When football fans settle in to watch the college bowl games, the only colors that matter are on the helmets and jerseys of their favorite teams.

Less noticed will be the disparity between the skin colors of the players on the field and the head coaches and offensive and defensive coordinators on the sidelines.

Though more than half of all college football players are black, a study of the 56 bowl-bound college teams released Monday shows that whites hold 94 percent of campus leadership positions — school president, athletic director, head coach, coordinator and faculty athletic representative.

NCAA president Myles Brand has urged schools to create greater diversity on the sidelines by widening their search process when hiring coaches.

There is no lack of qualified minority candidates, yet one of the reasons why they haven’t been interviewed may be that those in power at the schools are limiting their searches to people like themselves.

Call it the comfort factor or call it racism, but the facts are that at the highest levels of college football and throughout the game across the country, whites call the shots while blacks block, tackle and carry the ball.

Only two of the 56 colleges and universities, Bowling Green and Missouri, have black presidents. Among athletic directors at the bowl schools, three are black men (USC, Virginia and Hawaii), two are Latinos (UCLA and New Mexico), and two are women (Tulsa and Maryland).

Only UCLA has a black head football coach, Karl Dorrell, who was one of four blacks to lead a football team this season among the 117 NCAA Division I-A schools.

Of the 112 offensive and defensive coordinators — a pair at each of the 56 schools — only six are black (Virginia, New Mexico, Hawaii, Florida, Miami and Southern Mississippi) and two are Asian or Pacific Islanders (Navy and USC).

Even in the position of faculty athletic representative, only four are black men (Michigan, Texas, Mississippi and California), one is Latina (New Mexico), and 14 are white women.

“It is astonishing that only 13 of the 56 bowl schools employ any person of color in these key decision-making positions,” says the author of the study, Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

“It is no wonder why there is only one African-American head coach in a bowl game.”

Using the most recent NCAA statistics, Lapchick also looked at graduation rates among the bowl-bound schools. He found that only eight had graduated more than 59 percent of their black football players. Yet all five teams led by a black, Latino or female athletics director are among the eight. Another of the schools with a black coordinator was in the top eight.

“I do not think this is a coincidence,” Lapchick said.

“This shows me that if you have a person of color in charge of the department he or she is paying attention to more than that an athlete is there to help them win. They’re paying attention to making sure he’s on track to get his degree.”

Overall among NCAA Division I-A teams, 60 percent of white football players graduated while only 45 percent of black football players got degrees.

At bowl schools, 14 of the 56 had graduation rates of less than 40 percent for football players. Nearly double that number, 26 schools, had graduation rates of less than 40 percent for black players.

“Race remains a persistent academic issue, reflected in the continuing gap between graduation rates for white and African-American student athletes,” Lapchick said.

Though many bowl teams scored poorly with their graduation rates, some were notable for their high rates.

Eleven schools had graduation rates for football players that were better than those for overall students.