Probably shouldn't continue down that road as I'm about to but, though I don't think this is what he was talking about, I'd say that most football fans and coaches would say you can't be as "White" as North Dakota State is and win national championships if it hadn't just happened four times in a row. Kind of the same principle as when Bear Bryant got beat by USC and realized he had to start getting Black players.What do a mostly white team and unimaginative uni combo's have to do with a winning formula?
There's a reason it's like it is most of the time. The reason you see most successful college football team rosters being majority Black is because Blacks are faster, quicker, and capable of more explosive movement on average and that also translates to the high end of the performance distribution. People aren't going out looking for Black football players because they're Black. They're looking for guys with speed, quickness, and explosive movement so they end up with a lot of Black players.
I don't think it's any coincidence, for example, that Louisiana is the top State in terms of NFL player production and also happens to have a percent Black population more than twice the overall national percentage (32.4% vs. 13.2%).
NDSU is an exception to that trend. I don't think it's intentional on their part. They're not saying, "we don't want Black players." I think it's a function of where they're located. But obviously they've managed to win regardless.
Even though you also see a little "bias" in even NDSU's roster, I think. I looked at a photo of their team last year and tried to identify whether players were Black so I could see where they stand percentage wise. Can't remember the specific number but their percent Black was about what the US population percent Black was. Somewhere close to that 13% number. And they're in a part of the country that doesn't have a lot of Blacks proportionately. If you look at North Dakota and the States adjacent to it North Dakota is 1.8% Black, Minnesota is 5.7% Black, South Dakota is 1.9% Black, Wyoming is 1.7% Black, and Montana is 0.6% Black. If you go out to the "second ring" of States surrounding North Dakota you're looking at Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. You'll get the same kinds of percentages there.
So NDSU is in just about as "non Black" a spot as one can get in the United States. So having about 13 or 15% of their roster Black is having a disproportionately Black roster relative to the population in their vicinity by a factor of maybe 3 or 4 times the percentage you'd expect if you just randomly selected a number of college aged males from that area of the country.
