Your greatest strength can often become your greatest weakness. Dabo Swinney’s devotion and loyalty have served him greatly as he built a winning football culture in his own mold; his teams have fallen short of their goals in recent years with questionable in-house coordinator promotions and failing to adapt to the sport’s new transfer portal era. Urban Meyer’s competitive drive led to stress-related health issues while at Florida. Et cetera.
Mike Leach was no different. He was unapologetic, unafraid, and spoke and acted what came to his mind. It was his greatest strength, and his greatest weakness. He leaves behind a memorable and complicated legacy, and he should be understood for all of it.
Mike Leach passed away on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2022, survived by his wife Sharon, four children and three grandchildren. He left an indelible mark on the sport, winning football games at places where it is notoriously hard to win college football games, first in Lubbock as the head coach of Texas Tech from 2000 to 2009. He was fired from that position due to a public scandal of his handling of player injuries; his wrongful termination suit is still open to this day. He emerged in the Palouse, the remote strip of American geography home to Washington State, where he made a bowl game in six of his eight seasons. In 2020, Leach earned the call to the SEC, a league stocked with the sport’s most decorated programs and storied cathedrals. He commanded the comparatively underequipped Mississippi State Bulldogs to a 19-17 record in his three seasons at the helm.
Leach was truly a one-of-a-kind football coach. He built a singular career by creating, developing, and implementing the air raid offense. He was also a candid interview, a man unafraid to speak his mind on a wide range of topics. In a profession so full of cookie-cutter men as to be beyond parody, he was a towering figure as much for his gregarious personality as his strategic creativity.
He did so while running the same offense for two full decades, never veering or adapting. He began his career on the cutting edge of innovation and ended it so predictable that a few chief rivals with superior talent could easily stifle his teams.
You can not tell the story of football without Mike Leach. As a young offensive coordinator, he saw opportunity in the passing game where his peers had only seen potential failures. His creativity ran wild; without any of the filters that derail revolution, he devised a scheme that upended the sport forever. His protégés would go on to coach at all levels of football, and while no one does exactly what he did anymore – except for him – every team has adopted some concept of Mike Leach’s offensive creations. His influence is everywhere: how the sport is practiced, how to communicate with quarterbacks, how to attack a defense’s weakness, how to align your players, how to manage your own systems.
Leach’s air raid offense unlocked new heights for the underdog schools that employed him. Unfortunately, his dedication to his pure, uncut system led to some predictability. His offenses were solved by some of the sport’s excellent defensive minds, and his teams were shut down thoroughly by rivals at Washington, Alabama, and others.
Leach took ideas and stretched them to their impossible end. Where other coaches might have been stalled out by a lack of creativity, a lack of institutional support, a lack of talent, or a lack of want-to, Leach had no such guardrails to cloud his vision.
Many of Leach’s strategic innovations are invisible to the layman viewer. But as a public figure, we saw the other pillar of Leach’s legacy: his deadpan humor, his candor with reporters, and willingness to explore topics outside of banal clichés while holding court in front of the football media.
After news broke of Leach’s hospitalization, an outpouring of support flooded social media. Many of these posts included fond memories of various Leach quips, rants, or rambles. His trademark deadpan humor endeared him to college football fans everywhere. In a profession full of grumps, Leach seemed to actually get a kick out of speaking to the media. He veered easily away from speaking about football, instead opining on who would prevail in a hypothetical winner-take-all-brawl of Pac-12 mascots, or Netflix streaming shows worth watching, or the best kinds of Halloween candy. He was at his best when he would upend the typical sideline interview; a personal favorite was a pregame rant on the merits – or lack thereof – of drinking coffee.
Mike Leach never filtered himself with a microphone in his face. But this got him in trouble, too. Leach was a public supporter of Donald Trump’s political career, even as the latter’s rise to power caused so much suffering, strife, and division in the United States. Leach shared conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and COVID-19 on his Twitter account. The same willingness to be candid at all times that made him a folk hero for football fans made him a PR nightmare for his employers and created unnecessary controversy in his school communities.
Leach was, above all else, a curious man, a voracious learner. He held a law degree, taught a class at Washington State about naval warfare strategies, could speak knowledgeably on an array of topics, and revolutionized his chosen profession thanks to his desire to push intellectual boundaries. He studied and he learned continually, devouring information about new topics, looking for angles and advice and understanding.
It is with that same Leachian spirit that it’s important to understand his whole legacy. His unfiltered creativity and candor changed the way football is played, but it cost him a job, hurt people in his world, and frayed relationships with his players.
This isn’t some panacea to an imaginary Leach. This isn’t: oh, how I could enjoy watching him run mesh five times in a row on the same drive even more if he had just aligned more with my politics! No. This is not some attempt to divorce the art from the artist. Leach with a filter is no Leach at all.
But to celebrate only the jokes about candy corn and the devotion to his four verticals play call – while ignoring the more unsettling parts of his time in the public eye – would erase a part of the whole man. This would be a disservice to how Mike Leach (the man himself) would have approached Mike Leach (as a topic of study). Through him, we learn the value of unfiltered learning, creativity, and passion, but also the virtue of choosing our words and actions carefully and with respect to others. We must study and appreciate the whole of Leach, even the blemishes, because of the life and football lessons to be learned from an unfiltered man who lived an unforgettable career.
About the author
Born in Washington, DC, and living in New York City, I am the target demographic of the Big Ten's last expansion. I attended the University of Missouri in the Big 12 era, but I love life in the SEC. I am passionate about college football, baseball, board games, Star Wars, the written word, progressive politics, and the perfect slice of pizza.
