no big TV contracts, college basketball and football coaches in U.S. not paid like Gods

Woody Hayes taught history classes at Ohio State and even maintained a separate “faculty” office and he continued teaching for several years after he was fired as the football coach.
 
Tom Osborne has a PhD so it wouldn’t surprise me if he taught some classes at Nebraska over the course of his career.
 
Now’s a good time to tell you I went to high school in Ohio, which you may notice is not Texas. Read Friday Night Lights for a view of a world where high school football (yes, I said high school) is insanely big business. (Read the book - the movie doesn’t do it justice, and the TV show is fiction.) And this is out in Odessa, Texas, which is way the hell out in West Texas, where there is Jack-shit else to do, although the book makes it clear that it’s just as crazy in Dallas.

The head coach was the highest-paid school employee and didn’t teach classes - he coached full-time and wasn’t expected to teach (and probably couldn’t have if he wanted to; he had games to win!) It was probably the closest thing to a highly competitive amateur model that one could conceive of, and there was still a lot of shit going on to skirt the rules and a lot of arms races for facilities, equipment, and yes, coaches.
When I graduated from a suburban Houston high school in 1981, there weren’t big plastic banner ads for businesses and corporations on stadium fencing, like I’ve seen in schools today.

Football was still big, just not a monster out of control.
 
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