Admittedly this is long. It's different cuts/clips from a few articles. The last is a Michael Lewis article that's quite lengthy. Each is linked and worth a read if you have the time.
From this article:
The coach who gave Leach his first college job and one of Leach's former quarterbacks see it differently.
"Sometimes kids get so used to coaches who are political and when you run into someone like Mike who's going to be brutally honest, it doesn't sit well with 'em," said Hal Mumme.
"If you can't play, he's going to tell 'em he can't play," he said. "He does things his own way and he's been successful. He's not into appeasement."
Former Texas Tech quarterback Cody Hodges said that while Leach is not an easy guy to play for, he "never had a problem" with anything Leach did during his five years in Lubbock.
"Coach Leach was someone I enjoyed playing for and if I was a high school kid now and I was being recruited, I would feel comfortable with coach Leach," said Hodges, who is a motivational speaker. "He expects greatness. Even as a redshirt quarterback when I was third or fourth string on scout team, he expected me to be great in practice."
Hodges said that those expectations extended off the field.
"It's not just on the football field, he expects you to be great off the field," Hodges said. "You are going to go to class, you are going to graduate. A lot of guys who didn't go to the next level (the NFL) have jobs and are successful off the field because of the expectations put on them while they were at Texas Tech."
From this article:
Texas Tech coach Mike Leach ripped game officials Saturday, suggesting the crew favored Texas, ...
"I think it's disturbing that Austin residents are involved in
this. People work too hard, too long, there's too much money
invested in these games to allow that," Leach said.
"Am I condemning the crew? Hell yeah, I'm condemning the
crew," Leach said.
"It may be incompetence, bias, I don't know. Maybe it's something as simple as guys sitting over the water cooler at their office in Austin talking about how the great game they're going to see -- and then perhaps a preconceived notion develops as to how it's going to come out," he said.
Asked if expects to be punished by the league for his remarks, Leach said, "I expect to be coaching. I don't know what will happen but I'm not standing for this."
From this article: Hal Mumme received two applications for his vacant offensive coordinator job at NAIA Iowa Wesleyan.
The first applicant was a Los Angeles semi-pro coach/gang leader, who vowed to bring several of his players/gang members with him if hired.
The second was a law school graduate, who never played a down of college football.
Mumme was forced to hire the latter.
"Nobody wanted that job,” Mumme said. "It was slim pickings. But I ended up with a really bright offensive mind.”
"His strategy is good, his scheme is good, but what makes him a genius is his belief and confidence in it,” said former Tech quarterback Sonny Cumbie, who in 2004 threw for 4,742 yards. "The players have taken on the personality of coach Leach.
"They believe strongly in what they do.”
"That’s what’s crazy about it,” said Kliff Kingsbury, Leach’s first quarterback at Tech. "At first you’re like, ‘There are only eight plays?’ But you see how he installs it, teaches it and breeds confidence in his players that it should never be stopped.”
"It’s not so much you don’t know what they’re going to do, it’s that you have to execute against it,” OU coach Bob Stoops said.
Mumme hired Leach, who, in addition to being Iowa Wesleyan’s offensive coordinator, was the offensive line coach, sports information director and recruiting coordinator for a salary of $12,000. To make ends meet, Leach taught law classes at night twice a week and Mumme hired Leach’s wife to be the football secretary.
"He didn’t get overly complex. His system is about working the progression, one through five,” said Sooner quarterbacks coach Josh Heupel, OU’s quarterback in 1999. "He wasn’t too big on what the defenses were doing. He just wanted you to find some grass and get the ball there.”
Said Stoops, "I can remember him getting mad at Josh for telling him what coverage the defense was in. He said, ‘I don’t care what coverage they’re in.’”
"Even though it has evolved in a lot of ways, it’s still the same offense,” Mumme said. "He’ll have a wrinkle or two for OU.
"But for the most part he’s going to go with what brung him.”
From this article:
"When you first meet him," Jarrett Hicks, a junior wide receiver, told me, "you think he's an equipmentmanager." Leach's agent, Gary O'Hagan of I.M.G., who represents dozens of other big-time college andN.F.L. coaches, put it this way, "He's so different from every other football coach it's hard to understandhow he's a coach."
