JACKSON, Miss. — Years before Jackie Slater was a Hall of Fame offensive lineman, he was playing for Wingfield High School in Jackson, Mississippi, and hoping to attract the attention of college scouts.
This was in the early 1970s — about the time Southeastern Conference football teams were just beginning to recruit Black players — so this massive teenager was mostly ignored by the big schools. But Jackson State welcomed him.
“It was where I was wanted,” Slater recalled. “And it’s where I could excel.”
Slater was one of many players who thrived at the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities, particularly from the ’60s through the ’80s. NFL superstars Jerry Rice and Walter Payton were part of that wave.
But HBCUs have slowly turned into an afterthought on the college football landscape.
For the first time in the NFL’s common draft era, which started in 1967, not one player from the Southwestern Athletic Conference or Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference was selected this month. The two conferences combined to produce at least 20 NFL draft picks every year from 1967 to 1976, according to research by STATS. That output has slowly declined since.
Now storied programs like Grambling, Southern, Florida A&M and Mississippi Valley State are known more for crumbling facilities, player boycotts and struggles to meet NCAA academic standards than for what happens on the field.
