Mike Leach Is Thinking ...
About pirates, quarterbacks, the spread offensive, how to beat UT again, whether punting is ever a good idea, the futility of huddles, and what else he might do to completely reinvent the game of college football.
Leach, photographed on July 19, 2009.
Portrait by Lionel Deluy
The clock on the wall of Mike Leach’s office reads eleven p.m. He likes the deep night hours, when he is free of the constant demands of his job and can pursue his many intellectual interests, which include Apaches, sharks, whales, pirates, Australia, Daniel Boone, the tango, Wyatt Earp, Vikings, Doc Holliday, chimpanzees, Winston Churchill, grizzly bears, Napoleon Bonaparte, the philosophy of John Wooden, and the dynamics of the offshore surf breaks at San Onofre, California. Tonight he is working on an article for the Texas Tech Law Review about the relationship between practicing law and coaching football. He can do this because he is the only head coach at a major football university to have a law degree and because he is, well, the sort of person who would be inclined to do such a thing.
I am meeting with him in the sanctum sanctorum of Texas Tech football, a cramped conference room that is festooned with skull-and-crossbones flags, a painting of Leach in imitation of a Van Gogh self-portrait, a photograph of Sarah Palin, a sign that reads “You are either coaching it, or you are allowing it to happen,” and several drawing boards full of football hieroglyphics, in the middle of which appear Leach’s weight and cholesterol counts. He has a large, elegantly appointed office next door that contains such curiosities as a copy of Geronimo’s death certificate and a motion-activated, six-foot-tall pirate skeleton that says, “Yarrrr,” and scares the daylights out of the cleaning people.
But the 48-year-old Leach has no real use for such luxury. He meets various grandees and visitors there when he has to; he sometimes uses the room to entertain recruits by doing card tricks and telling pirate stories. He prefers the intimate clutter of his conference room, where he spends most of his time watching film and huddling with his coaches. (He also has at his disposal a domed practice facility meant to shelter his players from the blazing heat and bitter cold of the High Plains. He has no use for that either, insisting that his team experience the full fury of the local weather.)
Leach and I are talking football—specifically, what makes him so good at coaching it. Like many football fans around the country—especially those who followed Texas Tech’s dramatic run at a national championship last year—I am fascinated by how such a personality, one that suggests rather more of a bohemian intellectual than a square-jawed drill sergeant, can also house one of the greatest offensive minds in the history of the game. Leach has developed an offense that is as close to unstoppable as anything we are likely to see and that has been working brilliantly for so long—twenty years at five colleges in three collegiate athletic divisions—that his success cannot be regarded as a fluke. During his nine-year tenure as head coach at Texas Tech, Leach has never had a losing season, compiling a 76-39 record. He has done that while playing in one of the nation’s toughest conferences and using players that few or no other elite college football programs wanted. In five of those nine years, Texas Tech led the nation in offense, routinely hanging ungodly numbers of points on opposing defenses. Its quarterbacks have led the nation in passing eight of the past nine years. In 2007 and 2008 Graham Harrell became the first player in college history to throw for more than 5,000 yards in consecutive seasons. Unlike almost all major college coaches, Leach is his own offensive coordinator; he calls the plays.
Though Tech has had many big wins during the Leach years and even flirted with a top-ten finish in 2005, nothing compares with its string of victories last fall. For a scintillating month or so, millions of fans who had never paid attention to Texas Tech football were suddenly focused intently on this sprawling, monumental campus in West Texas. In one spectacular three-game run, the Red Raiders put up 158 points against the nineteenth-, first-, and eighth-ranked teams in the country. As Tech knocked off one ranked team after another, the hordes that descended on Lubbock were as interested in the team as they were its coach, a man who never played college football, rode the bench in high school, and, as Lubbock radio talk show host Ryan Hyatt puts it, “looks like he just got off tour with Jimmy Buffett.” Texas Tech is not exactly America’s team, but for a few shining moments last autumn it was the team much of America was rooting for.
Then it all came crashing down. On November 22 Texas Tech, ranked second and seemingly unstoppable, rolled into Norman, Oklahoma, and suffered one of the worst losses in school history. The lopsided score, 65—21, does not fully convey the extent of the damage the Oklahoma Sooners inflicted: Tech simply did not look as if it belonged in the game. Leach’s Red Raiders had arrived with the leading Heisman Trophy candidate—Harrell—and a team that not only was undefeated but had beaten Oklahoma two out of the past three years. And suddenly, in the bloody chaos of a second quarter in which the Sooners outscored the Red Raiders 35—7, it was all gone: the national title hopes, Harrell’s Heisman, the magic of the greatest season in Texas Tech history. Tech would go on to lose its bowl game to Ole Miss and finish twelfth in the country.
