It’s a historic year for the professional football players and supporters of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, who are among the throngs anxiously awaiting Super Bowl XLVIII – the first NFL championship game in the New York City metropolitan area, coming Feb. 2, 2014.
For the first time since the first Super Bowl in 1967, the championship game will be played outdoors in a cold weather location – MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., home of New York’s Giants and Jets.
Fans of former HBCU players – who have made impressive contributions to the NFL and its annual Super Bowl matchup over the years – are betting that black college players will continue this tradition.
The black colleges’ influence runs long and deep: Grambling University graduate Paul (Tank) Younger, a star of the 1951 Rams team, won the NFL Championship and also was the first African-American to work in the administrative offices of an NFL team (as scout and executive with the Rams).
Doug Williams, another Grambling University alum, was the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl.
Among the HBCU local heroes are N.Y. Giants’ star Harry Carson, a graduate of South Carolina State University, who played in a Super Bowl and was inducted into the Football Hall of Fame; and Texas Southern University graduate Michael Strahan, won a Super Bowl with the Giants and is now co- host of ABC-TV’s “Live with Kelly & Michael” as well as the Fox NFL Sunday football show.
There has been a decline in the number of players from HBCUs playing in the NFL over recent years, but they still have a major impact in the Super Bowl. Last year, Morehouse College alum Jerome Boger made history as the first HBCU graduate to serve as head referee of the Super Bowl. There is great inspiration for athletes and students attending HBCUs to impact the nation’s most watched sporting event.
