[Smell The Glove]

To continue with the cream rising to the top metaphor, I think that's more likely to happen in the NFL than college. The people making the personnel decisions in the NFL are usually the front office higher-ups/ owner/ whoever. These guys are trying to keep their jobs and make money. The best way to do this is to win football games, so the teams are more likely to hire coaches that give the team the best chance of winning, regardless of race.

For college teams, the people making the personnel decisions are very much answerable to the university's boosters (much more so than NFL front office people are to their team's fans). The people doing the hiring for a college team are more likely to be swayed by the booster's interests in maintaining a particular image for the team. I don't know any college football boosters, but I would imagine that they're generally rich old white men, who don't have the best reputation for giving a chance to the black man.

I think that this disparity between NFL and CFB is shown by the fact that there are at least 6 (off the top of my head) black NFL coaches out of 32 teams, and like 4 or 5 or something like that in CFB out of 100something teams.