Adolph Rupp eventually saw the need for black basketball players. Bear Bryant saw the need for black football players. Two of the Southeastern Conference's last three basketball national championships have been won by black coaches.

But the South's last stand against integration remains on the SEC football sidelines. With the hirings of Mike Price at Alabama and Rich Brooks at Kentucky this winter, the league now has had 337 head football coaches.

Not one has been an African-American.

Five league schools have had black basketball coaches (Arkansas, Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi). But King Football remains a Whites Only enclave, at least among the head-coaching ranks.

For a league with much to brag about, this is the sorry exception.

	Grambling's Doug Williams interviewed for the Kentucky opening last December, but did not get the job.

Mike Slive is well aware of the record. When he was announced as SEC commissioner last July, Slive alluded to the issue in his opening speech, mentioning the league's "challenge of fulfilling our responsibilities to assure gender and ethnic diversity in a way that is fair and equitable for all."

Since then the league office has compiled a database of all the black coaches in Division I-A and the National Football League, and sent the material to every school president, chancellor and athletic director. "It's a huge book," Slive said.

The clear message is that unfamiliarity with minority coaching candidates should not be a problem come hiring time.

"Right now we don't find ourselves in a different situation from many of the major conferences out there," Slive said. "It's a very important issue for all of us in intercollegiate athletics. I think we're all in this together and we all need to be discussing it, not just as a conference."

It's true that the overall number of black coaches in Division I-A is shameful, which spreads the blame nationwide. But the five other major conferences -- Big 12, Big Ten, Pacific 10, Big East and Atlantic Coast -- all have had at least one black head coach in their history. Most have had more than one.

Not the SEC.

Why? The most commonly held suspicion is that big-money boosters -- who are overwhelmingly white and tend to carry more clout in the SEC than the other leagues -- don't mind a nod toward diversity in basketball. But they want to have their say when it comes to the sport that stokes passions -- and fills coffers. And their say has, to date, been uniformly white.

"Well, it's not surprising," said Grambling coach Doug Williams last December shortly after interviewing for the Kentucky job and shortly before Brooks -- not Williams -- was named the Wildcats new head coach. "I think if you look at the demographics of the SEC -- the two Alabama schools, Starkville, Oxford, LSU in Baton Rouge ... Those demographics have a lot to do with it -- the people who pull the purse strings.

"Who are your donors? Who do they want to support? Who will they support? ... They keep saying racial harmony is getting better, but look at Division I football. Where is it getting better? Look at the administrations, the coaches -- where is it getting better?"

ESPN analyst Bill Curry, a native of the South and the former football coach at Georgia Tech, Alabama and Kentucky, said three different SEC athletic directors have told him that hiring a black football coach might cripple fund raising.

"I don't believe that would happen," Curry said. "But they believed it would happen. There is that perception."

Curry is optimistic that the SEC will break the color barrier soon, especially given the instant success Tyrone Willingham enjoyed at Notre Dame last season. And he believes that if the coach is at least given the chance to compete and succeed, odds will be in his favor.

"You watch the way he (Willingham) is going to recruit at Notre Dame," Curry said. "It's going to be awesome.

"And it's going to be because he's a good coach, not because he's a black coach. But I know from experience that a black coach will be able to get into homes that I couldn't get into."

A common lament at hiring time is that black coaches lack the experience ADs are looking for. But where are they going to get the experience?

Not at the coordinator level in the SEC. Last year South Carolina defensive coordinator Charlie Strong was the only black man in the league calling formations and/or plays. (Strong, who has suppressed his exasperation at being a perennial head-coaching candidate but never getting a job, since has moved to the defensive coordinator job at Florida.)

Experience seems to be a situational commodity anyway. Seven of the last 15 hires in the SEC had no Division I-A head-coaching experience.

Blacks have been interviewed for some of the jobs, but how seriously?

Strong was a candidate at Vanderbilt when the school hired Bobby Johnson from I-AA Furman. Williams was interviewed by Kentucky last December before the school plucked Brooks, who had been out of football for two years, from cold storage.

Integration has to happen sooner or later. But at the SEC's current foot-dragging pace, it could be later.

Pat Forde covers college football for the Louisville Courier-Journal.