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.
Claude says: Rick Leach + hype+ Big 12= Ole Miss 47 Texas Tech 34. (September 19th, 2009 at 8:32pm)
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As the years went by, recruiting above-average players like Harrell, however, was not Leach’s only challenge. His overwhelming focus on offense had an unfortunate result: His teams were becoming famous for their lack of defense. Texas Tech, it was said, was a team that could score 43 points but would give up 44. On one level, Leach was known as a nutty professor who scared the hell out of everyone. But he had a reputation for being inconsistent and vulnerable to a competent offense, of which there was no shortage in the Big 12. Tech was an unbalanced team. Interesting but unbalanced.
The problem came to a head on September 22, 2007, when Tech, whose defense had been allowing more than 400 yards per game—seventy-fourth in the nation—gave up 610 yards of offense to Oklahoma State and lost 49—45. The normally mild-mannered Leach unloaded. “The entire first half,” he told a TV interviewer, “we got hit in the mouth and acted like somebody took our lunch money and all we wanted to do was have pouty expressions on our faces until somebody daubed our little tears off and made us feel better.” The next day he fired his defensive coordinator, Lyle Setencich, the man who had given him his first job at Cal Poly, in 1987. “That was a big growth moment for Coach Leach,” said Hyatt. “A big seismic shift. Setencich was a close, close friend. Mike made the decision and sent the message that ‘I am not just an offensive guy. I can take ownership of this whole program.’ ” He promoted assistant coach Ruffin McNeill to succeed Setencich, and since then the team has gone 17-5, driven largely by improvements on the defense. Those changes were behind the team’s transformation last year. The nutty professor was still there, but now his defense had teeth.
On the night of November 1, 2008, Leach fielded an offense that was nearly identical to the one he and Mumme had cobbled together at Iowa Wesleyan College nearly twenty years earlier. The difference was that instead of playing Olivet Nazarene University, Leach was playing the University of Texas, the number one team in the nation, a dazzling array of all the talent he had no access to. Tech was 8-0, ranked sixth, and coming off a 63-21 dismantling of nineteenth-ranked Kansas. UT had just beaten, consecutively, the first-, eleventh-, and seventh-ranked teams in the country. The game, which pitted the Mad Pirate against the CEO-like Mack Brown, had quickly spooled up into a national-media event. ESPN’s Game Day carnival had moved in (with 15,000 fans in tow), as had ABC’s game-of-the-week crew. An enormous tent city known as Raiderville had materialized, with a population of 1,700. The place was so pumped up with digital technology and generator-powered electricity that it glowed at night. Pirate flags—a symbol that Leach had introduced and that Raider fans had embraced—were everywhere. Leach sent a truckload of barbecue to Raiderville as a gesture of appreciation. By the time the Masked Rider—a Tech student on a black stallion wearing a black costume and a red cape and making the famous “guns up” sign with his hand—thundered through the goalposts at Jones AT&T Stadium, a record 56,333 fans were screaming their lungs out. It was the biggest game in Texas Tech history.
Leach’s cohort came out firing. In the first half, Tech was so dominant that the game began to look like a replay of what the Red Raiders had done to Kansas. They scored 22 points to Texas’s 6, made 17 first downs to Texas’s 5, and put up 326 yards against Texas’s 108. Tech’s kicker alone outscored UT. That might not seem so bad except that the kicker, Matt Williams, had been playing college football for only a few weeks. He had won a contest during a home game against Massachusetts by booting a 30-yard field goal during a halftime promotion in which the winner would receive a month’s free rent. Leach, who was unhappy with the team’s kickers, liked the quickness of Williams’s approach and offered him the position. First-half score: Matt Williams 8, Texas 6.
The second half was more in line with expectations. Texas, under its brilliant quarterback, Colt McCoy, clawed its way back. The two heavyweights traded punches. With 1:29 left, the Longhorns took their first lead of the game, 33-32. Leach was unperturbed, as he often is in times of great crisis. “That’s just his mentality,” said Holgorsen. “He’s never too high, never too low. He has the same facial expression regardless of what is happening, and he preaches to the kids every single day to be like that. The message is ‘I don’t care if you are winning by a hundred or losing by a hundred, you are going to keep playing, keep playing.’ ” They did.
As the clock wound down, Harrell coolly drove the team downfield. With eight seconds to go on the Texas 28-yard line and 56,000 fans shrieking bloody murder, he launched a sideline pass to Crabtree, who beat two defenders and caught the ball at the 6, twisted away, and scored with one second left on the clock, while McCoy and Mack Brown looked on in flabbergasted disbelief. It is impossible to fully express the depth of the happiness of Texas Tech fans at that moment. Years of perceived disrespect by UT and everybody else had been instantly obliterated. They went crazy.
