A few minutes after 7 on a chilly Wednesday morning, bleary-eyed students began filing into the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, lugging book bags and wearing Ohio State colors. Or else.
"That's not Notre Dame Irish," Jim Tressel said in mock disapproval to Grace Miller near the team meeting room that twice a week doubles as a college classroom.
Miller recoiled for an instant; the OSU senior and Dublin Scioto High School graduate was unsure whether the most famous professor on campus was kidding about the cursive Irish, her high school's nickname, stitched across her sweatshirt.
He was. Sort of. But it was hard to tell that early in the morning. The Buckeyes' head football coach began his 7:30 a.m. class promptly at 7:28 because "everything is a race against time," he reminded his students.
And so began Theory and Practice of Football Coaching, a three-credit-hour course taught by Tressel, with much help from football staff assistants, as well as former OSU head coaches John Cooper and Earle Bruce. It meets on Mondays and Wednesdays in the fall, with a "lab" on Fridays that sends students out to scout high-school football games. The course includes pop quizzes and a midterm heavy on football history. And students must design a high-school-level training program for a position of their choosing.
"There's a lot more work than you would expect," Miller said.
Tressel, the only coach in all of major-college football to teach an academic course during the season, was dressed Wednesday in a scarlet-and-gray short-sleeved nylon shirt - no vest. He immediately began the roll call for the 50 students (no football players), who come not only for the novelty of being taught by Tressel but also to learn about X's and O's.
Some students, such as Miller, knew next to nothing about football when class began in September.
"Now, I can watch it and actually know what's going on," the molecular-genetics major said.
Other students, such as 64-year-old Vinny Sue Herwig, already understood the game but wanted to dig deeper. And Tressel provides students with a big shovel.
"Tress says, 'Little things don't mean anything; little things mean everything,'" said Herwig, a Westerville hairdresser who attends the class free through the university's program for those 60 or older. A classmate is her 76-year-old friend Frank Barone, a former Ohio University business professor who has gone from thinking that football is a slow, crazy and silly game to something "sophisticated and complicated, with a beauty to it I have not seen before."
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