Sports
Marcus Freeman’s moment is significant for Black coaches: ‘It gives us validation’
Minutes after Notre Dame beat Georgia to clinch a berth in the College Football Playoff semifinals against Penn State earlier this month, Tremaine Jackson’s phone buzzed.
“Well, we’re guaranteed one,” the text message read.
Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman and Penn State coach James Franklin would be facing off in the Orange Bowl, assuring that a Black coach would advance to the national title game for the first time in history.
Jackson, 41, who was hired as Prairie View A&M head coach in December, has found himself trading texts and phone calls with fellow Black coaches at the start of every season, wondering who can be the one who coaches his team to the pinnacle.
“We look at the guys who have real opportunities and say who can it be?” Jackson said. “And as the season goes along, you’re all like, ‘Hey, I’m pulling for him.’”
Freeman, whose father is Black and mother is Korean, beat Franklin’s Penn State team for the right to make history. His Fighting Irish meet Ohio State on Monday night in Atlanta for the championship.
Standing on the stage after the Orange Bowl, ESPN reporter Molly McGrath used her third question of four to ask Freeman: “Coach, I know you’re all about team, but I want to give a moment for everyone here to be able to celebrate you, because you are the first Black head coach to go to a national championship game in college football.”
The crowd cheered.
“Just hearing that response alone, how much does this mean to you?”
“I don’t ever want to take attention away from the team. It is an honor and I hope all coaches, minorities, Black, Asian, White, great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this. But this ain’t about me. This is about us. We’re going to celebrate what we’ve done. Because it’s something special.”
“It is an honor and I hope all coaches, minorities, Black, Asian, white, it doesn’t matter, great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this.”
Marcus Freeman on becoming the first Black and Asian American head coach to make the FBS national championship 👏 pic.twitter.com/KHMksJUNdK
— ESPN (@espn) January 10, 2025
Clips of the exchange almost immediately went viral. The video posted by ESPN alone has 2.6 million views on X.
Much of the response there and elsewhere the clip was posted praised Freeman and criticized McGrath and ESPN for the question. Some believed ESPN was injecting race into a moment where it shouldn’t be present.
Black coaches across the sport can tell you why it should be.
“We’re talking about it because it’s real. What are you pushing when you’re telling me I shouldn’t be talking about this?” said Van Malone, the assistant head coach, defensive pass game coordinator and cornerbacks coach at Kansas State, who has worked with a variety of minority coach associations and serves as the CFO of the Minority Coaches Advancement Association.
“It’s a really, really massive deal,” said Archie McDaniel, who coaches linebackers at Illinois and serves as president of the Minority Coaches Advancement Association. “For me personally, it’s monumental.”
Said Jackson: “When you realize we’ve been playing football since the 1860s, you just go, man, look how far we’ve come. I’m rooting for Marcus like hell. Because it gives us validation.”
Across all levels of college football since it began in 1869 — FBS, FCS, Division II, Division III and NAIA — only seven Black coaches are believed to have coached a game that could have clinched a national title.
Rudy Hubbard won a Division I-AA title at Florida A&M in 1978.
Mike London, who won an FCS title in 2008 at the University of Richmond, is the only coach to hoist a national title trophy somewhere other than at an HBCU.
Jackson, hired in 2022 as the first Black coach in Valdosta State history, led his program to the Division II national title game last month and lost. He parlayed his work into the job at Prairie View A&M, a historically Black university that competes at the FCS level.
In his almost 20 years as a coach, McDaniel has lost count of how many times he’s heard it. He’ll sit down with a player and talk about life after football. Lots of them bring up coaching, but he’ll hear a familiar phrase from his Black players.
“I would love to be a head coach,” McDaniel said they tell him. “But I don’t know if that’s really possible.”
Currently, 18 of the 134 (13.4 percent) FBS programs have a Black head coach. In the SEC, that number is zero. The ACC has two. Deion Sanders is the only Black coach in the Big 12. Four Big Ten coaches are Black.
One answer as to why there are so few Black coaches in a sport played predominantly by African Americans is that the history of college football is the history of America. Schools and conferences didn’t integrate until the 1960s and ’70s amid the civil rights movement.
The Bowl Championship Series debuted in 1998. Five years later, Mississippi State made Sylvester Croom the first Black head coach in SEC history. Twenty-two years after that moment, the league has four additional programs at 16 and one fewer Black head coach.
Opportunities are rare. Opportunities at good schools that are capable of reaching the national championship game are even rarer. Since 2000, the 48 spots in the national championship game have been occupied by just 17 programs. Seven of those have had a Black full-time head coach not in an interim role at some time in their history.
Much of the reason Freeman’s moment means so much to Black coaches in the sport is because they understand the math. They also know of playing the political game, Jackson said. Many don’t want to speak out about diversity publicly, Malone said.
“The older crowd never thought they’d see it,” Jackson said. “The younger crowd expects to see it and thinks it’s easy to get there.”
McDaniel said that a few years ago the Minority Coaches Advancement Association counted the number of minority head coaches by hand at the more than 500 programs at every level of the sport. They found 45.
“I’m a numbers guy. All I look at are numbers. And numbers and opportunity have a direct reflection on one another,” he said.
The National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches — founded by Maryland coach Mike Locksley in 2020 — works to expand schools’ applicant pools when openings arise and point them to candidates that might not be on their radar. One such effort from the group, which has over 2,000 members, paired up-and-coming coaches with athletic directors for an 18-month mentorship program, according to Raj Kudchadkar, executive director of the NCMFC. Freeman was paired with Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez.
Notre Dame promoted Freeman from defensive coordinator in December 2021 after Brian Kelly left for LSU.
In an open letter to Notre Dame shortly after he was hired, Freeman addressed it more openly than he has during this Playoff run.
“Being a part of this coalition has been an important reminder that: Hey, you are a representation of a lot of people. And that’s what I want to be. I want to be a representation, but also more than that I want to be a demonstration,” Freeman wrote. “I want to be a demonstration of what someone can do, and the level they can do it at, if they are given the OPPORTUNITY. Because that’s what is needed: opportunity. We need more minorities to get the opportunity to interview — and we need more minorities to get the opportunity to do a job that they can have success in.”
Multiple coaches pointed to Black head coaches Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith going head-to-head in the Super Bowl in 2007 — Dungy became the first Black head coach to be crowned the NFL’s champion when his Indianapolis Colts won — and noted that Monday night might be remembered similarly, especially if Freeman’s Irish pull the upset.
“What this moment provides is hope for a lot of people that have had a lot of moments of being discouraged,” McDaniel said. “It’s really hard at times to imagine yourself accomplishing something that has literally never been done.”
(Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
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The face of baseball will not be at Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
Shohei Ohtani was scratched from his start on Friday as the Los Angeles Dodgers said he will also miss the Midsummer Classic with what the team called left knee irritation.
Ohtani, for obvious reasons, has become an All-Star Game fixture. He has earned the honor in each of the past five seasons and made his first start in 2021.
Starting pitcher Shohei Ohtani #17 of the Los Angeles Dodgers warms up before the MLB game against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field on June 03, 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images) (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
The two-way phenom is on his way to winning his fifth MVP award in his last six seasons as he is hitting .290 with a .939 OPS and pitching to a minuscule 1.79 ERA, the second-lowest in the sport among pitchers with 80-plus innings. His OPS is also the seventh-best mark in the league.
The Dodgers said Ohtani will be the team’s designated hitter up until the break, but he will “have some interventions on his knee to put him in the best position for the second half of the season.”
Ohtani dealt with knee issues earlier in the season.
It is certainly a big hit for the game as the other face of the sport, Aaron Judge, will miss the game due to a fractured rib that has kept him out since late May.
Shohei Ohtani #17 of the Los Angeles Dodgers gets ready in the on deck circle against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field on June 01, 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Norm Hall/Getty Images) (Norm Hall/Getty Images)
DODGERS WILL AGAIN VISIT WHITE HOUSE TO CELEBRATE WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONSHIP, OFFICIAL SAYS
Ohtani hit 99 home runs combined in 2024 and 2025, leading the National League with a 1.025 OPS in that span. Ohtani did not pitch in 2024 after elbow surgery but returned to the bump last year and owned a 2.87 ERA and 11.9 K/9, a figure he also put up in 2022 that led the American League.
