B8 WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2020 SCORES ANALYSIS COMMENTARY
Ntop-tier recruits to H.B.C.U. alumni, in-
cluding those who made it to the N.B.A.
and N.F.L.
“We want to redirect people to commu-
nities and institutions that have histori-
cally supported us,” Gurley said.
As they reflect on the trauma that has
afflicted their community for centuries,
Black athletes are increasingly recogniz-
ing the value of their star power.
“WE ARE THE REASON THAT
THESE SCHOOLS HAVE SUCH BIG
NAMES AND SUCH GOOD HISTORY ..
But in the end what do we get out of it??”
Williams wrote on Instagram the day af-
ter his viral Twitter message. “Any way I
can help or make a change in the Black
community best believe I am going to do
that.”The Flutie EffectRevenue from college sports sur-
passed $14 billion in 2017, according to
the United States Department of Educa-
tion. Most of that figure was generated
by men’s football and basketball pro-
grams at Power 5 colleges.
The 65 schools which constitute that
group present a striking imbalance: 75
percent of athletic directors and 80 per-
cent of head basketball and football
coaches, are white men. Yet the players
on their basketball and football teams
are nearly 50 percent Black, according to
NCAA data.
A single star football player can in-
crease revenue to a school’s athletic de-
partment by more than $500,000, ac-
cording to a 2020 study by Ohio State
University.
In what is known as the Flutie Effect, a
successful college sports team can uplift
not only the athletic department, but the
entire school (the phenomenon is named
for Doug Flutie, the Heisman Trophy-
winning quarterback who was credited
for prompting applications to Boston
College after throwing a winning touch-On June 2, as Black Lives Matter pro-
testers swarmed America’s streets de-
manding an end to the racist vestiges of
America’s troubled past, a teenager from
a San Diego suburb posted eight words
on Twitter that would soon ignite a less
visible, though perhaps just as powerful,
movement.
“Going to an HBCU wouldn’t be too
bad,” he wrote.
The person behind the Twitter post,
which quickly went viral, is one of the
most sought-after college basketball re-
cruits of the Class of 2023: 16-year-old
Mikey Williams. If he were to attend a
historically Black college or university,
Williams would become one of the high-
est-rated athletes to do so post-integra-
tion.
Williams’s post came as a surprise to
college sports recruiters and fans who
pore over social media for clues about
which programs an athlete might be fa-
voring. To land a recruit like Williams
would all but guarantee a team’s success
and ensure prime TV placement for their
games.
Williams, who averages 30 points per
game for San Ysidro High School, had al-
ready amassed offers from some of the
country’s top basketball programs, in-
cluding Kansas and U.C.L.A. In the six
days after his tweet, he received another
14 — all from H.B.C.U.s. Black colleges in
the past have considered the effort and
resources to recruit elite talent a waste
because of the long odds of being se-
lected over a predominantly white insti-
tution. But in January of this year, LeV-
elle Moton, the head basketball coach at
historically Black North Carolina Cen-
tral University, offered a scholarship to
LeBron James Jr., a high school fresh-
man known as Bronny who is the son of
the N.B.A. superstar LeBron James.
As more top Black athletes express in-
terest in an H.B.C.U. movement, they are
signaling that Power 5 institutions may
no longer hold the same allure.
“All it takes is one person to change
history,” the N.B.A. star Carmelo Antho-
ny wrote on Instagram, referencing
Williams’s comments. Days after
Williams’s post, Nate Tabor, a top basket-
ball player from Queens, withdrew his
commitment from St. John’s to sign with
Norfolk State, a small Black college.
On July 3, Makur Maker, a 6-foot-11
power forward, said he was forgoing of-
fers from U.C.L.A. and Kentucky to at-
tend Howard University, becoming the
highest-ranked player in more than a
decade to choose an H.B.C.U. “I want to
inspire the youth to be able to lead in
whichever way they can. I’m doing it by
taking this step,” Maker said in a phone
interview. “Hopefully in one or two years
from now we’ll see H.B.C.U.s as power
schools.”
