There’s an alternate universe where the committee that selected the new Key West (Fla.) High Conchs football coach got it right in 1996. That year, Valdosta State’s offensive coordinator applied for the job, which would have allowed him to do so. his favorite thing in his favorite city. Committee members barely considered Mike Leach. They thought he was overqualified.
Had he been given the job, Leach probably never would have left. He probably would have spent the rest of his days crafting plays while his palms swayed. He and his wife Sharon would have walked to Harpoon Harry’s and dined while laughing at all the tourists running to look at a giant buoy.
Robbed of his dream job, Mike Leach had to settle for changing the way almost everyone at every level of football studies. His impact trickled down from the college ranks to high school football and the NFL. He brought the Air Raid into the mainstream, showing everyone in the sport that teams could overcome talent deficits (or improve talent advantages) if they spread the field, took advantage of pace and tolerated a degree of risk healthy in low quarter.
Leach turned Kentucky into an offensive juggernaut. He helped propel Bob Stoops’ tenure at Oklahoma. Then, as a head coach, he produced winners at places where it’s supposed to be hard to win: Texas Tech, Washington State and Mississippi State. All the while, he avoided the usual coaching clichés. Instead, he talked about pirates, about Geronimo, about corn, about what happened to the ice pick after the final scene of “Basic Instinct.”
There will never be another coach like Leach, who died Monday night of complications from heart disease at the age of 61. He was transported from his home in Starkville, Miss., to a hospital in Jackson on Sunday.
“Coach Mike Leach cast a tremendous shadow over not only Mississippi State University, but the entire college football landscape,” MSU President Mark E. Keenum said in a statement. “His innovative ‘Air Raid’ offense changed the game. Mike’s sharp intellect and unvarnished sincerity made him one of the nation’s true coaching legends. His passing brings great sadness to our university, the Southeastern Conference and all who loved college football. I will miss Mike’s deep curiosity, honesty, and open-minded approach to pursuing excellence in all things.”
The son of a forester, Leach spent his high school years in Cody, Wyo., before leaving home in 1979 to attend BYU. “I liked BYU,” Leach wrote in his 2011 autobiography Swing Your Sword (written with The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman). “The place is like Disneyland, only without the rides and merchandising.” Although Leach was fascinated by the offense LaVell Edwards ran in Provo, the former high school football player did not play for the Cougars. Leach tangled several times with the Honor Code patrol through his hair, but he did well in his classes and was accepted into Pepperdine University Law School.
Leach liked law school, but when he finished he realized that the law was not consumed. So he decided to take a stab at his dream job: coaching football. Worst case scenario? He trained for a few years, nearly starved to death, and went on to live the rest of his life as a lawyer. So he racked up more student loans to earn a master’s degree in sports science at the United States Sports Academy in Daphne, Alabama. In 1988, Leach took a part-time coaching job at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo. His salary: $3,000 a year.
While visiting Leach in Key West in 2011, between his dismissal from Texas Tech and his recruitment by Washington State, for a story for Sports Illustrated, I asked him if he ever wished he had been admitted to the law Absolutely not, he said. “It’s ridiculously satisfying,” Leach said of the workout. “But it’s kind of a narrow existence. It changes all the time, because young people this age change. Their lives are changing. … Now, I have variety.”
Talk to Leach for any length of time and the desire for variety made sense. He was interested in everything. This would lead to hour-long quarterback meetings where only a few minutes of football were discussed. It also got Leach on “60 Minutes” in 2008. But he was always more interested in football than he was saying, and soliloquies about weddings, shorts or live animal pets were often calculated moves to avoid nobody asked him. to reveal real football information that could put his team at a disadvantage.
Sojourns at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo and College of the Desert led to a coaching job in Pori, Finland, where “half my players smoked cigarettes on the sidelines,” Leach wrote in “Swing Your Sword” . After that, Leach sent his resume to a football outpost just a little less remote: Iowa Wesleyan, a school of about 550 students in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Hal Mumme was a former UTEP coordinator who had created a strange, wide-open offense to get more students to come to Copperas Cove (Texas) High for football.
