Among many history-makers, here's my Mount Rushmore of Black coaches

Besides being a great month for college basketball, I also enjoy February for the perspective offered by Black History Month.

The stories of the trailblazers who broke color barriers in sports are fascinating. And here in SEC country, they all happened since I was old enough to know what was going on.

I wasn’t born yet when Jackie Robinson took his first swing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. But I was a freshman in college in the fall of 1967 when Kentucky’s Nate Northington broke the color barrier in SEC football and Vanderbilt’s Perry Wallace soon followed in basketball.

In the decades since, we’ve witnessed countless highlights by the pioneers and then by the thousands of Black athletes who followed. Trying to single out a handful as the most outstanding would be a fool’s task.

But the pool of the SEC’s Black head coaches is more manageable.

Tennessee made history in 1989, hiring Wade Houston to coach men’s basketball, the first Black head coach in any SEC sport. Football? Sylvester Croom was the first, 2004 at Mississippi State. Only four more have followed, and the SEC football coaching roster has been all white since Vanderbilt fired Derek Mason in 2020.

Women’s basketball saw as many as seven of 14 programs led by Black head coaches in 2021. That number has shrunk.

So I’ve elected a Mount Rushmore of Black SEC head coaches. I’m sticking to turf I know: football and men’s and women’s basketball.

Apologies to guys like Mike Holloway at Florida and J.J. Clark at Tennessee, who won multiple national titles in track and field. If I try to take in the entire SEC sports menu, I’m guaranteed to miss somebody.

Here’s my four faces to carve into ... where, maybe Lookout Mountain?

Nolan Richardson: Nolan was already rollin’ when Arkansas basketball joined the SEC in 1992.

The highlight was a 1994 national title. But Richardson had good teams across his tenure in Fayetteville from 1985-2002. He got the Hogs to two other Final Fours.

His teams claimed two SEC regular-season titles. Richardson won 69.7 percent of his games at Arkansas and is enshrined in the Naismith College Basketball Hall of Fame.

Tubby Smith: One of the few coaches who can claim taking five programs to the NCAA tournament is Orlando Henry Smith. One was Georgia, in 1996 and ’97. That got attention.

Success at Georgia landed him the coveted Kentucky job when Rick Pitino left. Smith’s debut produced the 1998 NCAA championship.

Before leaving Lexington in 2007, Smith hung five SEC regular-season and five SEC tournament banners and was named 2003 national coach of the year.

Dawn Staley: South Carolina in 2008 made the greatest SEC women’s basketball hire since Tennessee handed Pat Summitt a whistle in the 1970s.

Staley has urged the Gamecocks to five Final Fours, winning titles in 2017 and 2022. There will be more. At this writing, South Carolina is undefeated and ranked No. 1.

Her teams have won seven SEC regular-season and seven SEC tournament titles. She’s a three-time national coach of the year. And she went 45-0 as coach of the U.S. national team.

James Franklin: No titles or banners here. But what Franklin did in three years at Vanderbilt football – 2011-13 – was terrific.

He took over a shambles of a program, led the ‘Dores to three bowl appearances and the first back-to-back nine-win seasons in school history.

There was a seven-game win streak. The 2012 team finished in the final AP Top 25 for the first time since 1948. No wonder Penn State came and got him.

Mike Strange is a former writer for the News Sentinel. He currently writes a weekly sports column for Shopper News.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Among many history-makers, here's my Mount Rushmore of Black coaches