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I have one of those Facebook friends who always gets all my other friends fired up.

He is one of the smartest people on my friends list. On a good day, he probably has me by 50 IQ points.

For some reason, he seems to really hate sports. But for some reason, he still reads my sports columns. 

He makes interesting and intelligent points with most of his Facebook posts and comments. Sometimes, though, he is a bit of a South Pole elf with his comments about my columns.

These comments usually get the masses fired up because he has no filter and his give a damn broke a long, long time ago. Even when I don’t agree with him, it is hard to not admire those qualities.

He doesn’t care what others think of him or his opinion, and he is not afraid to name names. That makes me like the guy.

But sometimes he takes things too literal and fails to see the nuance.

Last week, he got a bunch of people fired up with his take on my suggestion that high schools start offering sports history classes. He went a little too far when he suggested that no child should ever have to learn history or chemistry from a football coach.

This, of course, led to a handful of people engaging in the argument. A bunch of teachers and relatives of teachers were offended, and rightfully so.

The argument is one that I have seen many times over the last several years of our politics of discontent. Usually, it is by people sharing memes — that completely unoriginal way of pretending to sound smart by sharing someone else’s idea.

The meme that bounced around my Facebook feed dozens of times over the years blames misguided voters — and shared by friends on the left and right alike — on football coaches teaching high school government classes.

I’ve found myself in a handful of arguments about the same meme shared by several people.

As if high school government is such a hard concept to grasp.

Really, pretty much all you need to do to get an A in high school government is taught in the Schoolhouse Rock song “How a Bill Becomes a Law.”

It really isn’t rocket science.

People driving around town with vulgar flags about the president are not doing that because their government teacher was also the offensive coordinator of the football team.

People voting for politicians who are attacking the basic human rights of people they don’t like or understand are not the product of a football coach not fully explaining the Bill of Rights and the Electoral College.

Rather, you can blame that on poor parenting and the cable “news” networks mistaking opinion and ratings for reporting and journalism. It can also probably be blamed on the two-party political system that really should go away.
Politicians and voters would be much better off if candidates didn’t have to try to pander to the extremes of the parties.

Teachers simply explain the party system. They didn’t invent it.

Any time you are stereotyping about anyone, you are not making a compelling argument. Stereotyping is the tool of the weak. It is lazy and unfair.

Plus, this stereotype is just plain wrong. Some of the best teachers in the world also coach football.

Coaching football is not the job of fools and small minds. The game is ever evolving, and it can be highly complex. The day of the meathead football coach is long gone.

You can’t be a dummy and be a successful football coach. For the most part.

Jon McElroy won three Class AA State titles as head coach of the Butte High football team. Some of my smarter friends will also swear that he was a brilliant high school chemistry teacher.

By most accounts, current Butte High football coach Arie Grey, who runs a more complicated scheme than Coach Mac’s veer option, is an outstanding teacher of government and sociology. Grey also possesses a passion that is contagious, whether he is teaching or coaching. He cares about every student in the school.

I bet he knows the name and class of every boy and girl who walks the hallway.

So many of his assistants are also great teachers, and that is probably something you say about every high school coaching staff in the country.

Football coaching staffs are filled with teachers who know how to teach and lead.

Don Peoples Jr. has been the head coach of the Butte Central football team since 1989. He has multiple degrees because he cares about education first. His coaching staff is full of guys who don’t teach, but still donate their time for the student-athletes.

Everyone has had good teachers and bad teachers. Some teachers are bad at their job. Even teachers will tell you that.

My second-grade teacher at Blaine Elementary was awful. He gave a bad name to every teacher.

He was mean and condescending. He made me hate school.

That guy wasn’t a football coach, though. I bet he never even watched football. But he was a way bigger bully than some Facebook posts wrongly try to portray football coaches.

Every teacher/coach I ever encountered as a student and sportswriter was a teacher first and a coach second. They coach — and make pennies per hour if anything at all — because they care about the students.

I have yet to meet a high school coach who went to college with the primary goal of coaching in high school.

Yet, they give up their precious time to coach a sport that has become a year-round activity.

Every coach would have a better family life if he could just go home when the school day is done. Instead, coaches sacrifice that family time for their players.

Football, like every other sport, is beneficial to students, too. These coaches teach their players about so much more than the game.

Grey has often said that his job is not to win football games. Instead, it is to help make better men. Playing sports helps do that.

Students who participate in sports or other extracurricular activities also tend to get better grades than students who do not. That is because these coaches help instill stronger work ethics in their players.

Getting good grades is also a prerequisite to play. Players know that college athletic scholarships are not given out to C students.

So, it is unfair to depict football coaches like they are Jon Voight on Varsity Blues. It is also wrong. 

It is OK to not play sports. It is OK if you don’t like sports. It is OK to never read a single story about a sporting event.

But if you are stereotyping those who do, you just are exposing yourself as a South Pole elf.

Thanks to our politics of discontent, we already have enough of those.

— Bill Foley, who is tryin’ real hard to be the North Pole elf, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74. Listen to the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.