Hours after Maker’s announcement,
Daniel Ingram, a star quarterback from
Ohio who had signed a letter of intent in
February to attend the University of Cin-
cinnati, said in a Twitter post that he
would de-commit and instead attend the
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, an-
other H.B.C.U.
The following week, Tavyion Land, a
standout defensive back for Liberty Uni-
versity, announced he would transfer to
Norfolk State so he could be “surrounded
by people with similar backgrounds and
cultural experiences.” Several other ath-
letes and faculty members also left Lib-
erty recently, criticizing the university’s
handling of situations involving race.
“We’ve reached a boiling point. People
are truly upset and they’re going to push
this further than it’s ever been pushed
before,” said Jasmine Gurley, chairper-
son for HBCU Jump, an organization
that among other things helps connect
down pass in a 1984 game against Mi-
ami).
When Norfolk State upset Missouri at
the 2012 N.C.A.A. men’s tournament, be-
coming the fifth No. 15-seed ever to beat
a No. 2 seed, revenue from the men’s bas-
ketball team spiked by more than
$220,000 — a 24 percent increase over
the previous year. Enrollment jumped 4
percent. Assuming those new students
paid full tuition and fees, they would
have collectively brought an additional
$2 million to $4 million to the university
that year.
“Athletics is like the front porch of a
university,” said Robert Jones, the head
coach of Norfolk’s men’s basketball. “If
athletics does well, the university does
well as a whole.”
Attending H.B.C.U.s used to be the
norm for top-notch Black athletes who,
before college sports gradually desegre-
gated through the 1960s, had little other
choice. Over time, Black students have
shifted toward predominantly white in-
stitutions: The percentage of Black col-
lege students attending H.B.C.U.s fell
from 17 percent in 1990 to 9 percent in
2016, according to a study by the Race
and Equity Center at the University of
Southern California.
The report attributes the decline to
poorly resourced admissions depart-
ments and a negative perception of
Black colleges among African-American
students — a view spawned in part by
H.B.C.U. finance and accreditation woes
and exacerbated by intermittent cuts in
federal funding.
Star athletes moving en masse to re-
turn the spotlight to historically Black
universities could provide a needed eco-
nomic boost for the schools and provide
an environment that predominantly
white institutions cannot. A 2015 Gallup
study found that Black students who
graduated from H.B.C.U.s were twice as
likely as Black graduates from non-
H.B.C.U.s to have experienced support-ive professors and mentors, and are
more likely to strongly agree that their
university prepared them well for life
outside of college.
“H.B.C.U.s are the one place where
you’re not a minority,” said Gurley, who
swam for North Carolina A&T, an
H.B.C.U. “I encourage kids to go where
you’re loved. Go where you’re going to be
taken care of. Go where you’re more than
just the revenue dollars you’re going to
bring in.”
Black students at predominantly
white schools often experience racial mi-
croaggressions and stereotypes, said Ke-
neshia Grant, an assistant professor of
political science at Howard University.
Particularly after the 2016 election,
Grant said that many freshmen, as well
as students who transferred from pre-
dominantly white institutions, ex-
pressed concerns over safety.
“Students are asking themselves:
‘Where can I go and not have to worry
about falling asleep in the library and
having the police called on me? Where
can I not have to wonder if people are
questioning my presence because of
some affirmative action policy?’ ” she
said.The Exposure GapOf the 450 players on N.B.A. rosters,
just two attended H.B.C.U.s. The N.F.L.
boasts a similar ratio, with just 32
H.B.C.U. alumni among the league’s
1,800 players.
The slow rate of matriculation from
Black colleges to the pros owes in part to
a disparity in exposure. Big-name insti-
tutions offer not only first-class facilities
and well-connected coaching staffs, but
also the opportunity to play on TV in
front of millions of fans and, importantly,
scouts.