The “Japanese Babe Ruth” is the only player in MLB history to have 300-plus plate appearances and 40-plus innings in six separate seasons (Ruth only did it twice and never stole 50 bases), and he has more than excelled at both.
Shohei Ohtani pitches for the Los Angeles Dodgers against the San Francisco Giants at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, California, on May 13, 2026. (Gary A. Vasquez/Imagn Images)
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Ohtani is not hitting like he has in the past, but certainly the best pitching performance of his career will make up for it. He “only” has 20 homers and 56 RBI this season.
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If Mikel Merino is sleeping, please don’t wake him. If the last week has been a dream, he’d just as soon keep dreaming.
Because on Friday, for the second time in five days, Merino came off the bench for the final five minutes of a World Cup knockout game and scored the winning goal, the latest lifting Spain to a 2-1 victory over Belgium and into next week’s semifinal against France in Arlington, Texas.
“Not even in my wildest dreams could I have imagined what’s happening right now, right?” Merino said in Spanish. “Honestly, it’s crazy.”
How crazy? Merino has played less than 10 minutes in the last two games and has two goals. He’s taken four shots in the World Cup and put two of them in the back of the net, the first in stoppage time to beat Portugal in the Round of 16 and in the 88th minute Friday to beat Belgium in a quarterfinal and extend Spain’s unbeaten to streak to 36 games.
“I don’t really even know what to say. I still can’t quite believe it,” Merino said.
Yet Spain’s final substitution, which brought on Merino in the 86th minute, wasn’t the only one that figured heavily in the result. Fifteen minutes earlier Belgian coach Rudi Garcia sent backup goalkeeper Senne Lammens on for Thibaut Courtois — not by choice, by necessity.
The dropoff in talent wasn’t great — Lammens started 32 times for Manchester United this season — but the difference in experience was. Courtois was playing in his 21st World Cup game, second-most all-time, and he had been brilliant up to then.
But he tweaked a muscle making a save minutes earlier and dropped to the turf just before the second-half hydration break. After being attended to by the team’s trainers, he tried to continue but couldn’t, eventually hobbling to the sideline and collapsing on the bench in tears.
“We didn’t want his injury to get worse. That’s why I subbed him off,” Garcia said.
“It’s part and parcel of high-level sport. You need to be concentrated, 100% focused, and need to be able to perform. I did not want to put players on the pitch who were not 100%.”
The margin between Belgium and Spain, after all, is a small one, even if the teams took completely different routes to the quarterfinal.
Spain, which hadn’t gone past the Round of 16 in a World Cup since 2010 when it won its only title, had gone a record six games and 609 minutes without allowing a World Cup goal, dating to the group stage of the last tournament four years ago.
Spain midfielder Mikel Merino scores off a rebound in front of Belgium goalkeeper Senne Lammens during the second half of Spain’s 2-1 quarterfinal win in the World Cup quarterfinals Friday at SoFi Stadium.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
You could binge watch two seasons of “Abbott Elementary” in that time.
But if Spain, the reigning European champion, and goalkeeper Unai Simón were the immovable objects, Belgium, playing in the quarterfinals for the third time in four World Cups, was an unstoppable force. With 12 goals in the last three games, it entered the quarterfinals with the third-most goals in the tournament. And no team had taken more shots.
Spain struck first, with Fabián Ruiz giving La Roja a 1-0 lead with his first goal of the tournament in the 30th minute. The sequence started with Pedro Porro sending a cross into the box for Dani Olmo, whose shot was parried away by Courtois. But Ruiz pounced on the rebound and deflected a shot off defender Timothy Castagne and into the back of the net.
In any other game of this tournament, that would have been enough for Simón. But not against Belgium, which ended Spain’s shutout streak in the 41st minute on a brilliant header from Charles De Keterlaere, who shielded Pau Cubarsí with his body and one-hopped a Castagne cross past a flat-footed Simón for his third goal in two games.
