Jim Tatum
James M. "Big Jim" Tatum (July 22, 1913 – July 23, 1959) was an American football and baseball player and coach. Tatum served as the head football coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1942, 1956–1958), the University of Oklahoma (1946), and the University of Maryland, College Park (1947–1955), compiling a career college football record of 100–35–7. His 1953 Maryland team won a national title. As a head coach, he employed the split-T formation with great success, a system he had learned as an assistant under Don Faurot at the Iowa Pre-Flight School during World War II. Tatum was also the head baseball coach at Cornell University from 1937 to 1939, tallying a mark of 20–40–1. Tatum's career was cut short by his untimely death in 1959. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1984.
Curley Byrd
Two years later, Byrd hired Jim Tatum as football coach. The year prior at Oklahoma, Tatum fielded a winning team, but the athletic department ran up a huge deficit and some players were paid in violation of conference rules, which resulted in university president George Cross firing athletic director Jap Haskell. The media blamed Tatum for his termination. Tatum told Cross to refute Tatum's role in the matter, and threatened to reveal the Oklahoma team had been paid $6,000 after the 1947 Gator Bowl. Cross asked Byrd to persuade Tatum not to go public, and according to author Gary King in "An Autumn Remembered", Byrd replied, "Persuade, hell! I'll tell him to keep his damn mouth shut!" Tatum remained as coach at Maryland from 1947 to 1955, and amassed a 73–15–4 record.