"Everyone find someone," he yelled. Hands sought hands and clasped. The room swelled with thedisturbingly deep rumble of 70 football players speaking in unison. Our Father, who art in heaven,hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.. . .("Basically I'm areligious person, but with some clear obedience and discipline issues," Leach says.) "All right," he cried,after the Lord's Prayer. "Three things." He jumped up onto a little green stool and looked down on hisplayers, all larger than he. "Do your job. DO -- YOUR -- JOB!"
Wherever Mike Leach walks onto a football field, a question naturally follows. Vincent Meeks, who playssafety, puts it this way: "How does a coach who never played a down of football have the best offense inthe game?"
From B.Y.U. he went straight to Pepperdine law school, where he graduated, at the age of 25, inthe top third of his class. That's when he posed the question that has sunk many a legal career: "Why do Iwant to be a lawyer?" One day he announced to his wife, Sharon -- soon to be pregnant with their second4/13child -- that what he really wanted to be was a college football coach. ("Yeah, her side of the familyflipped.") To Leach, coaching football requires the same talent that he was going to waste on the law: thetalent for making arguments. He wanted to make his arguments in the form of offensive plays.
As his team raced onto the field, he gazed intothe stands filled with screaming fans and wondered about the several thousand "cadets" from TexasA.&M. clustered in one end zone. They wear military uniforms and buzz cuts, holler in unison and stand atattention the entire game. "How come they get to pretend they are soldiers?" he asked. "The thing is, theyaren't actually in the military. I ought to have Mike's Pirate School. The freshmen, all they get is thebandanna. When you're a senior, you get the sword and skull and crossbones. For homework, we'll workpirate maneuvers and stuff like that."
What a defense sees, when it lines up against Texas Tech, is endless variety, caused, first, by the sheernumber of people racing around trying to catch a pass and then compounded by the many differentroutes they run. A typical football offense has three serious pass-catching threats; Texas Tech's offensehas five, and it would employ more if that wasn't against the rules. Leach looks at the conventional offense-- with its stocky fullback and bulky tight end seldom touching the football, used more often as blockers --and says, "You've got two positions that basically aren't doing anything." He regards receivers as raffletickets: the more of them you have, the more likely one will hit big. Some go wide, some go deep, somecome across the middle. All are fast. (When Leach recruits high-school players, he is forced to compromiseon most talents, but he insists on speed.) All have been conditioned to run much more than a football5/13player normally does. A typical N.F.L. receiver in training might run 1,500 yards of sprints a day; TexasTech receivers run 2,500 yards. To prepare his receivers' ankles and knees for the unusual punishment ofhis nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field; sloggingthrough the sand, he says, strengthens the receivers' joints. And when they finish sprinting, they move toLeach's tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turnedmany young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.
Leach is unusual in giving his quarterback the authority to change every play, wherever the line ofscrimmage. "He can see more than I'll ever see," Leach says. "If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me outof it. If he doesn't get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there's aton of touchdowns to be had." All Leach is really saying to Hodges when he sends in the play is, "Line up inAce, see how they line up against it and call a good play."
Quickly, a pattern was established: A.&M.'s fear of Tech's passing meant that the field just beyond the lineof scrimmage was so open that a blind man with a cane could find the holes. Though the defensemanaged to stymie his passing attack -- temporarily -- the sight of big, lumbering defensive linemendropping back to cover the receivers did not displease Leach. "The thing is," he said after the game,"defensive linemen really aren't much good at covering receivers. They aren't built to run around thatmuch. And when they do, you have a bunch of people on the other team doing things they don't havemuch experience doing." For the first 16 plays of the game, Texas Tech lined up in seven differentformations (one with two running backs, another with two tight ends, etc.) just to see how the defenderswould respond and which way they would run after the ball was snapped. Hodges threw to four differentreceivers, at eight different spots on the field. Leach wanted to move the ball toward the opponent's goalline, of course, but he also wanted to see how the spaces changed, to see what the A.&M. defenseconceded and also which parts of the inherent disorder the defenders were failing to understand. Sevenof the first 11 plays were pass plays that Hodges changed into runs.
