I am Going to Miss Mike Leach

Mike Leach died last night rather suddenly. He had coached practice for MSU’s bowl game on Saturday. Sunday, he had a heart attack. Monday night, he died.

Only two weeks ago he’d won his first Egg Bowl in a very good game that ended with the Bulldogs defeating the Ole Miss Rebels 24-22. I’m glad his last game was a victory, and I have to say I was touched by Lane Kiffin’s statement about him:

“I truly loved coach Leach and every minute I shared with him. I have been able to work with several players and coaches, and they have told so many amazing stories about the impact he had on their lives. Going back to our years together in the Pac-12, I have always felt tremendous respect and admiration for coach, his unique personality and innovative mind, I can’t imagine college football without him. I’m grateful to be part of his final win, hug him and watch him walk off like the winner he is. I know God is welcoming the Pirate home now.”

I agree with Coach Kiffin and I feel somehow grateful that I witnessed Coach Leach’s final game, and I’m glad it was a big victory, as all Bulldogs wins over the Rebels must be.

I’d followed Leach since his stint at Texas Tech because his story was just cool. He’d never played a down of college football, but he studied it. He was in that sense a quintessential college football coach, a professor of football. He even taught a course about football at Washington State.

I don’t like his contribution to the game, interestingly enough, the overemphasis on the passing game to the exclusion of the running game, but I can appreciate how one might study the game and arrive at his conclusions about it, that flankers have an inherent advantage over the defense because they know where the ball is going to be. Give the quarterback four or five targets, and completions will abound.

I don’t like this. The passing game is boring, at least to me it is. I much prefer the running game, and I would like to see more teams in the mold of those bruising Tom Osborne-coached Nebraska squads from the 1990s, but I digress.

I find a lot about Leach to admire, starting with the fact that he never played football, but he studied it and wanted to coach it purely to put his theory into practice, and he figured out how to make that happen.

He was an eccentric, sure, I guess, but in this case it just means he spoke truth and he spoke about the things that he found interesting and he didn’t seem to care about what anyone else thought about it. In a cookie cutter profession, which is pretty much all of them, a guy who just does his own thing and tells the truth is eccentric. A man who is his own person stands out.

He was a hold over from a different time. He was a tough coach. Lots of write ups mention the Adam James incident at Texas Tech, that Coach Leach made the little pussy sit in a closet, and the little pussy got his rich daddy Craig to complain to the higher ups about it. They ended up running him off from Tech. They canceled him, as it were. Bear Bryant never had to deal with any of that sort of bullshit, but Leach did as a holdover in a new feminized and decadent era. When he came in to MSU three years ago, scads of coddled players quit the team because he was so tough on them.

What I probably like the most about Coach Leach is that he never worked for a high-profile program like a Michigan or Notre Dame or USC. Texas Tech, Washington State, and finally Mississippi State, all second or third-tier football programs, and that tells me he didn’t care one whit about money or about prestige. He cared about the challenge.

I wanted him at Ole Miss, and every time Ole Miss had a vacancy, which was quite often, I’d get on message boards and lobby for him. When Mississippi State had the good sense to hire him, I thought, well, that’s close enough. I thought it was super cool that Leach was coaching in Mississippi, and I think that given two or three more seasons, he would have had Mississippi State in the SEC championship game, so the really hard to swallow part about his death is that we will never know.

He was a remarkable man. I’m going to miss Coach Leach.