The College Football Playoff selection committee is dotted with notable names.
There’s former Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer, the winningest active coach in Football Bowl Subdivision history before he retired at the end of the 2015 season. There’s Gene Smith, athletic director at perennial football powerhouse Ohio State.
And then there’s Robert Morris University president Chris Howard, who — wait, who?
Howard, appointed to the 13-member panel in January, is the lone current college president on the committee and the only Football Championship Subdivision representative ever. Like many members, Howard brings an established career in both college football and academia. But what truly sets Howard apart is his extensive military experience, which includes service time in Afghanistan in 2003 for which he earned the Bronze Star.
College Football Playoff executive director Bill Hancock said he discovered Howard after looking through a list of William V. Campbell Award winners. Howard earned the inaugural award in 1990, which is given to the nation’s top senior scholar-athlete. Howard received positive feedback from other committee members who knew and had previously interacted with Howard.
“He’s a critical thinker, he is a person of high integrity,” Hancock said. “He also represents higher education. He’s just a thoughtful, critically thinking person that we love to have on this committee.”
Howard’s resume stood out, and the committee began the process of bringing in Howard in 2016, a few months after he took over as president at Robert Morris.
“We’re already teasing him about his expanded vocabulary, which is several notches higher than any of the rest of us,” Hancock said.
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Howard’s love for football and the armed forces was established as a young kid. He grew up in a military family in Plano, Texas, and said he had a social justice and service instinct as a youth. His heroes were NAACP civil rights lawyers and World War II Army paratroopers.
His father, Marvin Howard, was in the Army, served in Vietnam and played high school football in East Texas. Both Chris Howard’s dad and his mom, Caroline, were sharecroppers as kids. His grandparents were also sharecroppers. But Caroline and Marvin valued education, even when they were young. They met at Prairie View A&M University and were both the first in their families to attend college.
“My dad would literally would go from picking cotton with my grandparents as a sharecropper to going to football and school and was valedictorian, majoring in mathematics, and my mom was the same on her side,” Howard said.
Howard said that of the 1,400 people in his graduating high school class in 1987, around 25 students were black. But he navigated his surroundings better than most of his classmates. His list of accomplishments as a senior are long — he won a state championship as a running back under Plano High School legend Tom Kimbrough, was the battalion commander of his JROTC unit, president of the senior class, president of his local Fellowship of Christian Athletes branch and a finalist of the National Achievement Scholarship Program for Outstanding Negro Students, later renamed the National Achievement Scholarship Program.
Such a long list that the school’s administration honored Howard with his own day toward the end of his senior year — Chris Howard Day.
“They either had some extra money in the budget or were bored so they took some time to recognize,” Howard said. “It was a very special day, extraordinarily honored.”
Howard initially planned to go to West Point after graduating. But that changed after he met Fisher DeBerry, head football coach at Air Force from 1984-2006. DeBerry told him he wanted help Howard not only play football but become a better person.
“He said, ‘You’re the only coach that came in and didn’t talk football,’ ” DeBerry said recently. “I said ‘Well if you weren’t an outstanding player I wouldn’t be there to talk to you to begin with.’ It was very fun going to his home. I thought I was fighting an uphill battle because his daddy had spent 14 years in the Army, and I didn’t want him to go to Army, that’s for sure.”
On the field, Air Force dominated Navy and Army while he was there.
“We beat Navy four times and beat Army three times and won three Commander-in-Chief’s trophies, so I made the right decision,” Howard joked. “I tell all my Navy and Army buddies when I see them.”
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After graduating from Air Force in 1991 with a bachelor’s in political science, Howard thought he was headed for a multi-decade-long career in the military on active duty. He also liked the idea of becoming a politician one day and running for office as a senator.
“Chris was one of many folks on the team that excelled in academia,” said Rodney Lewis, Howard’s friend, former teammate and roommate at Air Force. “As I think about our football team — orthopedic surgeons, Rhodes Scholars, numerous pilots, numerous engineers — that’s just who we were and that’s what was expected of us. Chris was able to rise to the top of very accomplished young men at that age.”
Howard earned his doctorate in politics as a Rhodes Scholar from the University of Oxford in 1994, and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School in 2003. His military career continued to progress, and he served in Afghanistan in the Air Force Reserve for six months in 2003 after earning his MBA. But he discovered that academia could satisfy many of his career goals.
He worked with General Electric's Corporate Initiatives Group and advanced through the corporate ranks at Bristol-Myers Squibb before leaving for the University of Oklahoma, where he was the associate vice president for strategic & leadership initiatives and later vice president, in 2005. In 2009, he became president of Hampden-Sydney College.
He became president of Robert Morris on Feb. 1, 2016. He’s the first black president in the school’s history, and it isn’t lost on Howard how fast circumstances can change between generations. He listed important dates in America’s civil rights history, noting that Brown v. Board of Education, a Supreme Court ruling establishing that segregation at the public school level was unconstitutional, was passed just 15 years before he was born.
“We’ve made great strides to where the great, great grandson of a slave can run an institution like Robert Morris University,” Howard said. “On the same token, as Lincoln said, the Union is not yet perfected.”
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Howard isn’t the first member of the College Football Playoff committee to serve in the military. He isn’t even the first representative from the Air Force. That would be Mike Gould, who served on the committee from 2013-15 and was the superintendent of the Air Force Academy from 2009-13.
Committee guidelines bar current members from talking about their roles and responsibilities within the committee, but Gould is under no such restriction.
Gould, who is friends with Howard, said the commitment to being a selection committee member is time-consuming and requires plenty of travel. He considers himself lucky, as he had recently retired from active duty from the Air Force and could control his own schedule when he agreed to join the committee.
Hancock said selection committee members watch between five and 10 games each over each weekend, either on TV or via download. Committee members then travel to Dallas each Monday and Tuesday during the second half of the season for five weeks, and the sixth and final meeting is held over a weekend.
“Frankly I don’t know how some of them did it because it is a big time commitment,” Gould said. “But everyone committed to put the work in and I think the results of the first three cycles of the College Football Playoff have turned out pretty positive, which is a testament to the amount of work and effort that people have put into it.”
Howard has many responsibilities as a college president, and he leans on his staff at Robert Morris to take care of things as he boards flights to Dallas during the week and watches marquee football games during weekends.
He noted that it’s not the 17th century — phone calls, FaceTime calls and texting makes the process easier for both himself and those at Robert Morris.
Committee members are not financially compensated, but their travel and lodging expenses are covered.
“The bottom line is we’ve built a great team and you trust them and you know that this is going to be a multi-year process,” Howard said. “We’ve talked about it, we have a good game plan. I sound like a coach, right? We have a good game plan and all systems have been go so far and I have no reason to anticipate there will be anything other than that.
“This is just watching lots of football and then just getting together with 12 other bright, thoughtful people who know the game very well and getting a chance to make a selection that’s very important to a lot of people in this country, if not around the world,” Howard said. “Sports matter, football matters. They want it to be fair, they want judgment and wisdom. And as a president, I think I bring those two things.”
Omari Sankofa II: osankofa@post-gazette.com and Twitter: @omarisankofa
First Published: November 20, 2017, 4:00 p.m.