‘A brilliant football mind’: Mike Leach’s unique life and football legacy
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Pete ThamelESPN
Perhaps the highest compliment about the most improbable college coaching career of this generation is that as time marches on, and new eras of homogenized football coaches emerge, explaining the Mike Leach coaching experience will sound like fiction.
A former rugby player with no college football playing experience? A Pepperdine Law grad who coached in Finland and then won in Lubbock, Pullman and Starkville? A coaching tree that includes Lincoln Riley, Dave Aranda and Dana Holgorsen? A list of former players that ranges from Kliff Kingsbury to Josh Heupel? It all sounds like a Dan Jenkins fever dream.
But that was Mike Leach, a Renaissance man masquerading as a football coach, who died Monday night, Mississippi State announced. He was 61.
“He’s truly a one-of-a-kind,” Washington State athletic director Pat Chun said of his former coach. “There will never be another Mike Leach to walk this earth or grace the sideline at a college football game.”
Experiencing Mike Leach’s more than three decades of college coaching helps explain why he was unique. As the college football world descends into mourning for the loss of an American original, it’s difficult to encapsulate the breadth of a career that spanned from Cal Poly to Valdosta State, Iowa Wesleyan to Kentucky, and College of the Desert to Oklahoma.
He touched three major conferences — SEC, Big 12 and Pac-12 — and can be traced through nearly every boldface name in the sport the past two decades as a colleague or rival. There are few college coaches at any level who don’t have a Mike Leach story, be it from their time as an opponent, using him as an inspiration or bellied up at a bar in the coach’s beloved Key West, Florida.
“He changed college football,” former Mississippi State athletic director John Cohen said. “He took college football from a very conservative offensive approach where coaches were afraid to make a mistake … I go back to the word fearlessness. He’s not afraid to take risks.”
Mike Leach was schematically brilliant, intellectually fascinating and stubborn, flawed and unconventional enough to never get a chance to coach a blue blood. He rarely showed contrition for mistakes and proved nearly allergic to apology, the same traits that both carved his impossible path and eventually limited it. Leach was difficult to manage, prone to self-induced controversy and managed to cross lines with embarrassing public moments at all his head-coaching stops, from an acrimonious exit at Texas Tech over allegations he mistreated a player with a concussion, leading to wrongful termination lawsuits, to controversies over inappropriate tweets at Washington State and Mississippi State.
It never bothered Leach that he wasn’t deemed fit for a blue-blooded address like Austin, Tuscaloosa or Los Angeles, as his nonconformity act was always better suited for off-Broadway. Instead, he won as a head coach at three of the toughest ZIP codes in the sport — Texas Tech, Washington State and Mississippi State — and left an indelible imprint on the game.
Leach’s 21 seasons as a head coach left him with a 158-107 record, a near-60% winning percentage at schools that rarely, if ever, won at that rate without him. Among his many legacies will be as perhaps the most adept at defying gravity at some of the hardest spots in the sport.
And he did it his own way, whether he was with the Pori Bears in Finland in 1989 or being profiled by “60 Minutes” as “The Mad Scientist of Football.”
“He’s such a one-of-a-kind individual,” Chun said. “It’s hard. He’s caring, he’s a lifelong learner. He has a unique curiosity that carried him through his entire life. That same curiosity is why the Air Raid became the Air Raid. He’s a world traveler, voluminous reader. He has an insatiable appetite to learn and discover. He’s a person who wasn’t just defined by football. He had an expertise in it.”
Leach refined a branch of the Air Raid tree of offense and ran it to obsessive perfection, in a way that will be felt for generations. In an era when coordinators hold Cheesecake Factory menu-size play sheets on the sideline, Leach’s offense stressed perfecting fewer than 20 plays and running them to Swiss precision. His call sheet looked more like an airline snack box menu, a weekly mockery of the schematic gurus sleeping in their offices looking for an edge.
Back in 2009, “60 Minutes” profiled Leach’s Texas Tech team as “the powerhouse that shouldn’t be.” And that notion will be much of his on-field legacy, as his stint in Lubbock will epitomize the power of his scheme over talent. Perhaps Leach’s most famous on-field moment came in November 2008 when the No. 6 Red Raiders shocked No. 1 Texas in Lubbock on a last-second touchdown pass from Graham Harrell to Michael Crabtree.
