College Football

Mike Leach was a rogue, an innovator, and a man who belongs in the Hall of Fame

Updated Dec. 14, 2022 10:05 a.m. ET

In 2018, Jeremy Schaap interviewed Mike Leach in Pullman, Washington. Leach was coming off a great season in which he led Washington State to 11 wins and earned his second national coach of the year honor.

Schaap asked Leach how he wanted to be remembered.

"Well, that's their problem," Leach said. "They're the ones writing the obituary. What do I care? I'm dead."

See that? That's Mike Leach, kiddos.

Leach was the plug in the socket. The laugh in your belly. The whoopee in your cushion.

He gave wedding advice that amounted to "elope."

And he hated — hated — candy corn.

His comment to Schaap, though, was the best reminder that obituaries — like the need to mourn, like funeral rites — are for the living. After the death of Leach on Tuesday at the age of 61, I choose to remember what made the man a true original.

He was profiled by Michael Lewis — you know, the "Blind Side" and "Moneyball" guy — in The New York Times in 2005.

He wrote his autobiography through the lens of a black sail pirate. He wrote another about Geronimo.

He earned a law degree from Pepperdine, but rather than practice as an attorney, he took a job as an assistant coach at an NAIA school called Iowa Wesleyan because he didn't want to be like everybody else. Later in his life, he told Bruce Feldman as much.

"[If] you’re doing the same old thing that everybody else is doing, that’s who you become — everybody else."

At Iowa Wesleyan in 1989, he began to learn to run the Air Raid offense from legend Hal Mumme. The two quickly became successful, and took their show to Valdosta, Georgia, in 1992, where Leach continued to hone his play-calling ability and sharpen the offense.

As an assistant at Valdosta State, he convinced a fraternity to mount an air raid siren on their frat house roof and then to crank it every time the Blazers scored. The siren was banned shortly thereafter, and in 1997, Mumme and Leach took their show to the SEC by way of Kentucky.

After the duo produced record-breaking quarterback and No. 1 overall NFL draft pick Tim Couch in 1999, Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops successfully hired Leach to run and revolutionize the Sooners’ offense.

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Stoops hired Leach because he remembered how tough it was to prepare for UK’s offense when he was the defensive coordinator at Florida, where Stoops had helped win a national title.

Once, as Sooners offensive coordinator in 1999, Leach planted a fake play-call sheet near the Texas sideline, according to ESPN.

During pregame warmups, the script that supposedly outlined OU’s opening offensive plays was spotted by one of Texas’ student assistants, who scooped it up and took it to Longhorns defensive coordinator Carl Reese. To the heavily favored Longhorns, it seemed as if they’d caught an enormous break.

"We were trying to figure out if it was authentic," Reese said. "We were in this state of, ‘Can we believe this?'"

They shouldn’t have.

It was a fake, part of a plot hatched by Leach. The Longhorns quickly fell behind 17-0 before realizing they’d been duped.

A year later, with a little-known JUCO quarterback named Josh Heupel, Stoops, Leach and the Sooners won the 2000 national title.

See that, there? That’s Mike Leach, kiddos.

He was the hi-YAW in your yippee ki-yay. The hot sauce on your grits. The cowbell banging at your ball.

He loved the illusion of a small play-call sheet, even though it is a full-size piece of paper.

Having done the job at OU, Leach became head coach at Texas Tech in 2000 and put together quite the run.

With the game on the line against No. 1-ranked Texas, and quarterback Graham Harrell and wideout Michael Crabtree begging for the chance to go win the game, Leach called up "Four Verticals," making a play full of go-routes famous as Crabtree tiptoed the sideline on the way to the biggest win in Red Raiders history.

At Lubbock, Leach never failed to win fewer than seven games. He won nine or more four times, including 11 in 2008.

After a public falling out with Texas Tech in 2009 following allegations of mistreatment from a Red Raiders wide receiver, Leach took over as head coach at Washington State in 2012. There, he developed, among others, Gardner Minshew, who finished fifth in the Heisman voting, and Luke Falk, who won the Burlsworth Award.

By the time Leach left Pullman in 2019, he was the third-winningest coach in school history.

He became head coach at Mississippi State in a return to the SEC. He flipped the program into a seven-win team just one year after taking over and developed Will Rogers into the school’s most prolific passer.

While at Mississippi State, Leach went to the state Capitol of Mississippi in 2020 to advocate for the removal of the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag, because he knew many of the players he had coached viewed it as a racist symbol.

Of course, this is all before we talk about Leach's prodigious coaching tree, which includes USC coach Lincoln Riley, TCU coach Sonny Dykes and Houston coach Dana Holgorsen among others. And Leach never played a down of college football.

But Mike Leach isn't eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame because he didn't win 60% of his games as a head coach. He won 59.6%.

I've asked the National Football Foundation, which oversees the induction selection process for the sport’s hall of fame, to change the rule, as I and others did for Toledo quarterback Chuck Ealey.

They eventually took our suggestion and granted Ealey entrance into the Hall of Fame. I am optimistic that the NFF will make room for one of the sport’s best ambassadors and a damn fine football coach.

After all, the Hall of Fame is for us — the living — to remember those from the past, and we would do ourselves a disservice as college football fans to leave out the man who was a spoonful of cinnamon in your coffee, a rogue jalapeño on your burger and the most colorful coach in the history of the sport.

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