Bradley Moore, American Renaissance, September 5, 2019

The 2019 college football season kicked off August 24 with the Florida Gators defeating the Miami Hurricanes. Though the University of Florida is just 6.3 percent black, the victorious Gators started only one non-black player: a white right guard on the offensive line.

Florida is in the Southeastern Conference (SEC). For many Southerners, football means college football.

Last Sunday, AmRen published an article called “The Vanishing White College Football Player.” What follows is a closer look at what is happening in what is commonly ranked as the best division in college football.

There are 14 schools in the SEC, including the universities of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Auburn, Louisiana State, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, and Vanderbilt are also in the conference.

Most of these teams were all-white about 50 years ago. Today, they are overwhelmingly black, despite low numbers of black student enrollment.

The University of Kentucky integrated its team in 1967. Tennessee followed the next year. LSU and Ole Miss didn’t integrate until 1972.

Using the source OurLads.com, we can piece together the number of white players that started in the SEC, as of August 31. Each team has 22 total starters.

In every one of these schools, whites are vastly underrepresented in football, especially on defense. Put it this way: You couldn’t field a defensive team with the combined number of white defensive starters in the entire SEC.

Every team starts four defensive backs (the cornerbacks, free safety, and strong safety.) None is white. Eight of the 14 starting quarterbacks are white. They are at Arkansas, Auburn, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana State, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and Vanderbilt. Florida’s Feleipe Franks appears to be half-white.

Auburn, Louisiana State, and Texas A&M are starting white fullbacks, but there is not one white starting running back. In 2007, LSU won the national championship with the help of Jacob Hester, a white running back. Sports Illustrated noted how rare this was:

[T]here have been other instances in which Hester has removed his helmet without meaning to pull a fast one — like when he’s trying to towel off the part of him that is most an anachronism: his white face. The fact is, in today’s game, it’s rare to see a white running back playing the role of dominant rusher on a college football team, let alone a national champion. And Hester hears about it. In 2006, after shedding his headgear during a first-quarter timeout against Tennessee, Vols linebacker Jerod Mayo reacted as if he had seen a ghost. Said Mayo to Hester, “Shouldn’t you be playing running back for Air Force?”

Five schools will start white tight ends, one of the more common positions for white players. Most white starters are on the offensive line. Ole Miss is starting five white linemen, and Kentucky has four.

Websites such as Caste Football suggest that whites are deliberately excluded from certain positions.

The majority of the 14 SEC teams will start three or sometimes even four wide receivers in “spread” offenses, but only Auburn will start a single white wide receiver. This is Will Hastings, who broke high school records as a wide receiver, but walked-on for Auburn as a kicker. He has a 4.3 second 40-yard-dash time and teammates call him “white lightning.” Yet a USA Today article described him like this: “Undersized, baby-faced and sporting floppy blond hair, Will Hastings doesn’t really look the part of a Southeastern Conference receiver.”

Recruiters think the same way; they look for “types” of players, and this usually includes race. In Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side, recruiting guru Tom Lemming feels sorry for the “anti-types.” “Lord help the white receiver or the white running back,” he says, “or until the earlier 1990s, the black quarterback.”

Former Notre Dame safety and NFL defensive back Tom Zbikowski got the same treatment. An article about him quoted his father: “When you’re a white athlete, you’re never fast.”

The article also quotes the television football commentator Tom Lemming:

When it comes to football, white athletes have to prove themselves more than black athletes at certain positions — cornerback, wide receiver and running back,” Lemming said. “There’s a prejudice amongst a lot of college coaches — not all of them — that white guys can’t play those positions. So when they get to college, they get switched right away to other positions.

(The article appeared in The South Bend Tribune but has since been removed from the internet.)

Partly because of prejudice like this, just 50 years after the SEC integrated, whites are a small minority among starting players. They are even a minority at schools that are overwhelmingly white, such as the University of Tennessee. Older SEC fans who support their college teams might as well be rooting for a team from a different country. The Great Replacement has come to SEC college football.