The clock
on the wall of Mike Leach’s office
reads eleven p.m. He likes
the deep night hours, when he is
free of the constant demands of
his job and can pursue his many
intellectual interests, which include
Apaches, sharks, whales,
pirates, Australia, Daniel Boone,
the tango, Wyatt Earp, Vikings,
Doc Holliday, chimpanzees, Winston
Churchill, grizzly bears, Napoleon
Bonaparte, the philosophy
of John Wooden, and the dynamics of the offshore surf
breaks at San Onofre, California. Tonight he is working
on an article for the Texas Tech Law Review about the relationship
between practicing law and coaching football.
He can do this because he is the only head coach at a major
football university to have a law degree and because
he is, well, the sort of person who would be inclined to
do such a thing. ¶ I am meeting with him in the sanctum
sanctorum of Texas Tech football, a cramped conference
room that is festooned with skull-and-crossbones flags, a
type design by L I K E M I N D E D STUDIO
portrait by lionel deluy
September 2009 | 93
t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m
painting of Leach in imitation of a Van Gogh self-portrait, a photograph
of Sarah Palin, a sign that reads “You are either coaching it,
or you are allowing it to happen,” and several drawing boards full
of football hieroglyphics, in the middle of which appear Leach’s
weight and cholesterol counts. He has a large,
elegantly appointed office next door that contains
such curiosities as a copy of Geronimo’s
death certificate and a motion-activated, sixfoot-
tall pirate skeleton that says, “Yarrrr,” and
scares the daylights out of the cleaning people.
photograph by ART I E LIMMER
Opening spread: Leach,
photographed on July 19, 2009.
This spread: Leach’s office is
a testament to his many varied
interests—and his knack for
finding unsung quarterbacks
and making them stars.
But the 48-year-old Leach has no real use for such luxury. He
meets various grandees and visitors there when he has to; he
sometimes uses the room to entertain recruits by doing card
tricks and telling pirate stories. He prefers the intimate clutter
of his conference room, where he spends most of his time watching
film and huddling with his coaches. (He also has at his disposal
a domed practice facility meant to shelter his players from
94 | September 2009
t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m
the blazing heat and bitter cold of the High Plains. He has no use
for that either, insisting that his team experience the full fury of
the local weather.)
Leach and I are talking football—specifically, what makes him
so good at coaching it. Like many football fans around the country—
especially those who followed Texas Tech’s dramatic run at
a national championship last year—I am fascinated by how such
a personality, one that suggests rather more of a bohemian intellectual
than a square-jawed drill sergeant, can also house one of
the greatest offensive minds in the history of the game. Leach has
developed an offense that is as close to unstoppable as anything
we are likely to see and that has been working brilliantly for so
long—twenty years at five colleges in three collegiate athletic divisions—
that his success cannot be regarded as a fluke. During his
nine-year tenure as head coach at Texas Tech, Leach has never had
a losing season, compiling a 76-39 record. He has done that
while playing in one of the nation’s toughest conferences
and using players that few or no other elite college football
programs wanted. In five of those nine years, Texas Tech led
the nation in offense, routinely hanging ungodly numbers
of points on opposing defenses. Its quarterbacks have led
the nation in passing eight of the past nine years. In 2007
and 2008 Graham Harrell became the first player in college
history to throw for more than 5,000 yards in consecutive
seasons. Unlike almost all major college coaches, Leach is
his own offensive coordinator; he calls the plays.
Though Tech has had many big wins during the Leach years
and even flirted with a top-ten finish in 2005, nothing compares
with its string of victories last fall. For a scintillating
month or so, millions of fans who had never paid attention to
Texas Tech football were suddenly focused
intently on this sprawling, monumental
campus in West Texas. In one spectacular
three-game run, the Red Raiders put up
158 points against the nineteenth-, first-,
and eighth-ranked teams in the country.