"There's no such thing as a perfect game in football," Leach says. "I don't even think there's such a thing asthe perfect play. You have 11 guys between the ages of 18 and 22 trying to do something violent and fasttogether, usually in pain. Someone is going to blow an assignment or do something that's not quite right."
"Ournotion of balance," Leach says, "is that the five guys who catch the ball all gain 1,000 yards in the season." The trouble with running plays, as Leach sees it, is thatthey clump players together on the field -- by putting two of them, during a handoff, in the same spot withthe ball.
One of the side effects of Leach's tinkering with the accepted rules of offensive conduct is to upset theordinary rhythms of a football game. In the five full years Leach has coached Texas Tech, four or five timeseach season the team has flopped around ineffectually for the first third or so of a game before racing offto score touchdowns at a rate unheard of in organized tackle football. It's as if his opponent's defense hassome deep dark secret that takes time for his offense to extract.
With 8 minutes left in the second quarter, T.C.U. scored itsthird touchdown, for a 21-0 lead, and a T.C.U. defensive back was caught mouthing into a televisioncamera, "They aren't going to score." In the last six minutes of the half, Texas Tech scored three quicktouchdowns; after the break Leach's team came out and scored another seven and won the game, 70-35.A few games later, the Texas Tech offense scored the most points Nebraska had ever given up in its 114-year-old history. In that game, Texas Tech had been ahead, 14-3, with 2 minutes remaining in the first half.It won 70-10.
Before thegame, Leach had said to Hodges: "Get those fat guys up front and make them run. They're already a littleslow. By play 40, they'll be immobilized." That was one reason he kept sending so many receivers on deeproutes: to force the defense to run with them.
"Coach's motivational speeches are always the same," says Daniel Loper, who played fouryears for Leach and is now a rookie offensive tackle with the Tennessee Titans. "He tells very long stories,and you're never sure what they mean. But he's a genius. When we leave the locker room, we all knowthat we'll have three receivers wide open every play."
From this article:
The coach who gave Leach his first college job and one of Leach's former quarterbacks see it differently.
"Sometimes kids get so used to coaches who are political and when you run into someone like Mike who's going to be brutally honest, it doesn't sit well with 'em," said Hal Mumme.
"If you can't play, he's going to tell 'em he can't play," he said. "He does things his own way and he's been successful. He's not into appeasement."
Former Texas Tech quarterback Cody Hodges said that while Leach is not an easy guy to play for, he "never had a problem" with anything Leach did during his five years in Lubbock.
"Coach Leach was someone I enjoyed playing for and if I was a high school kid now and I was being recruited, I would feel comfortable with coach Leach," said Hodges, who is a motivational speaker. "He expects greatness. Even as a redshirt quarterback when I was third or fourth string on scout team, he expected me to be great in practice."
Hodges said that those expectations extended off the field.
"It's not just on the football field, he expects you to be great off the field," Hodges said. "You are going to go to class, you are going to graduate. A lot of guys who didn't go to the next level (the NFL) have jobs and are successful off the field because of the expectations put on them while they were at Texas Tech."
From this article:
Texas Tech coach Mike Leach ripped game officials Saturday, suggesting the crew favored Texas, ...
"I think it's disturbing that Austin residents are involved in
this. People work too hard, too long, there's too much money
invested in these games to allow that," Leach said.
"Am I condemning the crew? Hell yeah, I'm condemning the
crew," Leach said.
"It may be incompetence, bias, I don't know. Maybe it's something as simple as guys sitting over the water cooler at their office in Austin talking about how the great game they're going to see -- and then perhaps a preconceived notion develops as to how it's going to come out," he said.
Asked if expects to be punished by the league for his remarks, Leach said, "I expect to be coaching. I don't know what will happen but I'm not standing for this."
From this article: Hal Mumme received two applications for his vacant offensive coordinator job at NAIA Iowa Wesleyan.
