‘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.
1:04
Mike Leach is one of football’s most unpredictable, entertaining personalities. Here’s what happens when you give him a mic.
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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Bill Connelly
The 2025 College Football Playoff got underway in Norman, Oklahoma, on Friday night, and we’ve already seen a first. After all four home teams won by demonstrative margins in last year’s first round, Alabama became the first road team to prevail in a playoff game with a stirring comeback against Oklahoma and a 34-24 win.
Here are the main takeaways. We will update this with each completed game.
What just happened?
Oklahoma’s offense only had 20 minutes in it. The Sooners were perfect out of the gate, bursting to a 17-0 lead against an Alabama team that looked completely unprepared for the moment. But the Crimson Tide adjusted and rallied, and OU had only a brief answer. From 17 down, Bama outscored its hosts by a 34-7 margin from there.
We use the word “momentum” far too much in football, but this was an extremely momentum-based game.
1. Over the first 19 minutes, Oklahoma went up 17-0 while outgaining Bama by a stunning 181-12 margin. It could have been worse, too, as the Sooners’ Owen Heinecke came within millimeters of a blocked punt that might have produced a safety or a touchdown.
2. Over the next 21 minutes, Bama outscored the Sooners 27-0, outgaining them, 194-59. Freshman Lotzeir Brooks caught two touchdown passes — the first on a fourth-and-2 to finally get Bama on the board (after he caught a huge third-down pass earlier in the drive), and the second TD came on a 30-yard lob that put the Tide up for good. The Tide defense got pressure on John Mateer, and his footwork and composure vanished. An egregious pick-six thrown directly to Zabien Brown tied the game, and Bama scored the first 10 points of the second half as well.
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Zabien Brown stuns OU with game-tying pick-six before halftime
Zabien Brown takes a big-time interception 50 yards to the house to tie the score before halftime.
OU responded briefly, cutting the margin to three points early in the fourth quarter thanks to a 37-yard Deion Burks touchdown. But the Sooners’ offense couldn’t do enough, and kicker Tate Sandell, the Groza Award winner, missed two late field goals to assure a Bama win.
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Tate Sandell’s back-to-back FG misses help Alabama secure 1st-round win
Tate Sandell misses a pair of late field goals as Alabama holds on to beat Oklahoma 34-24 in the CFP first round.
Impact plays
Oklahoma beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa in November — in the game that eventually certified the Sooners’ CFP bid — thanks to a pick-six and special teams dominance. But the tables turned completely in Norman. Brown’s pick six was huge, and special teams completely abandoned the Sooners, both with Sandell’s misses and with a botched punt in the second quarter.
The botched punt was actually the second of a two-part sequence that turned the game against the Sooners. First, Mateer passed up an easy third-and-3 conversion to throw downfield to a wide open Xavier Robinson, but he short-armed the pass and dropped it. On the very next snap, punter Grayson Miller dropped the ball moving into his punting motion. Bama’s Tim Keenan III recovered the ball at the OU 30, and while OU’s defense held the Tide to a field goal, what could have been a 24-3 OU lead turned instead into a 17-10 advantage. That set the table for Brown’s pick-six and everything that followed.
The blown early lead leaves Oklahoma with quite the ignominious feat: In the history of the College Football Playoff, teams are 28-2 with a 17-point lead: OU is 0-2, and everyone else is 28-0. Ouch.
See you next fall, Sooners
We knew that whenever Oklahoma’s season ended, offense would be the primary reason. The Sooners survived playing with almost no margin for error for most of the year. Their No. 49 ranking in offensive SP+ was the worst of any CFP team, but they got enough defense (third in defensive SP+), special teams (21st in special teams SP+) and quality red zone play to overcome it.
The Sooners’ defense still played well on Friday night — Bama gained only 260 total yards (4.8 per play) — but the special teams miscues put more pressure on the offense to come through, and after a brilliant start, it ran out of steam. Mateer began the game 10-for-15 for 132 yards with a touchdown, 26 rushing yards and a rushing TD, but his last 31 pass attempts gained just 149 yards with five sacks and the pick, and his last nine non-sack rushes gained just 15 yards.
Brent Venables therefore heads into the offseason with some decisions to make. OU’s offense technically improved after the big-money additions of coordinator Ben Arbuckle and Mateer, but Mateer was scattershot before his midseason hand injury and poor after it. Do the Sooners run it back with the same roster core, hoping that better health and a theoretically improved run game can give the defense what it needs to take OU to the next level? Does Venables hit the reset button again? Can he ever get all the arrows pointed in the right direction at the same time?
What’s next
Alabama’s reward for the comeback win is a trip out West: The Tide will meet unbeaten and top-seeded Indiana in the Rose Bowl on January 1. Bama’s defense will obviously face a stiffer test from Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza and the Hoosiers attack, but Bama’s defense has been mostly up for the test this season. Their ability to pull an upset will be determined by Ty Simpson and the Alabama passing game.
Simpson began Friday night’s win just 2-for-6 with a sack, and while he improved from there and didn’t throw any interceptions — his final passing line: 18-for-29 for 232 yards, two touchdowns and four sacks (6.0 yards per attempt) — his footwork still betrayed him quite a bit over the course of the evening, and he misfired on quite a few passes. Oklahoma’s pass rush is fearsome, but Indiana’s defense ranks seventh in sack rate itself, and with almost no blitzing whatsoever. The Hoosiers generate pressure and clog passing lanes, and they held Oregon‘s Dante Moore and Ohio State‘s Julian Sayin to 5.1 yards per dropback with 11 sacks and two touchdowns to three picks. Bama will be an underdog for a reason.
That said, kudos to the Tide for getting off the mat. They were lifeless at the start, missing tackles and blocks and looking as unprepared as they did in their season-opening loss to Florida State. But Brooks’ play-making lit the fuse, and Bama charged back.
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Kristen Shilton
The Edmonton Oilers expected to stabilize their goaltending by trading for Tristan Jarry. But the honeymoon ended in a hurry when the Oilers placed Jarry on injured reserve with a lower-body ailment.
Edmonton announced Jarry’s change in status on Friday. Jarry was hurt during the Oilers’ game Thursday against Boston, when midway through the second period Jarry appeared to awkwardly move across his crease and then came up slowly afterwards. He was replaced by Calvin Pickard, who projects to be Edmonton’s starter now with Connor Ingram — recalled from the AHL on Friday — stepping into a backup role.
Oilers’ head coach Kris Knoblauch had no update on Jarry following Thursday’s 3-1 victory over the Bruins.
That was just the third start Jarry had made for Edmonton since the club acquired him and forward Sam Poulin from Pittsburgh on Dec. 12, in exchange for goalie Stuart Skinner, defenseman Brett Kulak and a second-round pick in the 2029 NHL draft.
Jarry is 12-3-1 on the season, with a .906 SV% and 2.73 GAA. Pickard has been a serviceable No. 2 (.858 SV%, 3.91 GAA) while Ingram — acquired from Utah in October — has had a tough year with the Bakersfield Condors, going 4-5-2 with an .856 SV% and 4.04 GAA.
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