Mississippi State coach Mike Leach walks onto the field this season after a 24-22 win over Ole Miss.
Mike Leach fit into no conventional hole.
He was the football coach who played rugby in college.
He was the renowned offensive mind who earned a law degree, taught a five-week course on insurgent warfare and football strategies and once delivered an unforgettable soliloquy on the pitfalls of planning weddings.
In the last years of his life, he coached in the football holy land that is the SEC, but as a young man, he called the shots at the College of the Desert, and for the Pori Bears in Finland.
The passing attack he helped make famous and popular was called air raid, and his mind began to tilt that way when as a rugby-playing undergraduate at BYU, he was asked to sit in on some of LaVell Edwards' film sessions. One thing Edwards' Cougars knew how to do was roll up the passing yardage. But Leach could talk just as long about society and history and the African safari he went on and the trip to Panama he took and what was hot at the moment on Netflix. He might have lived his life with X’s and O’s, but he wrote a book about how Geronimo’s leadership tactics with the Apaches could translate into the 21st Century. The man did not live by pass patterns alone.
When the college football world learned Tuesday that Leach had died at 61, the tributes poured in. Because he was successful. Because he was memorable. Because he was unique. Yeah, that’s a significant word in the legend of Mike Leach. Unique. Gets thrown around a lot when it’s time for eulogies, but in this case it is a perfect fit. There is no one else out there in the sport quite like him.
Forget that Leach never had a job in the blueblooded places. Never in Tuscaloosa or Athens or Columbus or Norman or Clemson or Ann Arbor or South Bend. He made his name and found his fame in Lubbock, Texas, and Pullman, Washington, and Starkville, Mississippi. Places that might be easy to overlook, but not with him in charge.
It wasn’t just that he won: 21 seasons, 19 bowl games. If you don’t think that’s not hard, try doing it nearly every year at Washington State. He had Texas Tech ranked No. 1. Texas Tech. He had seven wins over ranked opponents his three years at Mississippi State. His 158th and last victory was a 24-22 Egg Bowl classic over Ole Miss.
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Or that his teams were invariably highly entertaining because anything called air raid does not suggest many final scores of 14-10. His first game at Mississippi State in 2020, his Bulldogs tore through No. 6 LSU 44-34. Leach had come to town.
Or that the coaching tree he inspired looks like a mighty oak. Sonny Dykes is on there. He’ll be leading TCU in the playoffs. Lincoln Riley is on there. The passing philosophy he developed with Leach has turned into a production line of Heisman Trophy quarterbacks — Riley has coached three in the past six years.
But there's also this: Mike Leach was very, very good at being Mike Leach. A very lively offense came from a very lively mind, which often was displayed in very lively conversation. You watched his teams because you were never quite sure what they would try next. You listened to him because you were never quite sure what he would say next.
Consider some of these little gems from what turned out to be his final SEC media day session. Those things are supposed to begin with a coach’s opening statement.
“I hate opening statements. I really don’t see the point of it. So as opposed to me sitting there and think of some flowery opening statement, which I’ve done before, and then at the end of the opening statement a number of people ask questions that have already been addressed in my opening statement, I decided we’d just sort of cut out the middleman. You go ahead and ask the questions and I’ll go ahead and answer ‘em.”
About what makes his system go.
“Football has always been a game of execution. There’s a lot of Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote, who you ambush, fool the other guy, then you walk away laughing like Muttley (Dick Dastardly’s cartoon dog) after the rock fell on the guy. It doesn’t matter what you do schematically, you have to execute well.”
His displeasure at rules that make it harder to pull off trick plays.
“I don’t like to homogenize and make football kind of a cubicle game. I think some of these rules eliminating trick plays do just that. I think that, of course, is ridiculous.”
Trying to improve Mississippi State’s kicking game.
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“I had good luck with kickers through my whole career, including the time a guy walked out of the stands that we went ahead and had kick for us the next week.”
About what college football now faces with the transfer portal and NIL.
"Go up to your favorite NFL (front-office) guy and say, 'I heard in the NFL they're going to have unmitigated free agency, 365, 24/7, And by the way, there's not going to be any salary cap or draft, you're just going to have bidding wars. Just watch the expression on their face. Don't look at anything else or write down any notes because the expression on their face will be well worth it."
All this is less charming if a man doesn’t win. But he did. A lot, and in places where it has often been not easy.
So the recognitions poured in Tuesday, as college football lost one of its most vibrant minds and personalities. Coaching icons are not supposed to be gone at 61, in any sport. Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno worked into the 80s. Nick Saban is 71. Mike Krzyzewski finally called it a career at 75. Tom Osborne, long retired from Nebraska, is still around at 85. Bo Schembechler, who had a heart attack the night before his first Michigan Rose Bowl and was still studying play charts while waiting for the doctor at the hospital, lived to 77.
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Leach’s passing carries a bit of an echo of Bear Bryant. When Bryant coached his last game for Alabama in the 1982 Liberty Bowl at the age of 69, he was asked what he would do next in retirement. “Probably croak in a week,” he said.
Four weeks later, Bryant was gone from a heart attack.
“Mike’s death also underscores the fragility and uncertainty of our lives,”: Mississippi State president Mark E. Keenum said in a statement. “Three weeks ago, Mike and I were together in the locker room celebrating a hard-fought victory in Oxford. Mike Leach truly embraced life and lived in such as a manner as to leave no regrets. That’s a worthy legacy.”
A life lived as if it were the air raid offense.