The first applicant was a Los Angeles semi-pro coach/gang leader, who vowed to bring several of his players/gang members with him if hired.
The second was a law school graduate, who never played a down of college football.
Mumme was forced to hire the latter.
"Nobody wanted that job,” Mumme said. "It was slim pickings. But I ended up with a really bright offensive mind.”
"His strategy is good, his scheme is good, but what makes him a genius is his belief and confidence in it,” said former Tech quarterback Sonny Cumbie, who in 2004 threw for 4,742 yards. "The players have taken on the personality of coach Leach.
"They believe strongly in what they do.”
"That’s what’s crazy about it,” said Kliff Kingsbury, Leach’s first quarterback at Tech. "At first you’re like, ‘There are only eight plays?’ But you see how he installs it, teaches it and breeds confidence in his players that it should never be stopped.”
"It’s not so much you don’t know what they’re going to do, it’s that you have to execute against it,” OU coach Bob Stoops said.
Mumme hired Leach, who, in addition to being Iowa Wesleyan’s offensive coordinator, was the offensive line coach, sports information director and recruiting coordinator for a salary of $12,000. To make ends meet, Leach taught law classes at night twice a week and Mumme hired Leach’s wife to be the football secretary.
"He didn’t get overly complex. His system is about working the progression, one through five,” said Sooner quarterbacks coach Josh Heupel, OU’s quarterback in 1999. "He wasn’t too big on what the defenses were doing. He just wanted you to find some grass and get the ball there.”
Said Stoops, "I can remember him getting mad at Josh for telling him what coverage the defense was in. He said, ‘I don’t care what coverage they’re in.’”
"Even though it has evolved in a lot of ways, it’s still the same offense,” Mumme said. "He’ll have a wrinkle or two for OU.
"But for the most part he’s going to go with what brung him.”
From this article:
"When you first meet him," Jarrett Hicks, a junior wide receiver, told me, "you think he's an equipmentmanager." Leach's agent, Gary O'Hagan of I.M.G., who represents dozens of other big-time college andN.F.L. coaches, put it this way, "He's so different from every other football coach it's hard to understandhow he's a coach."
"Everyone find someone," he yelled. Hands sought hands and clasped. The room swelled with thedisturbingly deep rumble of 70 football players speaking in unison. Our Father, who art in heaven,hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.. . .("Basically I'm areligious person, but with some clear obedience and discipline issues," Leach says.) "All right," he cried,after the Lord's Prayer. "Three things." He jumped up onto a little green stool and looked down on hisplayers, all larger than he. "Do your job. DO -- YOUR -- JOB!"
Wherever Mike Leach walks onto a football field, a question naturally follows. Vincent Meeks, who playssafety, puts it this way: "How does a coach who never played a down of football have the best offense inthe game?"
From B.Y.U. he went straight to Pepperdine law school, where he graduated, at the age of 25, inthe top third of his class. That's when he posed the question that has sunk many a legal career: "Why do Iwant to be a lawyer?" One day he announced to his wife, Sharon -- soon to be pregnant with their second4/13child -- that what he really wanted to be was a college football coach. ("Yeah, her side of the familyflipped.") To Leach, coaching football requires the same talent that he was going to waste on the law: thetalent for making arguments. He wanted to make his arguments in the form of offensive plays.
As his team raced onto the field, he gazed intothe stands filled with screaming fans and wondered about the several thousand "cadets" from TexasA.&M. clustered in one end zone. They wear military uniforms and buzz cuts, holler in unison and stand atattention the entire game. "How come they get to pretend they are soldiers?" he asked. "The thing is, theyaren't actually in the military. I ought to have Mike's Pirate School. The freshmen, all they get is thebandanna. When you're a senior, you get the sword and skull and crossbones. For homework, we'll workpirate maneuvers and stuff like that."
