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.
Maryland Terrapins football under Jim Tatum
After the 1955 season, Tatum took an 18% pay cut, from $18,500 to $15,000 (from $ to $ in inflation-adjusted terms), to return to North Carolina as head coach. There, "The Daily Tar Heel" student newspaper was displeased to see Tatum arrive and called him a "parasitic monster of open professionalism." After a few years, however, he was accepted by the student body, the faculty, and alumni. Tatum had said, "I'm going back to North Carolina to die," and the statement proved prescient. Just four years later, in 1959, he died of Rocky Mountain spotted fever at the age of 46.