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Ohio State Football Coach Jim Tressel Has an Unusual Side Job on Campus?Teaching a Class
By HANNAH KARP
[SP_TRESSEL1] Andrew Spear for The Wall Street Journal
Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel lectures students last week on campus in Columbus.
Columbus, Ohio
You'd think the men who get paid millions of dollars a year to run the nation's top college-football programs would be a bit short on free time in the fall.
But Jim Tressel, the even-keeled, bespectacled, sweater-vest-wearing head coach at Ohio State, has been spending a good chunk of precious time this season doing something that seemingly has no impact at all on his Buckeyes' performance.
Just after sunrise twice a week, in a fluorescently lit room on Ohio State's sprawling campus, he lectures 49 bleary-eyed students on the art of coaching.
"You never want a name at the top of the alphabet?you might get some lates," a chipper Mr. Tressel warned one morning last week as he began taking attendance, a laborious process that took more than 10 minutes as he butchered names and mused about their origins.
Mr. Tressel, who has won one national title and won or shared six Big Ten championships in 10 seasons at Ohio State, has often been criticized for boring football fans with his conservative "Tressel Ball" that avoids turnovers at all costs and relies on defense, and for his mind-numbing habit of evading tough questions with safe, bland and often clich?d answers.
But Mr. Tressel's performance in the classroom, a place where few top coaches dare to venture these days, is downright riveting, and there's a growing number of students on the waiting list to prove it. "He's a legend," whispered senior Tim Weaver, an actuarial-science major from Canton, Ohio, sitting in a desk at the back of the class last week.
Andrew Spear for The Wall Street Journal
A chalkboard used by former coach Woody Hayes.
Part of the draw is the novelty, of course: The 57-year-old is the only coach in major-college football that teaches an academic class during the season, and many simply sign up for bragging rights or to bask in the presence of a national celebrity.
But it's also irresistible to watch one of the country's most powerful, venerated and usually unflappable men panicking to get through a lesson plan, fumbling with a slide projector, cracking jokes about his ineptitude with technology and struggling to engage with students who care far less about football and OSU's sacred traditions than his usual hangers-on.
"The 'victory bell' rings two times?when we win, and when else?" Mr. Tressel, who makes about $3.5 million a year, quizzed the class last week.
"Third down?" guessed a student.
"Third down? No! At graduation," Mr. Tressel said.
It used to be standard issue for top coaches to teach: The late Woody Hayes, who led the Buckeyes to three national championships in his 28-year reign, schooled students on everything from English to World War II history. And most schools in lower divisions still require their athletic coaches to teach if they're getting paid full-time.
But as the business of college sports has ballooned, teaching coaches at the upper echelon have become a dying breed. In basketball, Temple's Fran Dunphy, who lectures on management, and UC Davis's Gary Stewart, who teaches ethical issues in college athletics, are the only remaining Division I teachers.
Mr. Tressel, who renewed his contract this year through 2014, says teaching doesn't distract him from his coaching responsibilities?when he took the helm at OSU in 2001, he even moved the class to the fall quarter from the spring, which he believed was the wrong season. He says he continues to teach because he enjoys it, and though "football is a big deal around here, it's not all about football."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704116004575522034164361398.html
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