When I was a freshman or sophomore at UTC, we had to write a end of semester research paper on any topic of our choice for an English class. I picked college athletes being paid and the pros and cons of it. We had to use a variety of different types of sources and one had to be an interview of someone with some kind of direct experience with the topic. He was the AD at UTC at the time, so emailed him asking if I could swing by his office or call him for an interview.
He replied back and said he was out of town and had a lot of travel coming up, but asked me to send him some questions and he'd answer the best he could. I sent him maybe 5-6 questions and a couple of days later, at maybe midnight or 1:00 in the morning, he sent back these very detailed, well-thought out responses that made up the bulk of the info in my paper. Also mentioned all these other angles I hadn't thought about that made the paper a lot better.
I wish I still had the email, but I seem to remember him saying something to the effect of that if the rules were ever changed and athletes were allowed to be paid, it wouldn't be from the NCAA, the member schools, or athletics conferences themselves but from booster collectives (he didn't use that term but basically indicated the money wouldn't come out of athletics revenue, and it would be the end of lower-level college athletics if that ever did happen). He ended up being exactly right. I thought it was really nice for him to do that and ended up with a really good grade on the paper.
