243 – 243 - Statistics in Sports and Beyond
Assessing Racial Differences in the Tenures of College Football Coaches Using Survival Analysis
Mac Wetherbee
University of Denver
It is widely suspected that ethnic/racial minority college football coaches are treated differently in the job market than their White counterparts. In this paper, I test whether minority head football coaches have shorter mean tenure lengths than White head coaches. I first build a new dataset consisting of all Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) college football head coaches that coached at least one season between 1979 and 2019, expanding the sample from previous studies in this area. I present descriptive statistics for this new dataset. I then test the relationship between ethnicity and tenure length using the Cox proportional-hazards model. Even after controlling for relevant covariates, results indicate that there is a difference in mean tenure lengths between minority coaches and White coaches. Minority head football coaches are significantly more likely to have their coaching tenures end at a given length than White head football coaches are, all else equal. Due to limited sample sizes for other ethnic groups, this difference is driven primarily by the difference in tenure lengths between White and Black college football coaches.