“The record and the milestones are there,” Spanish coach Luis de la Fuente said of his goalkeeper’s record streak. “It’s been decades since the last record was set. And perhaps somebody will break the clean-sheet record.
“But it’s going to be many, many years before that happens.”
Belgium opened the game up a bit when Garcia brought Romelu Lukaku, the country’s all-time leading scorer, on at the hour mark. But Courtois was called to make two saves in the next three minutes and came up lame after the second.
Shorty after he came off, De la Fuente summoned Merino over.
“He didn’t say much to me,” Merino said. “He told me I was coming in as the No. 10. And then, as the game was coming to an end, he told me I was incredible.
“Those are the only two things he said to me.”
The first shot Lammens faced came moments later, when Cubarsí put a one-hop shot on goal from distance. The keeper dove to his right to stop it with both hands, but the ball skipped just before it reached he and Lammens had trouble with the rebound, pushing it toward the edge of the six-yard box for Merino, who tapped it in.
“Unfortunately, to beat a team of this caliber, you need luck on your side,” Garcia, the Belgian coach, said. And the stars didn’t align for us.”
So while Belgium goes home, Spain goes to Texas for Tuesday’s semifinal with France, the only team in the world ranked ahead of it.
“Ever since the World Cup started, everyone has been waiting for this match,” Spanish wunderkind Lamine Yamal said. “I’ve been really looking forward to it. To me, they’re the two best teams in the World Cup.
“If anyone can take on France with confidence, it’s us.”
Especially if Merino keeps dreaming.
Sports editor Iliana Limón Romero contributed to this story.
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Oba Femi and Brock Lesnar’s feud will come to a head at SummerSlam in August, and the showdown has the potential to be WWE’s match of the year.
Femi beat Lesnar at WrestleMania 42 and led to “The Beast Incarnate” deciding to retire – at least for a moment – at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Lesnar made a dramatic return a few weeks later, challenging and beating Femi at Clash in Italy.
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Oba Femi looks on during Monday Night RAW at Allstate Arena on July 6, 2026, in Chicago, Illinois. (Melina Pizano/WWE via Getty Images)
At SummerSlam, Femi and Lesnar will do battle inside a Hell in a Cell.
WWE Hall of Famer John Bradshaw Layfield called the next meeting between Femi and Lesnar a “generational matchup.”
“I’ve never seen anything like Oba – well, I have. I’ve seen Brock,” he told Fox News Digital. “It’s very much the carbon copy of Brock coming in. Brock coming in was like, oh my God, who is this guy? The guy can even talk, and he’s gonna be one of the biggest stars in wrestling. Not only could he talk, he’s a really smart guy. Brock became one of the biggest draws in professional wrestling. He came one of the biggest draws in UFC. It’s an unbelievable story, and now you got somebody who can rival that character.
Brock Lesnar in action against Oba Femi during “Monday Night Raw” at TD Garden on March 23, 2026, in Boston, Massachusetts. (Michael Owens/WWE via Getty Images)
“This Oba Femi comes out with the silly little walk he does. Everyone kinda does it, it’s like The Bushwackers. But the whole arena does it. I was in Vegas and I didn’t want to go to the matches and deal with the traffic and deal with the backstage area, and so I kinda just watched it in a sports bar. I stood in the back where nobody could recognize me, and as soon as Oba came out, the entire sports bar was sitting there doing that Oba Femi dance. The guy is just unbelievably over.
“I really think that somewhere in the NFL this year, you’re going to see an entire NFL arena doing this dance. You’re gonna have somebody like Saquon Barkley or ‘King’ (Derrick Henry) or some of these guys do this dance, and it’s infectious. Once one of them does, one of these great running backs or wide receivers, or somebody scores a touchdown, that’s when I think you’re gonna see entire arenas doing it. I just think Oba Femi is lightning in a bottle and Brock has always been that way. This is, to me, a generational matchup.”
Brock Lesnar and Oba Femi face off during WrestleMania 42: Night 2 at Allegiant Stadium on April 19, 2026, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Georgiana Dallas/WWE via Getty Images)
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SummerSlam will take place on Aug. 1 and 2 at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.
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