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Ex-Purdue assistant Tony Levine left coaching to open Chick-fil-A franchise

Scott Halleran / Getty Images Sport / Getty

In January, Purdue announced that Tony Levine was resigning from his job as special teams coordinator "to pursue opportunities outside of coaching." Those opportunities, as Levine has since revealed, include running a Chick-fil-A franchise in the Houston suburb of Missouri City.

Levine, who served as the University of Houston's head coach from 2011-14, spoke to Sports Illustrated's Bruce Feldman about his new venture, noting that it isn't all that different from coaching football.

"The reasons when I was 23 years old that I wanted to get into coaching, the things that I've been passionate about for most of my life - developing people, team-building, identifying and recruiting talent, competing - while I had a love for those, I saw an opportunity with Chick-fil-A to become an owner/operator where a lot of those same things that I was passionate about I could keep doing, and the ability to stay in Houston was very important to my wife and I and our family as a whole," he said.

The Chick-fil-A is located just two miles from Levine's home - the same one he lived in during his time with the Cougars - and is set to open in six weeks.

Levine isn't the first coach to leave college football to open a fast-food joint. In 2014, former Iowa assistant coach Eric Johnson left the school to open a Culver's in Tennessee.

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