As NCAA Division I athletic departments continue to fail miserably in hiring African American head football coaches, the Black Coaches Association (BCA) has stepped up efforts to raise accountability. A year after announcing plans to issue a "hiring report card," the BCA has spelled out the criteria for its first evaluations, which will be issued in October.

"For the first time in the history of intercollegiate athletics, we have a systematic mechanism to hold people accountable for the hiring process," says C. Keith Harrison, Director of the Paul Robeson Research Center for Academic and Athletic Prowess at the University of Michigan, who was awarded a three-year research grant from the BCA to study the head coach hiring process in Division I football. "The scores will make people more aware and institutions more accountable."

Division I schools with head football coach openings from 2004-06 will be graded on:

• The number of times they contact the BCA, with an A for four contacts, a B for three, a C for two, a D for one, and an F for none.

• The effort to interview candidates of color, based on the proportion of interviews given to minority candidates, with 40 percent counting as an A.

• The diversity of the hiring process, based on the proportion of minority members on the search committee, with 26 percent counting as an A.

• The length of the search process, with two to four weeks counting as an A.

• The adherence to their college's affirmative action hiring policies, with an A for full compliance, B, C, and D for partial compliance, and F for total non-compliance.

The BCA plans to issue report cards for three years, by which time it hopes to see that 20 percent of head coaching opportunities have been filled by African Americans. "We're trying to make the hiring process inclusive," says Floyd Keith, Executive Director of the BCA. "If athletic directors follow the criteria for what we feel is the proper way to conduct a search that is inclusive and diverse, a reasonable number of minority candidates will surface and a good candidate will come through.

"We're creating the environment for progress to take place," continues Keith. "The grades will speak for themselves."