I was all revved up to read that article and write about how ridiculous it was to allege that colleges weren’t hiring qualified blacks as head football coaches. “Colleges practice affirmative action even when their states legally forbid them to,” I was going to write. “How on earth would they err in the opposite direction — by passing up the most qualified applicants, who just happen to be black? To make this allegation you’d need some real evidence, and a mere gap in black representation is not that.”

But actually, Dungy steps up to the plate and makes some specific allegations:

Over the past decade I’ve been contacted by many universities who were looking for head coaches. I’ve recommended African-American coaches including Herm Edwards, Lovie Smith, Mike Tomlin, Ron Meeks and Leslie Frazier — men with great leadership skills and great track records in the N.F.L. None was hired, and rarely did they even get interviewed by those universities.

I don’t know the first thing about these coaches (somehow I managed to grow up a block from Lambeau Field without becoming a football fan), but at least this is a claim we can evaluate, rather than a simple pointing-out of a gap.