“I for sure would have gotten drafted
earlier had I gone to a P.W.I.,” said An-
toine Bethea, referring to predominatelywhite institutions. Bethea, a defensive
back, has played 14 seasons in the N.F.L.
after being drafted out of Howard in 2006
by the Indianapolis Colts.
Bethea said he was discovered by
chance when N.F.L. scouts visited How-
ard to evaluate a teammate. He said they
first took note when he happened to
make a play that flashed on the team-
mate’s videotape.
“When I was at the N.F.L. training
camps I saw guys from Ohio State and
Oklahoma who were no better than some
of my Howard teammates,” he said.
“Sometimes it felt like we got the short
end of the stick because of where we
played.”
Athletes who commit to underfunded
H.B.C.U.s should be prepared to make
sacrifices, he said. At Howard, for exam-
ple, his team’s weight room was located
in the basement of a dorm. Unable to af-
ford plane tickets, they often took 12-
hour bus rides to attend away games.
Despite struggles with scouting and
facilities, Bethea insisted that attending
an H.B.C.U. “was the best decision of my
life.”
The N.B.A. and N.F.L. have begun to
offer initiatives to help close the expo-
sure gap. In 2017, the N.B.A. players’ un-
ion launched a camp to scout the coun-
try’s top 50 players from H.B.C.U.s and
the N.F.L. was set to launch a similar ini-
tiative in March — scouting the top 100
players at a combine — but the event was
canceled because of the coronavirus
pandemic.
The N.F.L. recently designated seven
scouts to find and evaluate H.B.C.U. tal-
ent and expanded their video exchange
program — where colleges share game
footage with N.F.L. scouts — to include
H.B.C.U. conferences.
“Exposure is everything. So this is us
filling that gap,” said Troy Vincent, the
N.F.L.’s executive vice president of foot-
ball operations, and its highest-ranking
African-American official. “If the talent
is there, we’ll find you.”
That may prove more difficult than
usual this year, as the Mid-Eastern and
Southwest athletic conferences an-
nounced they would postpone their foot-
ball seasons indefinitely because of the
virus outbreak. The MEAC and SWAC
are primarily comprised by H.B.C.U.
teams.
Social media could help fill the expo-
sure void now and once sports return.
Williams and Maker each have Insta-
gram followings of 2.3 million and 90,000,
respectively, and with recent moves to-
ward revising N.C.A.A. rules, which have
long prohibited athletes from profiting
off their celebrity, players could poten-
tially leverage their movement to con-
sider Black colleges to generate endorse-
ments.
“We’re at a critical point in our country
as far as policy, empowerment and how
we’re going to deal with social injustice,”
said Kali Jones, the head football coach
at Withrow High School, who encour-
aged Ingram to withdraw his commit-
ment from Cincinnati and choose an
H.B.C.U.
Jones said he has always pushed his
players to consider H.B.C.U.s, but excite-
ment over the idea swelled after Ingram
announced his decision. He anticipates
many of his athletes will follow.
“This is a beautiful thing. This is a
beautiful moment,” he said. “We are liv-
ing in a paradigm shift.”For Some Athletes, History Becomes New Again
Makur Maker, a 6-foot-11 power forward, at his home in Yorba Linda, Calif. The highest-ranked player in more than a decade to choose a historically Black uni-
versity, Maker spurned offers from U.C.L.A. and Kentucky. ‘“Hopefully,” he said, “in one or two years from now we’ll see H.B.C.U.s as power schools.”CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAs activism swirls, Black colleges
and universities see a surge of
interest from highly rated recruits.
By ANNIKA HAMMERSCHLAGGREGORY PAYAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS‘I want to inspire the youth
to be able to lead in
whichever way they can. I’m
doing it by taking this step.’
MAKUR MAKER, right,
who has committed to Howard