![]() ![]() Without Leach, Patrick Mahomes does not play the way he does, nor does the quarterback of your local high school team. In doing so, he emboldened a generation of coaches and quarterbacks to explore new ways to win games.įootball does not look like it does now without Mike Leach. But Leach won a hell of a lot of games running an offense others said couldn’t work-the Air Raid, a pass-first, pass-second, pass-third system as revolutionary and iconoclastic as its name sounds. He never won a national championship or a conference championship, or even reached so much as a conference title game. He coached at Texas Tech, Washington State, and Mississippi State, none of which is the most prominent program in its own state. Scanning Leach’s Wikipedia page won’t tell you his impact on the sport. Luckily, Leach also left words of wisdom for his obituary writers: “ Well, that’s their problem, they’re the one writing the obituary … what do I care, I’m dead!” It had been 16 years since an active FBS coach died on the job. On Saturday, Leach coached a practice ahead of Mississippi State’s ReliaQuest Bowl game against Illinois, then attended a party where he debated a child about Bigfoot. It’s stunning, because up until a few days ago, Mike Leach was just being Mike Leach. Leach died Monday night as a result of complications from a heart condition at the age of 61. But unlike his opinions on candy or weddings, Leach’s football philosophy would go on to shape the sport forever. Much like his opinions on candy or weddings, he came to that conclusion one day, and believed it for the rest of his life. His teams would run a few pass plays, and simply run them better than anybody else. Leach had an unwavering belief in how offense should be played, and stuck with it. As waves of stories about Leach’s eccentricities flooded the internet this week, NFL reporter George Stoia shared how Leach had once gone on a lengthy diatribe to Stoia’s father about apartment complexes, then repeated the same speech, nearly verbatim, to Stoia over 20 years later. And once Leach decided on something, well, that was that. I guess Leach couldn’t have figured out how he felt about rollerblading if he’d been on a bumpy surface, and needed to give it a fair shake to really make up his mind. In an iconic New York Times profile, Michael Lewis explained how Leach decided to rollerblade, sought out the flattest, smoothest piece of asphalt in Lubbock, Texas, and spent hours skating up and down that strip. He researched and wrote a book about the Native American warrior Geronimo, and taught a class at Washington State about “insurgent warfare and football strategy.” An NFL Films crew found him trying to figure out whether coffee did a better job killing ants than water. Leach was curious about all things, and spent his entire life diving into new topics to determine how he felt about them. Need a wedding planner? had ALL the wedding advice for /jifRCv5sPg- SEC Network October 2, 2022 While Nick Saban or Bill Belichick would’ve stared daggers through Lang for asking a non-football question during football hours, Leach happily went into great detail about why Lang and her fiancé should elope. After Mississippi State’s high-flying win over Texas A&M in October, SEC Network reporter Alyssa Lang asked Leach for wedding tips. He’d talk to journalists for so long that they had to hang up on him. He was willing to do weather reports or cameos or Cameos. But Leach was eager to discuss literally any topic at literally any point in time. ![]() Other coaches love to broadcast to the world that they eat and drink and sleep and dream football every second of every day, projecting intensity into every interaction. Sometimes, he’d even talk about football. Pirates were a favorite topic, as was romance, but he was willing to go on tangents about pretty much anything: candy, which mascots could kick the crap out of other mascots in a fight, even dinosaur evolution. Mike Leach had a philosophy on everything. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |