College football

Unconventional coach has teams scared

Texas Tech's Leach never played football, but proves he can coach it

OPINION

By John Walters

NBCSports.com

updated 5:25 p.m. ET Nov. 3, 2008

John Walters

Whoever coined the term “conventional wisdom” was an idiot.

Wisdom, after all, is rare. And genius, its well-heeled cousin, is almost always unconventional — at first.

Mike Leach, the college football coach who never played a down of college football, is beginning to scare people. On Saturday night, Leach’s Red Raiders (9-0 and ranked No. 2 in the AP poll) beat top-ranked Texas in what was the college football game of the year. More than just the nation’s top ranking, however, was at stake.

A paradigm shift hanged in the balance.

For most of this decade, Mike Leach has fielded a Texas Tech team whose offense posted numbers that were shockingly spectacular. Five of the 13 most prolific passing yardage seasons in the history of college football, after all, have been produced by one of Leach’s quarterbacks in the previous five seasons.

During this period, however, the oligarchy of programs that wield power in the game (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Texas, USC, etc.) never much felt threatened by such EA Sports statistics. Tech’s offense was just a gimmick, went the (uh-hunh) popular wisdom. It was no more seductive to five-star athletes with NFL aspirations than Navy’s wishbone. Get the Red Raiders on a field with elite athletes and the gimmickry would be exposed. Leach’s offense was Madden-ing, if not maddening.

Between 2003 and the first 11 games of 2007, Texas Tech went 35-7 against unranked teams, often by chalk-outline scores: 80-21 over Sam Houston State, 75-7 over Northwestern State, 70-10 against Nebraska. In that same period, the Red Raiders went 1-13 vs. opponents who hit back, that is to say, ranked teams. Texas Tech was, to paraphrase the Smashing Pumpkins, a bully with butterfly wings.

In a profile of Leach that appeared in the New York Times three years ago, the typically superb author Michael Lewis ("Liar’s Poker") quoted Leach’s agent, Gary O’Hagan, on how Leach’s peers, that is, O’Hagan’s other clients, regard him: “When you're talking to them Monday morning, and you say, Did you see the play Leach ran on third-and-26, they dismiss it immediately,” O’Hagan said. “Dismissive is the word. They dismiss him out of hand. And you know why? Because he's not doing things the way they've always been done.”

Leach attended Brigham Young University, where he did not play football, though it would be nice to believe that he absorbed some of Norm Chow’s passing wizardry by sheer osmosis. In fact, Leach barely got on the field as a high school sub in Cody, Wyo. By age 25, he had his B.A. from BYU and a law degree from Pepperdine. A passionate football fan, he had a radical thought: I may have less experience than most football coaches, but they have less intellect than I do.

And thus, the most successful non-conformist coaching career since Knute Rockne was born. Leach, for example, uses a pitching machine to fire tennis balls at his wide receivers. That may sound as if it comes directly from the Patches O’Houlihan school of coaching (“If you can dodge traffic, you can dodge a ball!”), but it also makes sense. Any receivers coach preaches catching the football with your hands, out in front of your pads. A wideout has no choice but to do so when a tennis ball is rocketing his way. Hence, the drill creates and promotes good habits.

Another Leach innovation? The 40-yard beach at Tech’s practice facility. Leach has his wide receivers sprint in the sand pit in order to strengthen their knees and ankles.

Unorthodox? Certainly. And what school can boast the first freshman wide receiver to win the Biletnikoff Award? Tech, whose Michael Crabtree shattered the NCAA freshmen records for receptions (134), touchdown catches (22) and receiving yards (1,962) last season while leading the entire nation in those three categories. And here’s the kicker: Crabtree played quarterback in high school.

The beauty of Leach is two-fold: One, he never lost the courage of his convictions, and two, there was always someone unhinged, or desperate, enough to hire him. Stops at College of the Desert and Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, both in California, as well as a European league team in Pori, Finland, have landed him in Lubbock.

It is a wind-swept west Texas town, the type of outpost that could have inspired Dwight Yoakam’s “1,000 Miles From Nowhere.” Just last Saturday night in Columbus, Ohio, some of the country’s more prominent college football scribes were discussing how to get there as if they were contemplating a lunar landing.

“You could fly to Dallas, but then it’s a five-hour drive —“

“Or you could hop a connection to Midland, but then it’s still a two-hour haul from there —

“And good luck finding a place to stay.”