Barry Switzer said he never tried to cover up a felony when he was coaching football at the University of Oklahoma in the 1970s and 1980s. But misdemeanors, well, that’s a different story.

Switzer told USA TODAY Sports a cozy relationship with the local sheriff and other officials helped keep embarrassing incidents involving his players out of the newspapers and out of the public eye.

“I’d have local county people call me and say, ‘One of your guys is drunk and got in a fight and is jail down here.’ And I’d go down and get him out. Or I’d send an assistant coach down to get his ass out,” Switzer said Thursday. “The sheriff was a friend of the program. He didn’t want the publicity. He himself knew this was something we didn’t need to deal with in the media or anything with publicity.”

This was standard operating procedure in college football, according to Switzer.

“This is back before social media and the Internet and all that,” he said. “And most colleges ran it that way. Most coaches ran it that way. We all did.”

Switzer’s comments came in the wake of a startling disclosure by Jerry Angelo, former Chicago Bears GM, who told USA TODAY Sports that during his 30 years in the NFL he helped keep “hundreds and hundreds’’ of domestic violence incidents from coming to light. Switzer, who coached the Dallas Cowboys from 1994 to 1997, said he was unaware of such cover-ups during his time in the NFL.

But Switzer spoke candidly about helping a kid on less egregious criminal matters when he was the head coach at Oklahoma between 1973 and 1988 and won three national championships.

Switzer said he or an assistant coach oversaw the discipline of the offending player.

“I’d get his ass up at 5 o’clock in the morning for two weeks in a row and run his ass, up and down the stairs, the stadium steps,” he said. “And the (assistant) coaches would be so pissed off that they had to get up and do it that they wore their ass out because they had to be the ones that run them. And a couple of the guys that were star players, I ran their asses off. So I had to be there at 5 o’clock in the morning.

“We could handle things internally in an era 30 years ago that you can’t today. You get a traffic ticket today, it’s everywhere. No one escapes what we have today, the attention and technology we have today.

“It was a different era, a different time.”