As Tech knocked off one ranked team after
another, the hordes that descended on Lubbock
were as interested in the team as they
were its coach, a man who never played college
football, rode the bench in high school,
and, as Lubbock radio talk show host Ryan
Hyatt puts it, “looks like he just got off tour
with Jimmy Buffett.” Texas Tech is not exactly
America’s team, but for a few shining
moments last autumn it was the team much
of America was rooting for.
Then it all came crashing down. On November
22 Texas Tech, ranked second and
seemingly unstoppable, rolled into Norman,
Oklahoma, and suffered one of the
worst losses in school history. The lopsided
score, 65–21, does not fully convey the extent
of the damage the Oklahoma Sooners
inflicted: Tech simply did not look as if it
belonged in the game. Leach’s Red Raiders
had arrived with the leading Heisman Trophy
candidate—Harrell—and a team that
not only was undefeated but had beaten
Oklahoma two out of the past three years.
And suddenly, in the bloody chaos of a second quarter in which the
Sooners outscored the Red Raiders 35–7, it was all gone: the national
title hopes, Harrell’s Heisman, the magic of the greatest season in
Texas Tech history. Tech would go on to lose its bowl game to Ole
Miss and finish twelfth in the country.
Leach, a man of exquisitely even temperament, was unbowed
and unshattered. He even seemed to enjoy his new celebrity. In
the off-season he won two prestigious coach-of-the-year awards
(the George Munger and the Woody Hayes). He was invited
to the White House to meet President Bush and was featured
on CBS’s 60 Minutes. His name was mentioned in almost
every coaching search, and he interviewed for a job at
the University of Washington. Then came a long, nasty contract
dispute with Tech. All of which prompted Raider fans
to wonder: Was Leach going to desert them now? Just when
they were starting to hit the big time?
In the end Leach signed a new contract and Lubbock breathed a
sigh of relief. He was staying. But now fans are asking another set
of questions. Was last season an anomaly? Or was it the dawn of a
golden age in Tech football? Are Leach and his ragtag band of rejects
fi nally ready for full-time prime time? And, perhaps most important,
the question that has been asked everywhere Mike Leach
has ever coached: How in the world does he do it?
one aFTernoon durinG SprinG FooTball,
Leach and I were camped out in the conference room, studying fi lm.
Unlike most coaches, he is completely unguarded around reporters.
He does not edit what he says, nor does he have any apparent sense of,
or need for, privacy. In a world typically veiled in secrecy, he is an open
book. He was seated in his favorite chair at the head of the table, remote
control and laser pointer in hand. He is an interesting-looking
man, with a round, softly contoured face that can best be described
as cherubic, a prominent nose, and a pair of startlingly bright
blue eyes. He has a low-pitched, gravelly voice that he rarely
raises and that often comes out no louder than a mumble. Onscreen:
the Texas Tech–Oklahoma State game from November
8, 2008, a superb example of what the Leach off ense can
do. OSU was ranked number eight with an 8-1 record, having
beaten number three Missouri, piled up 56 points against Texas
A&M, and lost to top-ranked Texas by less than a touchdown.
The Cowboys had their best team in years.
“The basic idea here is that you have to make the defense
cover the whole field,” Leach said as the film rolled. “Not
just part of it. If you do it right, it makes life very diffi cult for
them.” Instead of a dense, seemingly impenetrable off ensive
line, Tech’s linemen are spaced three to four feet apart, twice
the norm, leaving enormous gaps that seem to invite tackles
and linebackers to stroll right through them. The quarterback
operates from the shotgun, and on most plays four
or fi ve receivers are spread across the breadth of the fi eld.
This creates huge amounts of space between players, making
the whole thing look porous and vulnerable, even skeletal,
until it swings into action. Which it does between 85
and 90 times a game. A typical off ense snaps the ball 65 to
70 times a game, but Tech never huddles. It is all attack,
all the time. Leach attempts few fi eld goals and
rarely punts, even when he is deep in his own territory.