What a defense sees, when it lines up against Texas Tech, is endless variety, caused, first, by the sheernumber of people racing around trying to catch a pass and then compounded by the many differentroutes they run. A typical football offense has three serious pass-catching threats; Texas Tech's offensehas five, and it would employ more if that wasn't against the rules. Leach looks at the conventional offense-- with its stocky fullback and bulky tight end seldom touching the football, used more often as blockers --and says, "You've got two positions that basically aren't doing anything." He regards receivers as raffletickets: the more of them you have, the more likely one will hit big. Some go wide, some go deep, somecome across the middle. All are fast. (When Leach recruits high-school players, he is forced to compromiseon most talents, but he insists on speed.) All have been conditioned to run much more than a football5/13player normally does. A typical N.F.L. receiver in training might run 1,500 yards of sprints a day; TexasTech receivers run 2,500 yards. To prepare his receivers' ankles and knees for the unusual punishment ofhis nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field; sloggingthrough the sand, he says, strengthens the receivers' joints. And when they finish sprinting, they move toLeach's tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turnedmany young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.
Leach is unusual in giving his quarterback the authority to change every play, wherever the line ofscrimmage. "He can see more than I'll ever see," Leach says. "If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me outof it. If he doesn't get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there's aton of touchdowns to be had." All Leach is really saying to Hodges when he sends in the play is, "Line up inAce, see how they line up against it and call a good play."
Quickly, a pattern was established: A.&M.'s fear of Tech's passing meant that the field just beyond the lineof scrimmage was so open that a blind man with a cane could find the holes. Though the defensemanaged to stymie his passing attack -- temporarily -- the sight of big, lumbering defensive linemendropping back to cover the receivers did not displease Leach. "The thing is," he said after the game,"defensive linemen really aren't much good at covering receivers. They aren't built to run around thatmuch. And when they do, you have a bunch of people on the other team doing things they don't havemuch experience doing." For the first 16 plays of the game, Texas Tech lined up in seven differentformations (one with two running backs, another with two tight ends, etc.) just to see how the defenderswould respond and which way they would run after the ball was snapped. Hodges threw to four differentreceivers, at eight different spots on the field. Leach wanted to move the ball toward the opponent's goalline, of course, but he also wanted to see how the spaces changed, to see what the A.&M. defenseconceded and also which parts of the inherent disorder the defenders were failing to understand. Sevenof the first 11 plays were pass plays that Hodges changed into runs.
"There's no such thing as a perfect game in football," Leach says. "I don't even think there's such a thing asthe perfect play. You have 11 guys between the ages of 18 and 22 trying to do something violent and fasttogether, usually in pain. Someone is going to blow an assignment or do something that's not quite right."
"Ournotion of balance," Leach says, "is that the five guys who catch the ball all gain 1,000 yards in the season." The trouble with running plays, as Leach sees it, is thatthey clump players together on the field -- by putting two of them, during a handoff, in the same spot withthe ball.
One of the side effects of Leach's tinkering with the accepted rules of offensive conduct is to upset theordinary rhythms of a football game. In the five full years Leach has coached Texas Tech, four or five timeseach season the team has flopped around ineffectually for the first third or so of a game before racing offto score touchdowns at a rate unheard of in organized tackle football. It's as if his opponent's defense hassome deep dark secret that takes time for his offense to extract.
With 8 minutes left in the second quarter, T.C.U. scored itsthird touchdown, for a 21-0 lead, and a T.C.U. defensive back was caught mouthing into a televisioncamera, "They aren't going to score." In the last six minutes of the half, Texas Tech scored three quicktouchdowns; after the break Leach's team came out and scored another seven and won the game, 70-35.A few games later, the Texas Tech offense scored the most points Nebraska had ever given up in its 114-year-old history. In that game, Texas Tech had been ahead, 14-3, with 2 minutes remaining in the first half.It won 70-10.
Before thegame, Leach had said to Hodges: "Get those fat guys up front and make them run. They're already a littleslow. By play 40, they'll be immobilized." That was one reason he kept sending so many receivers on deeproutes: to force the defense to run with them.
"Coach's motivational speeches are always the same," says Daniel Loper, who played fouryears for Leach and is now a rookie offensive tackle with the Tennessee Titans. "He tells very long stories,and you're never sure what they mean. But he's a genius. When we leave the locker room, we all knowthat we'll have three receivers wide open every play."
