Mike Leach sounded awful. It was Nov. 29, a Tuesday afternoon, and he could hardly speak without it being followed by a harsh, hacking cough. I didn't give it much thought at the time, as I was too busy enjoying the fact that a major college football coach was treating me like a human being, not someone from whom he needed a buffer.
"Call anytime," Leach had texted me earlier.
We didn't have a preexisting relationship. We'd chatted a few times over the years for different stories, all of them fairly routine, just like this one — I wanted his opinion on the one-year turnaround his former pupil, Lincoln Riley, had pulled off at USC.