The victory lifted Texas Tech to number two in the BCS standings. A week later, with Raiderville in full flower and the same national broadcast teams back in Lubbock, Tech dismantled Oklahoma State. For the first time in its history, the team now had a clear shot—with only Oklahoma and the subsequent Big 12 title game standing in the way—at a national championship. How did Leach feel? “It will probably be more fun to remember it,” he says now, “more enjoyment to think back on it because at the time there is no wistful ‘Look, oh gee, these are the times of our lives’ or any of that bullshit, and the reason is because next week you are playing Oklahoma or Oklahoma State. The win at Kansas was huge, but guess what? It’s Sunday and we’re playing Texas in six days . . .”
Tech’s win over Oklahoma State was the season’s high point, the moment when it seemed that anything was possible, when Raiders fans everywhere finally believed that Leach could really pull it off. A week later all those dreams were mere wreckage on the ground. The team, which had sustained an unimaginably high level of football for three weeks against ranked teams and in the national spotlight, fell apart against Oklahoma in an ugly, humiliating rout. Almost everything went wrong. Tech, whose magnificent offensive line had allowed a total of five sacks the entire season, gave up four, including back-to-back sacks of Harrell in the first quarter. Crabtree, the nation’s touchdown leader, had a poor game and no touchdowns. Leach’s famous idiosyncrasies were partly to blame. In the second quarter, on fourth-and-three from the Oklahoma 15, Leach decided to go for it instead of kicking a field goal and didn’t make it. Five plays later OU scored. In the second quarter he gambled again on fourth-and-four from the Sooners 45 and failed there too. Down 35-7 with less than a minute remaining in the second quarter, Leach, who is never content to run out the clock, had Harrell launch a deep pass down the middle of the field. OU intercepted, returned the ball to the 1-yard line, and scored on the next play. The score at halftime was 42-7.
In the locker room Leach tried to calm his team down. Since there was no mechanical explanation for what was going on, he believed that his players were too keyed-up. “I think we wanted to do well and overtried,” he said after the game. “Rather than just trying to make little routine plays, we tried to make super plays. I felt that we squandered the first half trying to make too much happen and trying to be too good.” He told them as much and managed to settle them. They played a respectable, if somewhat flat, second half. But the game was already over. When asked about it today, Leach just shrugs. He obviously does not torture himself with the memory. “To my knowledge no team in the history of college football has beaten four top-twenty-five teams in succession,” says Leach. “We wanted to be the first. I think we were suffering from a kind of mental, emotional fatigue.”
The next week Tech barely beat a weak Baylor team, and only by coming from behind and scoring three touchdowns in the second half. On January 2 the lingering shock of the Oklahoma loss gave way to the dull pain of an uninspired 47—34 loss to Mississippi in the Cotton Bowl. There was really no explaining this one either. Leach took it with equanimity, said he was proud of his 11-2 record and the shared championship of the Big 12 South. The loss to a 9-4 team was reminiscent of all those years when Tech lost to teams it should have beaten and suggested perhaps that there are limits to what even superb coaching can do with thirty-seventh-ranked recruits. Tech ended its season ranked twelfth, which in most years would be cause for celebration but now seemed like a crushing defeat.
A few weeks later, Leach’s surprisingly nasty contract dispute with his employer spilled into the national press. The fight ended when Leach and Chancellor Hance sat down and personally negotiated a five-year contract that will pay Leach $2.5 million a year and make him the third-highest-paid coach in the Big 12. Leach seemed unperturbed by this controversy too. “I expected everything to work out,” he says, “but it took a little more circuitous route than I expected. I have been thrilled to be here from the beginning, and there has never been a point where I wasn’t thrilled to be here.”
Though the team is losing Harrell, Crabtree, and several outstanding offensive linemen, Leach says that this spring he had his best recruiting class ever, one that included two of the most highly rated defensive tackles in the country. “I am very excited about this fall,” he says. “I think we’ll be as good as we were last year. We don’t have a single receiver who is as good as Crabtree, but as a whole they are better.” There is no reason why his quarterback du jour—Taylor Potts—should not, like his predecessors, put up phenomenal passing yardage. Perhaps most interesting of all, three of Leach’s recruits this year chose Tech over scholarship offers at Oklahoma, which presents a dazzling prospect for most Red Raiders fans. They are all captivated, as anyone even remotely interested in football should be, by the idea of what might happen if the pirate-in-chief ever gets hold of an entire team of top-tier recruits.
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