This seems to be the offseason that the dam is breaking on the long-simmering dearth of black head coaches at major schools, and no one is more qualified to join this particular flood than Florida defensive coordinator Charlie Strong. He's been the "next sure thing" in head coaching rumors for so long, players he was rumored to be taking over will be passing him up the ladder soon. His baffling plight is one of Orson Swindle's oldest running jokes at EDSBS (in Internet years, that's pretty old).

Strong's been the stoic type about it, until Monday's media blitz in Miami, when he told the Orlando Sentinel's Mike Bianchi that, yes, it's all about the melanin:

Strong, when I asked him if his interracial marriage to a white wife has been factor in him never being offered a head-coaching job despite an illustrious career that has spanned a quarter-century, shook his head affirmatively.

In fact, there was one job at a southern school he interviewed for a few years ago when he says he heard it too many times to simply discard it as a vicious rumor.

"Everybody always said I didn't get that job because my wife is white," said Strong as he prepared Florida's defense for Thursday's national championship showdown with Oklahoma.

"That job" could be any number of jobs -- at least six different schools have reportedly told Strong "Thanks, but no thanks" even after an interview, and his name's come up on every initial list of candidates in the Southeast four or five years running -- but Ole Miss-centric blog The Godfrey Show suggests the Rebels hold "the smoking gun" from the 2004 search that led to three years of Ed Orgeron, in which case they got what they deserved from that hire (although Godfrey does give his school credit in Orgeron's case for reaching out to certain minority groups: "the mentally challenged [and] Cajuns").

Back to Strong: There are very, very few coaches whose careers I would describe as "illustrious," and that of a journeyman coordinator is not among them. But I wasn't exaggerating by much when I made that crack about Strong's would-be ex-players passing him up on the career ladder -- for example, Strong was an assistant head coach at Florida when Lane Kiffin was in high school, and landed his first defensive coordinator job at South Carolina in 1999, as Kiffin was moving to a graduate assistant gig at Colorado State. Strong's cell phone-juggling counterpart at Florida, Dan Mullen, was also a graduate assistant in 1999. That's nothing personal against Kiffin or Mullen, or against Tennessee or Mississippi State, which hired young guys it hopes will be dynamic, long-term winners (or at least a reasonable facsimile, in Mullen's case). When Strong wonders, "What's that guy doing that I'm not doing?," it's possible he's being paranoid, or that he has some subtle but fatal personality flaw ... that, uh, only the people interviewing him notice. He's not a mind reader.

Still, at this point, it's a good question.