Vanderbilt Football Coach Will Not Hire Assistants Until He's Seen What Their Wives Look Like

Ah, Vanderbilt. A refined, enlightened place. "The Harvard of the South," it's called. So it's not without reason that its football coach, James Franklin, seems like the Larry Summers of the South:

I've been saying it for a long time, I will not hire an assistant until I see his wife. If she looks the part and she's a D1 recruit, then you got a chance to get hired. That's part of the deal. There's a very strong correlation between having the confidence, going up and talking to a woman, and being quick on your feet and having some personality and confidence and being articulate and confident, than it is walking into a high school and recruiting a kid and selling him.

Franklin, who said all of this on Clay Travis's 104.5 The Zone radio show, a Vanderbilt- and defining-oneself-through-one's-wife's-attractiveness-friendly zone, credits Moneyball with his inspiration. He said he made his entire staff watch the movie. Presumably they noticed that the film had that pearl of wisdom coming from the geezer strawman scouts whom Brad Pitt wisely ignores. Oh well.

All that said, Franklin's strategy would have been plenty effective before Betty Friedan rolled around in the early 60s. Marriage used to be all about wooing young targets to join an unequal partnership in which they'd wind up oppressed and exploited. Now that's just college football.

James Franklin: If she looks the part, you got a chance to get hired. [Coachingsearch.com, via Eye on College Football]