Bret Bielema, the future head football coach at the University of Wisconsin, still has a note he received from Hayden Fry, when the former Iowa coach retired following the 1998 season.
Fry had an uncanny knack for identifying assistants with the potential to be head coaches and he saw something in Bielema, an undersized nose guard whom he coached as a player and then first hired as an undergraduate student assistant, working in the weight room in 1993, before eventually promoting him to linebacker coach.
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