Posted on September 1, 2019

The Vanishing White College Football Player

Peter Bradley, American Renaissance, September 1, 2019

There are 130 teams in Division I college football. These are schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Of course, there are other colleges that play football in smaller divisions, but the 130 schools in the FBS are what most people refer to as college football. These are the games you see on TV, playing in bars and restaurants.

Since 2005, Caste Football — a website that covers race and sports and advocates for white athletes — has conducted a racial breakdown of the starters for each college football program. This is a painstaking task that involves going to websites and researching official rosters of the various teams. Of course, starters change throughout the year due to injuries and coaching decisions. But the Caste Football reports give as good of a racial breakdown of college football (and other sports) as can be found.

College football officially kicks off this weekend but really dives into a full schedule after Labor Day. This means the rosters for 2019 for all 130 teams are set.

Caste Football counts a total of 764 white starters, which averages out to about 6 per team (each team has 22 total starters, 11 on offense and 11 on defense). This means whites are 26.5 percent of all FBS starting players. This is 2.5 percent fewer (a drop of 67 players) since 2018. Most of the other starters are black, though Polynesians are heavily represented in certain programs such as the University of Hawaii, Brigham Young University, University of Utah and other, mainly West Coast programs. Hispanics and Asians are rare.

Only 6 percent of schools start a team that’s half-white (11 starters) or more. This compares to 36 percent of teams that had a half-white or more starting lineup in 2010. Air Force started an all-white squad in 2007, which may be the last all-white starting lineup we will see in major college football.

Who are the few white-friendly teams we can cheer for? Northwestern, Air Force, and Miami (OH) each start 13 whites, though Northwestern also starts two players who are half white/ half Asian and will probably be seen as white by viewers. Other teams with at least a half-white starting lineup include Army, Brigham Young, Wisconsin, Kansas State and Ohio (not to be confused with Ohio State).

What about the least white teams?

Tennessee and Texas El Paso start no whites at all. Auburn, Florida State, and Mississippi State each start one white player. Perennial powerhouse Alabama starts two whites.

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) is comprised of teams from the deep South and is usually the strongest conference in college football. The teams in the SEC average a mere three white starters. This is an amazing statistic considering the SEC had all-white teams into the 1970s. Texas was the last all-white team to win a national championship (1969) though Brigham Young won the 1984 national championship with an overwhelmingly white squad.

One pleasant surprise is Clemson. Last year’s national champions sport a relatively white-friendly eight white starters and have many white backup players. Clemson’s white quarterback, Trevor Lawrence, is the strong favorite to win the 2019 Heisman Trophy, given to the best player in college football.

Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence. (Credit Image: © John Mersits/CSM via ZUMA Wire)

A brief overview of this year’s player breakdown by race and how it compares to past years can be found here.

Will whites turn off?

Three years ago, I wrote a piece for American Renaissance on why ratings were falling for the National Football League (NFL). This was when Colin Kaepernick was kneeling for the national anthem. Many people blamed this for the poor ratings, but I suggested another cause:

But could it also be that whites are getting sick of watching an increasingly black league that seems to exclude talented white players? In 1985, the league was nearly half white, with blacks making up 52 percent of the rosters. Today, blacks are 67 percent of players with whites at only 31 percent.

This put the NFL at odds with its overwhelmingly white fan base.

Seventy-seven percent of the fans are white, 15 percent are black, and 8 percent are Hispanic. Moreover, it is an older audience, with 37 percent of NFL fans over 55.

Perhaps these older white fans started following football when the demographics were not so skewed. Younger generations of whites don’t seem as enthralled by the mostly black league. Only 20 percent of NFL fans are in the 18-34 age bracket. That number slips to 9 percent for viewers 17 and younger.

College football is now slightly less white than the NFL, at least when it comes to starters. Will whites start turning off college football games the way they have mostly done with the National Basketball Association (NBA)? As of 2016, there were more black NBA fans (45 percent) than white (40 percent) in a league in which barely 20 percent of the players are white.

TV ratings and attendance for college football have been declining for several years though the games still dominate Saturday television ratings.

What do older whites who remember the days of all-white and mostly-white teams representing Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Carolina and others think of stadiums full of whites cheering on nearly all-black teams? Of course, it is only whites who cheer across racial lines. Blacks don’t pack the stands to root for their favorite hockey teams.

Moreover, it is only a matter of time before the black racial activism that has taken over the NFL and NBA comes to college football.

This is a shame, since many whites have fond memories of college football. Some played for their schools, and others no doubt enjoyed tailgating and cheering for their teams as students. Still more may like to relax and watch a game on Saturday afternoon. But it makes no sense for whites to cheer on mostly black players who hate and despise them — even as coaches overlook and refuse to recruit talented white players.

College football is now just one more institution created by whites that has sunk into a sea of diversity.