Mumme had just taken over a team that had gone 0-10 the previous season. Mom liked Leach because he knew BYU. He also liked it because he wouldn’t have the same preconceived notions that more established coaches had about the offensive game. The two meshed immediately, and at Iowa Wesleyan they planted the seeds for an offense that would eventually take over the Big 12 and be picked by college football and NFL coaches.
The aerial attack as conceived by Mumme and Leach is not a complicated offense. For most of his head coaching career, Leach maintained a play sheet the size of a napkin. The Air Raid has a few basics: the post, the mesh, the corner, the shallow cross, and the vertical four, which quarterbacks and receivers drill endlessly. Receivers do not run a traditional route tree; they are taught to find open space within the defense. The more quarterbacks and receivers repeat plays, the better they get at nonverbal communication that allows the quarterback to know what the receiver is going to do long before the defense does.
Ideally, a veteran quarterback could change Leach’s play or call the plays himself. “At the end of my freshman year and throughout my freshman year, I was probably calling 70 percent of the plays,” former Washington State quarterback Connor Halliday told The Athletic in 2019. “I would give a formation and then he’d call. the game. His coaching philosophy is, ‘You’re out there on the field, you can see how the defense is lined up better than I can.’ So it’s my job to get you to the best spot to believe in yourself and believe in your ability to make plays. That’s how he coaches. Sometimes he does it indirectly, but his philosophy is to have the quarterback run the whole show.”
Leach stayed with Mumme; they moved to Valdosta State and then to Kentucky. It was at Kentucky that Leach’s offense bothered Florida defensive coordinator Bob Stoops so much that when Stoops was hired in December 1998 to be Oklahoma’s head coach, he hired Leach to run the offense . Leach immediately went in search of a college quarterback to run his offense. Although several coaches were unimpressed, Leach convinced Stoops to allow him to sign Josh Heupel from Snow College. Heupel led Oklahoma to a national title in 2000; in 2022, he was 10-2 in his second season as Tennessee’s head coach.
That 1999 season planted the seeds for an offensive revolution in Norman, and it also included Leach planting something else. In Texas’ game in the Cotton Bowl, Leach hatched a plot to leave a fake game sheet on the field during pregame warmups. A Texas assistant found the sheet and took it to Longhorns defensive coordinator Carl Reese, who proceeded to call plays thinking it was real. The Longhorns trailed 17-0 before Reese realized he had been tricked. Texas won 38-28, but Leach had warned it would be a major pain for Big 12 defensive coordinators.
Leach was not in Norman for the national title. That first year at Oklahoma he impressed Texas Tech, and Leach was hired to replace longtime coach Spike Dykes. There, Leach would meet another quarterback destined to be a coach. Leach inherited Kliff Kingsbury, who threw for 3,418 yards and 21 touchdowns in their first season together. In their third season together in 2002, Kingsbury threw for 5,017 yards and 45 touchdowns. Towards the end of that season, the Red Raiders upset then-No. 4 Texas and put the rest of the Big 12 on notice. The funky offense led by the strange coach with the law degree could beat anyone.
Leach and QB Graham Harrell (left) brought a fun, high-flying offense to Texas Tech. Leach was head coach from 2000 to 2009. (Ronald Martinez/Getty)
Leach reached the height of his success at Texas Tech in 2008 when the Red Raiders went 11-1 and found themselves locked in a three-way tie with Texas, which beat Texas Tech, and Oklahoma, which beat Texas Tech, atop the Big 12. South. Oklahoma was picked to play in the Big 12 title game by virtue of its top Bowl Championship Series ranking, but Leach had become a household name in the college football world, and teams across the country were taking their concepts or hiring former assistants like now. like Dana Holgorsen.
Leach’s time at Texas Tech wouldn’t last much longer. In 2009, Leach was accused of abusing catcher Adam James. James, the son of former SMU star and then-ESPN commentator Craig James, accused Leach of ordering him placed in a locker for several hours while he sat in practice recovering from a concussion cerebral The Texas Tech coach later contradicted James’ story, saying that James was told to stay in a large room typically used for visiting team media interviews at Jones AT&T Stadium .
Texas Tech fired Leach days before the Red Raiders were…