HOUSTON — David Bailiff has wondered what might happen if he bundled up the nondescript piece of old furniture and took it to be appraised — say on the popular “Antiques Road Show.”

Tucked away behind a locked door at Rice Stadium sits the Coaches Table. When the room is open, the artifact is roped off — please do not touch — and no one is really sure what it might be worth.

Rice’s football coach suspects, though, it would be “priceless.”

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He’s got good reason. Burned into the wood are the autographs of dozens of football coaching and other athletic legends of yesteryear:

There’s “Bear Bryant” — with “Kentucky” burned beneath his name, placing his visit sometime between 1946-53, before he coached at Texas A&M and won all those national titles at Alabama. Circle the table to find “John W. Heisman ’29,” which would’ve been two years after he’d finished coaching at Rice and six years before an award was named after him. Not far away: “Jim Thorpe,” the world’s greatest athlete. And so on.

The table is a surviving piece of history from Ye Olde College Inn, a restaurant that opened near the Rice campus in 1918. Over the years, it became a hangout for Rice athletes and coaches from all over. The restaurant is gone, the coolest piece of memorabilia has been preserved.

When celebrities came to eat — and for the longest, they came often — they were given a wood-burning instrument and asked to engrave their names into what had become known as the Coaches Table. In other words, the biggest names in college football of the time quite often literally left their mark.

There’s Homer Norton, who won a national championship coaching Texas A&M. Dana X. Bible, who brought Texas football to national prominence. And of course Jess Neely, who did the same at Rice. And there are dozens more, with enough bygone big names to excite any student of college football history (and as shown by Thorpe’s autograph and a few others, athletic history).

“Probably if you googled some of those names,” Bailiff muses — and given that he asks newcomers to the Rice football team to write reports on historic names from the program’s past, perhaps he will.

A few feet away from the original Coaches Table, sitting in the “R Room” above Rice Stadium’s south end zone, there’s a newer version. This one has ink autographs of more recent vintage, including Grambling’s Eddie Robinson, Texas’ John Mackovic, Baylor’s Grant Teaff, Texas Tech’s Spike Dykes — and for some reason, Evander Holyfield.

Who knows what it would fetch from a collector? It’s still a pretty cool idea. But unlike its older cousin, it might not be priceless.