Thomas Hammock’s Victory Over Notre Dame Is a Statement on Equal Opportunity

In the second week of my seek for the primary black coach to win a national championship in college football, I used to be caught off guard by a surprising message from Thomas Hammock of Northern Illinois University.

NIU defeat Fifth-ranked Notre Dame, coached by Marcus Freeman, certainly one of the few black coaches at schools with the resources, schedule and conference affiliations to usually compete for a national title. Michigan’s Sherrone Moore and Penn State’s James Franklin also make the list. Black coaches at UCLA, Purdue and Maryland all have a possible path, in some unspecified time in the future, to winning the newly expanded 12-team College Football Playoff. And you never know what might occur in the longer term with Deion Sanders coaching at Colorado (for now).

But Hammock? In the Mid-American Conference? Who a few years ago thought he’d never get a likelihood to be a head coach?

Northern Illinois still has a slim likelihood of creating the playoffs, let alone winning all of it. But no matter where the Huskies find yourself, Hammock made a huge statement about equal opportunity, and his uninhibited tears after defeating the Irish in South Bend, Indiana, showed that college football still has heart and a higher purpose amongst all greed AND destroyed traditions.

Tracing the “first black” people could be tiresome—some would argue that President Barack Obama has rendered the topic moot—but I believe we’d like to proceed to look at the arenas where black people have been denied equal opportunity to succeed. Only 16 of 134 trainers in the very best league of faculty football there are black people, while greater than half of the players are black.

The indisputable fact that no black coach has won a national championship in college football means various things to different people. I asked Hammock: What does that mean to you?

“As a player, it motivates me,” he said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “It should motivate all the black coaches who have the opportunity (to be starters). It’s something we should strive for.”

Some black coaches simply want to educate without the added burden or pressure of being liable for the progress of black people normally. That in itself is a measure of equality, as white coaches are generally free from racial expectations.

Hammock is just not certainly one of those coaches.

“Of course, I want other black coaches to have the opportunities that I have,” he said. “I want to represent black coaches in the right way and make sure that I can help provide more guys with opportunities. And I think it’s important for all of us to do the right things, do the right thing and put our teams in a position to win so that others behind us have a chance to become the first black coach to win a national championship.”

Hammock, who’s 43, could do it himself. That could be tough at NIU, which might need to win the MAC and be ranked higher than the winners of Conference USA, the American Athletic Conference, the Mountain West and the Sun Belt to make the playoffs. Then NIU would need to undergo a bracket with star programs with greater budgets and dearer talent. Northern Illinois has only one former player on the NFL roster for 2024; Michigan, for instance, has 41.

But Hammock clearly has the flexibility to educate. If he keeps winning, other job offers could come his way — which could be ironic, considering he almost didn’t get the possibility to educate.

Hammock played running back at NIU, with two 1,000-yard seasons and two Academic All-American honors. In the primary game of his senior 12 months, he rushed for 172 yards and two touchdowns in a surprising win over Wake Forest — then was diagnosed with a heart condition that ended his profession.

“I never wanted to be a coach. I never wanted to coach people like me. I was a jerk 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 spirit is a part of your life, and I wanted the opportunity to get back into the game.”

Hammock went to Wisconsin as a graduate assistant, where he was mentored by the quarterbacks coach. Henry MasonAfter stints at NIU, Minnesota and Wisconsin again, he moved to the NFL in 2014 to educate running backs for the Baltimore Ravens. He was also mentored by Eric Bieniemy, who’s Exhibit A for black coaches who were never given the chance to change into head coaches that similarly talented white coaches got.

Hammock desired to change into a college coach but was unable to get an interview, even within the lower league of FCS, Division I college football.

“I really had it in my head to turn it down,” Hammock said. “Just because there are so many more goalies now than there ever were. … It’s just another way to keep you from taking advantage of the opportunity, from getting close to the opportunity, in my opinion. So I thought, you know what? I’m going to be an NFL assistant.”

Then the job opened up at NIU. Historically, the predominant reason black coaches were excluded from consideration was because they weren’t a part of the predominantly white network of faculty presidents and athletic directors. In all walks of life, people are inclined to hire people they know. But NIU athletic director Sean Frazier happened to work with Hammock at Wisconsin. And Frazier was black.

Hammock landed his dream job and embraced his old coaching mentality, prioritizing relationships, learning and private growth over the brand new, transactional nature of faculty football.

“I really grew as a man at NIU and the impact that the coaches had on me and my development as a student, 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 18-22-year-old young men, it takes more than that. They’re at a critical point in their lives where they need to grow so they can make great decisions as they become adults, as they become fathers, as they become husbands, as they become productive members of society.”

That could be hard to do in top-tier programs, where players sign with the very best bidder after which bounce from school to highschool. But those programs also provide the perfect opportunity to realize certainly one of the last “first black” milestones in sports.

Is Hammock occupied with taking it to the following level?

“My goal is to make the most of this season, right?” he said. “We just got a big win over Notre Dame. How will we get our players ready for the following game?

“I can’t predict what will happen in the future.”