Leach’s Tech tenure included not only going 7-2 against Texas A&M but also needling the school’s Corps of Cadets. In a New York Times profile by author Michael Lewis in 2005, Leach said: “I ought to have Mike’s Pirate School,” he said. “The freshmen, all they get is the bandanna. When you’re a senior, you get the sword and skull and crossbones. For homework, we’ll work pirate maneuvers and stuff like that.”
At his next stop in Pullman, Washington, Leach revived a dormant Washington State program and built it to the point that he authored one of the most memorable seasons in school history. Washington State won 11 games in 2018, the most in school history, after Leach persuaded East Carolina transfer Gardner Minshew to come to the Palouse instead of being a backup for Alabama. It ended with an Alamo Bowl win over Iowa State that Washington State officials remember for Leach wanting to visit a local haunted hotel.
Leach stayed defiantly and unflinchingly himself. Every conversation with Leach had the undulations of a small-town carnival ride. It would jerk in completely different directions, and by the end of his answer you’d have forgotten the question because he had veered through politics, modern art and mascot battles.
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Leach never forgot that this reporter lived in South Boston, and every conversation circled back to his fascination with local gangster Whitey Bulger. Leach wasn’t just curious — he had read multiple books, sought local updates and someday hoped to tour Southie. Call Leach for a quote on spread quarterbacks transitioning to the NFL, and you often ended up with 43 minutes on gangsters, officiating and politics. Often, you’d end up scouring through the eclectic material and hoping there were a few tangentially usable quotes, alternately amused and frustrated.
Those who were around him on his stops say Leach was devoted to philanthropy, but only if it wasn’t publicized. His deprecation, diatribes about marriage and mascots, and generally oddball nature often distracted from his intellect rather than accentuating it. But as the years pass and Leach’s vast, wide and quirky legacy is revisited, it’s clear his ability to change the sport will loom largest of all.
“Mike is one of those guys who doesn’t want to let you in on what he knows about football,” Cohen said. “When he does, it’s eye-opening. I don’t think he gets enough credit as a football mind. He’s a brilliant football mind.”
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Jorge Castillo
NEW YORK — Giancarlo Stanton, one of the first known adopters of the torpedo bat, declined Tuesday to say whether he believes using it last season caused the tendon ailments in both elbows that forced him to begin this season on the injured list.
Last month, Stanton alluded to “bat adjustments” he made last season as a possible reason for the epicondylitis, commonly known as tennis elbow, he’s dealing with.
“You’re not going to get the story you’re looking for,” Stanton said. “So, if that’s what you guys want, that ain’t going to happen.”
Stanton said he will continue using the torpedo bat when he returns from injury. The 35-year-old New York Yankees slugger, who has undergone multiple rounds of platelet-rich plasma injections to treat his elbows, shared during spring training that season-ending surgery on both elbows was a possibility. But he has progressed enough to recently begin hitting off a Trajekt — a pitching robot that simulates any pitcher’s windup, arm angle and arsenal. However, he still wouldn’t define his return as “close.”
He said he will first have to go on a minor league rehab assignment at an unknown date for an unknown period. It won’t start in the next week, he added.
“This is very unique,” Stanton said. “I definitely haven’t missed a full spring before. So, it just depends on my timing, really, how fast I get to feel comfortable in the box versus live pitching.”
While the craze of the torpedo bat (also known as the bowling pin bat) has swept the baseball world since it was revealed Saturday — while the Yankees were blasting nine home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers — that a few members of the Yankees were using one, the modified bat already had quietly spread throughout the majors in 2024. Both Stanton and former Yankees catcher Jose Trevino, now with the Cincinnati Reds, were among players who used the bats last season after being introduced to the concept by Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT-educated physicist and former minor league hitting coordinator for the organization.
Anthony Volpe, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Cody Bellinger, Paul Goldschmidt and Austin Wells were among the Yankees who used torpedo bats during their season-opening sweep of the Brewers.
Stanton explained he has changed bats before. He said he has usually adjusted the length. Sometimes, he opts for lighter bats at the end of the long season. In the past, when knuckleballers were more common in the majors, he’d opt for heavier lumber.
