land-grant schools. 

I wrote in September our schools should be made whole and raised the question during the South Carolina legislative preview of the media on Monday. The response from state Sen. Greg Hembree, the South Carolina Senate education committee chairman, was less than encouraging. Not only did he contend the school under his purview, South Carolina State University, had not been underfunded but that because students had the option to attend the University of South Carolina and Clemson University, the mission of HBCUs “had been completed.”

There are the high stakes of sports, and then there are the highest stakes of keeping our schools in a position to thrive, not just survive. I believe Sykes understands this, which is why she doesn’t allow folks to play on Florida A&M’s name, evidenced by a quick-witted retort in response to comments made by rival Bethune-Cookman University’s administration during the Florida Classic luncheon. She also explained her reasoning for pulling out of the Orange Blossom Classic, which she did looking to ensure season ticket holders got the most bang for their buck.

It’s not difficult to see similarities in Sykes’ and Mangum’s tenures, with the obvious question of whether Sykes continues in her current capacity as director of intercollegiate athletics and vice president.

The collective decision to be family and not fanatics rests with those of us who profess to love our HBCU spaces. My hope is that we choose care and not capitalism.