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RIP Coach Leach

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Why he’s one of the best interviews ever and always will be…

Jeremy Schaap: "When people write the Mike Leach obituary, how do you want to be remembered?"

Mike Leach: "Well that's their problem ... what do I care, I'm dead."

rip pirate
 
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CalCane said:
A great story on Leach from years ago. I knew a guy who played QB at USC and was working with Pete Carroll at the time. He was at a big coaches golf tournament and was hanging out talking to Mike Stoops who was the DC at OU at the time. He said there was a guy smoking a cigar and had a bunch of coaches around him laughing hysterically while the guy was telling stories. He asked Stoops, who is that guy? He goes let me tell you about that guy. If you gave every coach in this room the same amount of talent and were strictly going off of x’s and o’s that guy would win every time. He’s that good. Of course he was talking about Leach. I also knew an attorney who went to law school with him at Pepperdine and said he sat in the back of the class with the sports pages and a marker tracking statistics every day.

One of my favorites. RIP Coach Leach.
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he epitomized a coach who out-schemed talent. basically was an 8-4 coach on average for 20 years at three different schools where the talent probably should have meant going 4-8.
 
:( If there is a modern coach that belongs in the college football HOF, it's him. I'm sure he'll get the Howard treatment and not get in because he took over floundering programs and it hurt his win %. Scrap that **** rule already. Mike Leach was the most fun coach I have ever seen.
 
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A little story.

When I finished law school, I moved to Tucson, Arizona to take a job down there. As a little bit of a hobby(Plus, I had weekends free for some reason), I ended up picking up some freelance journalism work for the paper down there and was assigned to the UA football beat. To create more content, and take advantage of Facebook Live, we started doing a little pregame show for people where we really dug into concepts and whatnot. It was a pregame show for the hardcore football nerd and it did really well, mostly through word of mouth.

When Arizona played Wazzu, I was doing the pregame show and explaining the mesh concept, even had a dry erase board on the field to illustrate the concept. I was talking, my co host was holding his camera, and look who comes walking by during pregame, Mike Leach. He walked past us, stopped and watched me finish the explanation. We wrapped(Had to get up to the press box before the game to get set up), but before we walked away, Coach asked to speak to me. He said he enjoyed the explanation, and the fact that we actually talked a little about the history of the air-raid and the different permutations. He also pointed to my dry erase board and said that he used visual aids when teaching the concept to young players. Amazing how much passion he had for a simple route concept, he talked nonstop for 10 minutes, before going and finishing his pregame stuff.

After the game, we crossed paths at the press conference, where I asked him a couple of questions, and he made a quip about me singlehandedly buying every dry erase board in Tucson. What's hilarious is that when I made the return trip to Pullman the next year, I ended up running into Coach Leach at a media scrum, and the first thing he said to me was "I don't know if we have enough dry erase boards for you here, I already bought a ton. Hope you packed a couple".

I may have had my personal misgivings about Coach Leach and his philosophy, whether it could actually work at a high level at a place like Miami, but he had a colorful career, he found his niche and stuck to it. None of us are perfect, and there are things I'm sure he regretted doing, things that he may have said and done to players that weren't his best work. That said, I'll never forget the kindness he showed to a kid fresh out of law school, moonlighting as a journalist. RIP Coach.
 
Allabouttheu_3 said:
I know the kid probably feels terrible…

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He likely does, but no one could have predicted this. As I said in a previous post, Coach wasn't perfect, there were things he said and did that I'm quite sure he regretted. I think that sometimes, you get so wrapped up in your own ethos, you end up doing things to hurt people, and you didn't mean to.
 
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