The appellation “American original” is thrown around excessively and cheaply, but it absolutely fits the late Mike Leach, who died Tuesday due to complications from a heart condition. There has never been another college football coach like him, and there will never be one like him now that he’s gone. The Mississippi State coach’s profession is more drab today because of his loss.
Leach was eccentric, brilliant, fearless, funny, sometimes mean, always unconventional. In a time when coaches are increasingly (and boringly) homogenous, he came out of an irregular mold that was broken immediately upon his arrival. Only Leach could have blazed a trail from playing rugby (not football) at BYU to earning a law degree at Pepperdine to becoming arguably the most influential offensive coach of the 21st century.
He was an unapologetic maverick who talked a different game, coached a different game and marched to a different drumbeat. He would walk about seven miles roundtrip to work every day while at Washington State, often using the time on the journey home to make late-night phone calls to reporters that could veer almost anywhere. His mind was a random subject generator.
Dellenger: Mike Leach, One of College Football’s Most Innovative Minds, Dies
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Leach disdained coachspeak. During the week, he was his profession’s foremost expert on pirates, expounded enthusiastically on theoretical animal fights and dispensed free wedding advice. And on Saturdays, he was the pass-throwingest play-caller in the history of the sport.
When did college football accelerate its evolution from Thou Shalt Establish the Run to Spread It and Chuck It? When Mike Leach started winning games that way.
What then–offensive coordinator Leach and his boss, Hal Mumme, concocted in the obscure small-college laboratories of Iowa Wesleyan and Valdosta State from 1989 to ’96 was the Air Raid offense. It would, in the years to come, revolutionize the sport.
Leach and Mumme borrowed some principles from BYU’s offense under LaVell Edwards, but the ethos was a bit more radical and subversive. The Air Raid was dismissed as a gimmick by the old guard—but the gimmick was working, and the creators delighted in tweaking the nonbelievers.
Kentucky athletic director C.M. Newton took a chance on the two iconoclasts in 1997, desperate for a style that would put butts in seats and give star quarterback recruit Tim Couch a vehicle to succeed. When that offense led to Kentucky’s first winning season since the ’80s and Couch being the No. 1 pick in the ’98 NFL draft, the coaching industry started paying attention.
Oklahoma hired Leach away to be new coach Bob Stoops’s offensive coordinator, and he turned a junior college transfer named Josh Heupel into a 3,000-yard passer. After one season in Norman, Leach got his first head coaching job, at Texas Tech. From there, he really began to transform the way offenses were constructed and plays were called.
While Heupel was helping Oklahoma win the 2000 national championship, Leach was in Lubbock having sophomore Kliff Kingsbury throw the most passes in the country. That would become a recurring theme. Today, the four quarterbacks who have attempted the most passes in a single season were all Leach QBs: Kingsbury’s 712 in ’02; Graham Harrell’s 713 at Tech in ’07; Connor Halliday’s 714 at Washington State in ’14; and B.J. Symons’s record 719 at Tech in ’03.
This season is the 11th straight in which a Leach team has led the nation in pass attempts. His teams hold FBS records for most passes in a game (Washington State threw 89 against Oregon State in 2013); most passes attempted and completed per game for a season (64.3 and 42.5, respectively, at Wazzu in ’14); and most passing first downs per game (23.5 at Texas Tech in ’03).
In the process of rewriting the record book, a man who imitated no one spawned a generation of imitators. Look at the current coaching ranks and count the Leach disciples who played for him and/or coached under him: USC coach Lincoln Riley, who has mentored three of the last six Heisman Trophy winners; TCU’s Sonny Dykes, who has the Horned Frogs in the College Football Playoff and may soon be winning national Coach of the Year honors; Heupel, who took Tennessee to 10 wins this season; Kingsbury, who is in his fourth season coaching the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals; Harrell, the offensive coordinator at West Virginia after a stint in the same job at USC; Sonny Cumbie, the coach at Louisiana Tech; Dana Holgorsen, the coach at Houston; Neal Brown, the coach at West Virginia and Dave Aranda, the coach at Baylor.
There are many others who simply adopted elements of the Leach playbook without working for him. His concepts and routes are all over the sport now, at every level. It’s not a coincidence that in 1999, Leach’s season at Oklahoma, the FBS average for team pass attempts per game surpassed 30 for the first time; that number crested at 33.6 in 2007, as the Air Raid influence proliferated.
The only rub was that Leach never put it together at a championship level. He came close twice, a decade apart at two different schools. His 2008 Texas Tech team went 11–2 and won a share of the Big 12 South Division title with Oklahoma and Texas but watched the Sooners advance to the league title game and then the BCS championship game. In ’18, Washington State went 11–2 and tied for the Pac-12 North title but lost the tiebreaker to Washington.
Leach’s stubbornness made him great but also held him back. Indifferent toward defense, disdainful of the running game and locked into recruiting players to fit his esoteric system, he rarely fielded complete teams.
And, frankly, Leach’s personality wasn’t a fit with blueblood programs. He was better off in the backwaters of Lubbock, Pullman and Starkville, waging guerrilla campaigns against the establishment programs. He was a great coach in hard jobs and just offbeat enough to never get the easy ones.
The Texas Tech tenure ended in a controversial 2009 firing over how Leach—the winningest coach in school history—handled a player with a concussion. That led to Leach’s suing the school and likely had a chilling effect on his ability to get another job in the next hiring cycle. In ’12, he took over a Washington State program coming off eight straight nonwinning seasons. By the time he left, Leach had the best winning percentage since before World War II for any Wazzu coach who had been there more than two seasons.
At Mississippi State, the steady progress looked familiar, improving from 4–7 to 7–6 to 8–4. But there were health issues during this 2022 season, eliciting quiet concerns that the 61-year-old might have to retire. He seemed to bounce back in recent weeks—then came the stunning news Tuesday.
Lower the Jolly Roger flag to half staff in memory of The Pirate. Pour one out for him in his beloved Key West. Mike Leach was an American original whose passing leaves college football a less interesting place.