When the ball is snapped, you can see how the magic
works. Receivers stretch the fi eld from chalk to chalk,
taking the defensive backs with them. The defensive
linemen—who are forced to spread out too, lest they
lose their rushing angles—must therefore attack from
longer range, creating even more room. Suddenly the
grid opens up, and the quarterback is looking at what
Leach calls “pieces of space.” Lots of them.
On the fi rst set of downs against Oklahoma State,
Texas Tech lost a fumble, and the Cowboys promptly
marched in and scored. What happened next, though,
amounted to a clinic on off ense, conducted by Leach at
OSU’s expense. Tech scored on its next seven possessions.
On fi lm the mismatches caused by the spread
were easy to spot, as was the horrifi c task the defense
had of covering such a vast expanse of real estate, while receivers
like Michael Crabtree, who appeared to be equipped with bat sonar,
worked the spaces of the grid. Final score: 56–20.
So how did Leach fi gure out the system? That is what everyone in
the football world—pro, college, and high school—wants to know.
There is certainly no shortage of theories on how to stop him. Sports
Illustrated reported this year that the market is booming for “instructional
videos, Internet forums, and dissertations in publications by
coaches from high school to the pros” that address how to stop spreadstyle
off enses, which have begun to proliferate—not coincidentally—
in the wake of Leach’s success. The answer lies entirely in his past.
Leach’s offense actually came into being
CLOCKWISE, TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF THE LEACH FAMILY; ANDY LYONS/ALLSPORT/GETTY IMAGES; RONALD MARTINEZ/GETTY IMAGES; JAMIE SQUIRE/GETTY IMAGES
Clockwise from top left:
Leach in the late seventies;
Coach Hal Mumme,
Leach’s early mentor at
Iowa Wesleyan, in 1998;
Leach with Graham Harrell
during the 2006 A&M game,
which Tech won 31–27;
Leach fi lling in for the
weatherman on Lubbock’s
KAMC; Tech fans swarming
the fi eld at Jones AT&T
Stadium, in Lubbock, after the
Red Raiders defeated the UT
Longhorns in the fi nal seconds,
39–33, on November 1, 2008. | CONT I N U E D ON PAG E 1 4 1
t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m September 2009 | 141
two decades ago, long before he ever set foot
in Lubbock.
Leach grew up in a Mormon family in Cody,
Wyoming, and attended Brigham Young University,
where he was nowhere near talented
enough to make the football team. But he studied
hard and made it to law school at Pepperdine
University, in California, graduating in
1986 in the top third of his class. Bright and
personable, he appeared destined for a successful
law career. Except he did not want to
be a lawyer. After graduation he decided, to the
dismay of his wife’s parents, that he wanted to
be a football coach. He had coached various
youth sports before, and the idea stuck. So he
did what no sane Pepperdine law school grad
would do: He enrolled in the United States
Sports Academy, in Daphne, Alabama, to earn
a master’s degree in coaching.
Over the next few years he managed to land
a couple coaching jobs, in spite of his complete
lack of experience. The first was with Cal Poly
San Luis Obispo, a Division II school in California.
For $3,000 a year, he coached safeties
and offensive linemen. It is not clear how he
knew how to do that. He supplemented that
income by working as a substitute teacher;
his wife, Sharon, became an administrative
assistant at a local vineyard. They were raising
a daughter and somehow made ends meet.
In 1988 Leach got a job coaching linebackers
at College of the Desert, in Palm Desert, California—
a junior college—where his salary
jumped to $12,000, while Sharon worked at
an office on campus. Early the next year he
accepted a brief engagement coaching professional
football in Finland, where the players
smoked cigarettes on the bench.
