Former Georgia Tech football assistant coach Joe Popp died Thursday at his home in Mooresville, N.C., according to local reports.
Popp, 82, coached at Tech when Bobby Dodd was athletic director. He started out as a high school coach, leading Mooresville High School to a state title in 1961 before moving on to college football and then the NFL.
"I'll never forget when I was coaching in high school, I used to say to myself if I could ever coach at Georgia Tech or Notre Dame, and here I ended up coaching at Georgia Tech with Bobby Dodd as the athletic director," he told a biographer at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., which he attended on a football scholarship. "Then I thought, 'I'd like to get in the pros' and ended up coaching for the Cleveland Browns."
According to the biography, Popp was hired as assistant football coach at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, then moved on to coach at George Washington University, Wake Forest University and finally Tech. Popp left Tech to spend five years as assistant coach with the Cleveland Browns in the mid 1970s.
"The Lord has been good to me," Joe Popp told the biographer. "Every school I went to, there were moments there that were so great. Each was different and had something special to it."
One of his three children served as a lawyer in the Clinton administration. Another, Jim Popp, is general manager of the Montreal Alouettes in the Canadian Football League.
In a statement obtained by the Mooresville Tribune, Mayor Miles Atkins also called Popp a respected businessman and praised his "dedication and hard work contributed to the enrichment of our community."
According to the Tribune, his wife, Peggy, died last November at age 80.