Last year, he said he simply chose his usual bat but with a different barrel after experimenting with a few models.
“I mean, it makes a lot of sense,” Stanton said. “But it’s, like, why hasn’t anyone thought of it in 100-plus years? So, it’s explained simply and then you try it and as long as it’s comfortable in your hands [it works]. We’re creatures of habit, so the bat’s got to feel kind of like a glove or an extension of your arm.”
Stanton went on to lead the majors with an average bat velocity of 81.2 mph — nearly 3 mph ahead of the competition. He had a rebound, but not spectacular, regular season in which he batted .233 with 27 home runs and a .773 OPS before clubbing seven home runs in 14 playoff games.
“It’s not like [it was] unreal all of a sudden for me,” Stanton said.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone described the torpedo bats “as the evolution of equipment” comparable to getting fitted for new golf clubs. He said the organization is not pushing players to use them and insisted the science is more complicated than just picking a bat with a different barrel.
“There’s a lot more to it than, ‘I’ll take the torpedo bat on the shelf over there — 34 [inches], 32 [ounces],'” Boone said. “Our guys are way more invested in it than that. And really personalized, really work with our players in creating this stuff. But it’s equipment evolving.”
As players around the majors order torpedo bats in droves after the Yankees’ barrage over the weekend — they clubbed a record-tying 13 homers in two games against the Brewers — Boone alluded to the notion that, though everyone is aware of the concept, not every organization can optimize its usage.
“You’re trying to just, where you can on the margins, move the needle a little bit,” Boone said. “And that’s really all you’re going to do. I don’t think this is some revelation to where we’re going to be; it’s not related to the weekend that we had, for example. Like, I don’t think it’s that. Maybe in some cases, for some players, it may help them incrementally. That’s how I view it.”
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Eli Lederman
USC secured the commitment of former Oregon defensive tackle pledge Tomuhini Topui on Tuesday, a source told ESPN, handing the Trojans their latest recruiting victory in the 2026 cycle over the Big Ten rival Ducks.
Topui, ESPN’s No. 3 defensive tackle and No. 72 overall recruit in the 2026 class, spent five and half months committed to Oregon before pulling his pledge from the program on March 27. Topui attended USC’s initial spring camp practice that afternoon, and seven days later the 6-foot-4, 295-pound defender gave the Trojans his pledge to become the sixth ESPN 300 defender in the program’s 2026 class.
Topui’s commitment gives USC its 10th ESPN 300 pledge this cycle — more than any other program nationally — and pulls a fourth top-100 recruit into the impressive defensive class the Trojans are building this spring. Alongside Topui, USC’s defensive class includes in-state cornerbacks R.J. Sermons (No. 26 in ESPN Junior 300) and Brandon Lockhart (No. 77); four-star outside linebacker Xavier Griffin (No. 27) out of Gainesville, Georgia; and two more defensive line pledges between Jaimeon Winfield (No. 143) and Simote Katoanga (No. 174).
The Trojans are working to reestablish their local recruiting presence in the 2026 class under newly hired general manager Chad Bowden. Topui not only gives the Trojans their 11th in-state commit in the cycle, but his pledge represents a potentially important step toward revamping the program’s pipeline to perennial local powerhouse Mater Dei High School, too.
Topui will enter his senior season this fall at Mater Dei, the program that has produced a long line of USC stars including Matt Leinart, Matt Barkley and Amon-Ra St. Brown. However, if Topui ultimately signs with the program later this year, he’ll mark the Trojans’ first Mater Dei signee since the 2022 cycle, when USC pulled three top-300 prospects — Domani Jackson, Raleek Brown and C.J. Williams — from the high school program based in Santa Ana, California.
Topui’s flip to the Trojans also adds another layer to a recruiting rivalry rekindling between USC and Oregon in the 2026 cycle.
Tuesday’s commitment comes less than two months after coach Lincoln Riley and the Trojans flipped four-star Oregon quarterback pledge Jonas Williams, ESPN’s No. 2 dual-threat quarterback in 2026. USC is expected to continue targeting several Ducks commits this spring, including four-star offensive tackle Kodi Greene, another top prospect out of Mater Dei.
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