Mike Leach fit into no conventional hole.
He was the football coach who played rugby in college.
He was the renowned offensive mind who earned a law degree, taught a five-week course on insurgent warfare and football strategies and once delivered an unforgettable soliloquy on the pitfalls of planning weddings.
In the last years of his life, he coached in the football holy land that is the SEC, but as a young man, he called the shots at the College of the Desert, and for the Pori Bears in Finland.
The passing attack he helped make famous and popular was called air raid, and his mind began to tilt that way when as a rugby-playing undergraduate at BYU, he was asked to sit in on some of LaVell Edwards’ film sessions. One thing Edwards’ Cougars knew how to do was roll up the passing yardage. But Leach could talk just as long about society and history and the African safari he went on and the trip to Panama he took and what was hot at the moment on Netflix. He might have lived his life with X’s and O’s, but he wrote a book about how Geronimo’s leadership tactics with the Apaches could translate into the 21st Century. The man did not live by pass patterns alone.
When the college football world learned Tuesday that Leach had died at 61, the tributes poured in. Because he was successful. Because he was memorable. Because he was unique. Yeah, that’s a significant word in the legend of Mike Leach. Unique. Gets thrown around a lot when it’s time for eulogies, but in this case it is a perfect fit. There is no one else out there in the sport quite like him.
Forget that Leach never had a job in the blueblooded places. Never in Tuscaloosa or Athens or Columbus or Norman or Clemson or Ann Arbor or South Bend. He made his name and found his fame in Lubbock, Texas, and Pullman, Washington, and Starkville, Mississippi. Places that might be easy to overlook, but not with him in charge.
It wasn’t just that he won: 21 seasons, 19 bowl games. If you don’t think…
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