TCU Athletics
Recent research led me to stumbling over an old newspaper story about TCU students and the jobs they took to make ends meet.
For example, during the fall semester of 1911, M. Jackson Farmer of Colorado, Texas, served as a baker, making all the bread consumed by every student in the dorms at TCU. It was good stuff, too, apparently.
“How did I break into the baking game?” he said to a reporter. “The most natural thing in the world. There are five of us boys and four of us are bakers — like our father. I am a kind of jack-of-all-trades, too, and in extra jobs outside and in the college, I have made more than $50 since the term began above my salary as a baker.”
Red Morton, a baseball pitcher, was a barber.
And then there was Milton Daniel, a football player. You know the name. Daniel is the namesake of Milton Daniel Hall and the Daniel-Meyer Athletics Complex. But before he graduated to banking and oil, he was moving pianos and furniture and picking up other odd jobs around campus “with the same energy he displays on the gridiron.”
Via Instagram
Josh Hoover, center right, and his partner in the cattle business, Cade Sharp, center left, on a hunting outing with Drew Dollar, left, and Travis Sanders, right.
All of this ties in with an interview I recently conducted with TCU quarterback Josh Hoover.
Much has changed over the course of 115 years or so.
With revenue sharing and endorsement deals, athletes in the revenue sports are no longer having to move furniture or “find” envelopes full of cash under large pizzas to pay bills or have some spending money.
Hoover, in fact, is in the cattle business.
“We buy and sell cattle, and I do a lot of that on the side all year long,” says Hoover. “So, if you know anybody who needs some cows, give me a call.”
His partner is Cade Sharp, a former baseball player at Texas Tech University. The two grew up together in Rockwall. Their base of operations is San Angelo.
“We’re selling — we do a lot of different stuff, kind of whatever’s hot at the time,” Hoover says. “Recently, we had some lightweight calves that we grew and then sold. And now we’ve got some heifers that we’re putting bulls on, and we’re going to sell them as bred heifers. Instead of waiting the full time for the calves to be born, we sell them as bred. We get them checked by the vet and then sell them as pregnant.”
Hoover said the partnership just sold a “bunch of cows.” He also has a horse stabled in Fort Worth. He sold another recently.
Hoover traces his interest in ranching back to his family roots. His mother’s side of the family hails from West Texas, where ranch life is part of the landscape, and many of them are still in the business. His own parents, however, never took part in it, even though his paternal grandfather had always run cattle.
For Hoover, that skipped generation didn’t lessen the pull. Ranching was simply something that appealed to him on its own terms, and over the last couple of years, he’s thrown himself into it more seriously, carving out his own place in the Texas tradition.
Hoover is also dabbling in another business with loads of history in Texas: energy. With a degree already in hand, Hoover is doing graduate work in the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute.
I joked that if he can get into a plane and do some aviation, he’ll have hit every major industry in Fort Worth.
“I’ve actually flown a plane,” he says, recalling a family friend letting him slip into the pilot’s seat of a small jet or classic light aircraft or something. “It was terrible.”
Hoover is trending up in the estimation of NFL scouts. If he can put together another good season in 2025, his draft stock will continue to rise to the point that he might have to make a decision on whether to forego a final season in 2026.
The NFL is his immediate goal. And he’ll get a shot at it.
But whenever his playing days are behind him, Hoover says cattle is a long-term interest for the future.
Professional football is the “No. 1 goal,” he says, “but ranching is something I can do to keep busy in the off-season. And it's a cool little side deal. And then I'm sure someday I'll want to do it full time.”
There’s little doubt Hoover has a lot of Milton Daniel’s entrepreneurial streak.