Leach, a man of exquisitely even temperament, was unbowed and unshattered. He even seemed to enjoy his new celebrity. In the off-season he won two prestigious coach-of-the-year awards (the George Munger and the Woody Hayes). He was invited to the White House to meet President Bush and was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes. His name was mentioned in almost every coaching search, and he interviewed for a job at the University of Washington. Then came a long, nasty contract dispute with Tech. All of which prompted Raider fans to wonder: Was Leach going to desert them now? Just when they were starting to hit the big time?
In the end Leach signed a new contract and Lubbock breathed a sigh of relief. He was staying. But now fans are asking another set of questions. Was last season an anomaly? Or was it the dawn of a golden age in Tech football? Are Leach and his ragtag band of rejects finally ready for full-time prime time? And, perhaps most important, the question that has been asked everywhere Mike Leach has ever coached: How in the world does he do it?
One afternoon during spring football, Leach and I were camped out in the conference room, studying film. Unlike most coaches, he is completely unguarded around reporters. He does not edit what he says, nor does he have any apparent sense of, or need for, privacy. In a world typically veiled in secrecy, he is an open book. He was seated in his favorite chair at the head of the table, remote control and laser pointer in hand. He is an interesting-looking man, with a round, softly contoured face that can best be described as cherubic, a prominent nose, and a pair of startlingly bright blue eyes. He has a low-pitched, gravelly voice that he rarely raises and that often comes out no louder than a mumble. On-screen: the Texas Tech—Oklahoma State game from November 8, 2008, a superb example of what the Leach offense can do. OSU was ranked number eight with an 8-1 record, having beaten number three Missouri, piled up 56 points against Texas A&M, and lost to top-ranked Texas by less than a touchdown. The Cowboys had their best team in years.
“The basic idea here is that you have to make the defense cover the whole field,” Leach said as the film rolled. “Not just part of it. If you do it right, it makes life very difficult for them.” Instead of a dense, seemingly impenetrable offensive line, Tech’s linemen are spaced three to four feet apart, twice the norm, leaving enormous gaps that seem to invite tackles and linebackers to stroll right through them. The quarterback operates from the shotgun, and on most plays four or five receivers are spread across the breadth of the field. This creates huge amounts of space between players, making the whole thing look porous and vulnerable, even skeletal, until it swings into action. Which it does between 85 and 90 times a game. A typical offense snaps the ball 65 to 70 times a game, but Tech never huddles. It is all attack, all the time. Leach attempts few field goals and rarely punts, even when he is deep in his own territory. When the ball is snapped, you can see how the magic works. Receivers stretch the field from chalk to chalk, taking the defensive backs with them. The defensive linemen—who are forced to spread out too, lest they lose their rushing angles—must therefore attack from longer range, creating even more room. Suddenly the grid opens up, and the quarterback is looking at what Leach calls “pieces of space.” Lots of them.
On the first set of downs against Oklahoma State, Texas Tech lost a fumble, and the Cowboys promptly marched in and scored. What happened next, though, amounted to a clinic on offense, conducted by Leach at OSU’s expense. Tech scored on its next seven possessions. On film the mismatches caused by the spread were easy to spot, as was the horrific task the defense had of covering such a vast expanse of real estate, while receivers like Michael Crabtree, who appeared to be equipped with bat sonar, worked the spaces of the grid. Final score: 56-20.
So how did Leach figure out the system? That is what everyone in the football world—pro, college, and high school—wants to know. There is certainly no shortage of theories on how to stop him. Sports Illustrated reported this year that the market is booming for “instructional videos, Internet forums, and dissertations in publications by coaches from high school to the pros” that address how to stop spread-style offenses, which have begun to proliferate—not coincidentally—in the wake of Leach’s success. The answer lies entirely in his past. Leach’s offense actually came into being two decades ago, long before he ever set foot in Lubbock.
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Claude says: Rick Leach + hype+ Big 12= Ole Miss 47 Texas Tech 34. (September 19th, 2009 at 8:32pm)
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