College Football Will Miss Mike Leach
Mike Leach died today at the age of 61.
I didn’t know the coach personally, but I get the feeling he would have hated some random guy in Nebraska sitting down at his keyboard and trying to boil down his ethos into some kind of Leachian tea to be consumed by the masses on a cold December day.
He’d say something smart and acerbic and deeply, deeply weird and then he would go and get ready to get his 8–4 Mississippi State Bulldogs team ready to throw the ball 53 times and win. Because he usually did that, too.
He’d probably casually drop some wild pre or post game knowledge at the Reliaquest Bowl about Polar Bears or the wind patterns during El Nino in Tampa, Florida or something.
Now? The silence is practically thundering.
College football, and sports in general, became a little less interesting today.
In a sport where coaches “Ctrl C” and “Ctrl V” their way through interactions with the media and fans so often that they sound more robotic than an AI chatbot, Leach was nuanced and odd and wholly original.
He was the antithesis to the human Hobby Lobby Wall art that is a coach like PJ Fleck.
When Leach would talk, you would listen. He was a “whoa, whoa, whoa, turn the TV up. Leach is doing his halftime interview” at the tailgate and he was an auditory version of a hilarious Tweet, unbound by character limits.
You can be a total weirdo. And you can win football games.
Usually? You can’t be both.
People either run out of patience, your stream of consciousness approach lands you in hot water, or you just don’t win enough to have people in a notoriously uptight sport put up with the verbose, literary ramblings of an almost-too-smart guy at the helm.
But, make no mistake: Leach won. A lot. He won at Texas Tech, where his high octane offenses literally LOL’d at “Run the Damn Ball” guy — just ask BJ Symons who threw the ball 55 times per game in 2003.
He won at Washington State, where I will forever remember fondly him finding his football soulmate in Gardner Minshew in the 2018 season where it seemed like the team was some kind of LSD Countercultur eacting troupe from the 1970s. And, he was in the process of winning some more at Mississippi State. All in all, he won almost 60% of his games.
Like the pitching decks of his beloved pirate ships, there were some ups and downs along the way with Captain Leach.
He was fired from Texas Tech after allegedly locking a concussed player in a closet for three hours as punishment. Eventually, he denied any wrongdoing and sued the university for wrongful termination. You talk as much and as openly and honestly as he was prone to do, you’re going to jam your own team-sponsored shoes into your mouth a few times.
His teams would have aberrations where they lost a ton of games and it seemed like finally –at long last — Leach had outschemed himself and would need to start coaching like everyone else. Then his teams would rip off a another 9–4 with a quarterback who passed for 5,700 yards and 45 TDs and he’d be answering more questions about his favorite Halloween candy or how a groom should prepare for a wedding.
It’s pretty played out to say that someone was a “true original” or “one of one” and it would be a disservice to be so hackneyed and cliché when trying to describe someone who was anything but.
At the risk of going full Leach and rambling on any longer, here’s where I’ll leave it.
College football is a place so full of coachspeak and half-truths and “no comments”, but Leach would cut through the bullshit and say what he thought, for good and ill, for long and short. It’s a place where guys are heralded as genius when they’re really just doing karaoke of someone with true vision, but Leach routinely does something utterly unique on the field.
College football was better off with Mike Leach in it.
He will be missed.
