Ohio State is No. 2
Ohio State checks in at No. 2 in the first College Football Playoff rankings of 2024.
One of the things that always bugs me in the general mythology of football is the common tale that head coaches tell of their time as a graduate assistant or a low-level coach, which always sounds something like this: making pennies, working 95 hours a week, eating out of trash cans and fending off raccoons for week-old pizza crust, sleeping under a desk occupied by three other GAs, etc.
Usually these stories are told with a smirk and a twinkle in their eye, a twinkle they were able to buy with the tens of millions of dollars they managed to accrue over decades of head coaching, but it's interesting to me that we don't get to hear those stories from the coaches that didn't quite make it, the coaches who spent years on subsistence wages, working their asses off and putting their health and relationships at risk, only to not strike it big somewhere down the line.
Which is why I'm glad that Mike Warren is suing Florida State over unpaid wages.
In the lawsuit, Warren says he “received no compensation at all” for working “approximately 84 hours per week” in the days — Dec. 8 to Dec. 27 — leading up to the bowl game. Warren also alleges he worked an average of more than 100 hours per week during football season but was only paid for 40 hours per week.
Because the NCAA limits staffs to 10 on-field coaches, programs often employ quite a few quality control coaches who work behind the scenes breaking down film and helping the other coaches prepare for future opponents without working with the players. After working as a teacher and assistant coach at a high school in Tallahassee, Warren was hired as a quality control coach in January 2013.
It's ironic that Warren is suing the school over a period of time in which they hired a new coach in Willie Taggart. Taggart will be making at least 5 million dollars a year with the Seminoles.
