Even though I remember him being basically a peripheral character, I think that occasionally the athletic director for Minnesota State would have a somewhat central role to whatever the hell was going on on Coach. I don’t remember what his name was, but I remember that he was bald and he was hell of fidgety. It was as if the guy that played the athletic director decided to base his entire acting repertoire on a terrible attempt at some sort of understated Don Knotts caricature. I don’t remember much about him, but I think he was always super-stressed out about Coach’s antics. This was sort of a weird dynamic, because it was as if there were this history of Coach always getting in to trouble and the athletic director always having to cover for him and getting totally stressed out. I think this resulted in a lot of jokes about why the athletic director was bald.

I’m somewhat unclear as to how the employee/employer hierarchies work in major university athletic departments. Is the athletic director of a school necessarily the football coach’s boss? Or is it more like an administrative supervisor role where the athletic director isn’t a boss so much as an overseer of proper procedure? I don’t really know, but in either case I don’t think the bald guy had any reason to get so stressed out all the time. If he really was Coach’s boss and Coach’s zany antics always left him all stressed, why didn’t he just fire Coach? And if he wasn’t his boss, why the hell would he put so much pressure on himself when Coach was too busy getting into hilarious situations to do his job? But then again, Coach seemed to have a fair amount of job security, so he must have at least been passably decent when it came to coaching football.

What the hell was the athletic director so worried about all the time? I think all of his scenes ended with like, some sort of nervous double-take or Coach maybe knowingly giving him a hard time right before he left Coach’s office. Then maybe he'd say something again once the door closed; you know, just like, to one-up the scared, nervous athletic director. Atta way, Coach. Show 'em who's boss.