In 1989 he found the job that would change
everything: offensive line coach at Iowa Wesleyan
College, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, a
school with eight hundred undergraduates
and a bad football team. Most aspiring
coaches would have considered it a backwater;
for Leach it was a revelation. That
was because of the remarkable man who had
just taken over as head coach. His name was
Hal Mumme. In the early eighties Mumme
(rhymes with “tummy”), while at the University
of Texas at El Paso, had been a sort of
prodigy—the youngest Division I offensive
coordinator in the country. But he had fallen
on hard times. After the head coach at UTEP
was fired, Mumme lost his job and wound up
coaching at perennial loser Copperas Cove
High School, in Central Texas. Leach was one
of the first coaches Mumme hired at Iowa
Wesleyan. “He probably thought I was ambitious
and would do anything he told me,”
Leach says. “He was right.”
Mumme, as it turned out, was on to a big
idea. He was a disciple of LaVell Edwards’s,
the brilliant Brigham Young coach who in
the eighties was lighting up college football
with the most potent passing attack in history,
one that won him a national championship
in 1984. Mumme had studied Edwards’
schemes closely, and at Copperas Cove he had
put those ideas to work. He installed a radical
offense that featured widely split linemen,
passed on most downs, and used four
or five receivers. In less than two years he
had turned Cove into one of the state’s most
prolific passing offenses, knocking off such
powerhouses as Austin Westlake, Killeen Ellison,
and Temple—which had beaten Cove
70–0 the last time they’d met. Each spring
Mumme made a pilgrimage to BYU, where
Edwards would open the film room to him.
By the time Mumme arrived at Iowa Wesleyan,
he knew exactly what he wanted to do.
Leach hit it off with him immediately, meeting
at BYU in the spring to watch practice and
later spending most of his free time driving
with Mumme all over the country to study
other teams’ passing schemes. “Hal was really
driven as far as studying football,” Leach
said. “We’d drive through snowstorms and rainstorms.
We’d go to some little high school that
had something we were interested in seeing.
We would go visit the Chicago Bears, the Green
Bay Packers. We would weasel our way into the
Packers offices, and [head coach] Lindy Infante
would talk to us. We went to countless colleges,
anywhere that had somebody who was throwing
the ball.” Though Leach was the student and
Mumme the master, the two men developed
their offense together. “We spent a lot of time
talking on our trips,” said Mumme, who now
coaches at McMurry University, in Abilene.
“Florida is a long way from Iowa.”
At Iowa Wesleyan they put their theories to
work. In 1989 they began adopting the shotgun
as their primary formation. In 1991 they
installed a no-huddle offense. Like theoretical
physicists, they began to investigate the
nature of time. “We just saw time differently
than other coaches did,” said Mumme. “You
can replace personnel. You can replace equipment.
Time is the only thing you can’t replace
in a game. So we wanted to run as many plays
as we could in the time allotted.” Most teams
want to eat up the clock, using ball control to
increase their time of possession. Mumme
and Leach wanted nothing to do with slowing
down the game. Time of possession did
not matter. Running ninety plays did. Scoring
quickly did. The game itself—now with up
to five receivers streaking across the field on
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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 5
142 | September 2009 t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m
almost every play—became faster.
And all of it was based on simplicity. Where
many so-called genius offensive coaches keep
thick playbooks, Mumme and Leach had no
playbook. They ran roughly twenty basic plays,
which they disguised by running them out of
different formations: double tight ends, fourreceiver
spread, two running backs, et cetera.
The routes the receivers ran were the same,
but of course the defense did not know that.
To the defense, each play looked more hellishly
complicated than the last. Mumme and
Leach’s rule was that if they added a play, they
had to subtract one. Their idea was to keep
things as simple as possible for their players.
The simplicity helped with the speed too.
As former University of Texas coach Darrell
Royal once observed, “If a player is the least
bit confused, he can’t be aggressive. Tattoo
that on your wall. Or better still, on your wallet.”
Confused players could not, as Leach
would say, play fast.
The result was startling. Iowa Wesleyan
had gone 0-10 the year before Mumme and
Leach arrived. Over the next three years
the program went 25-10. In 1991 Mumme’s
Tigers became the first team in school history
to make the National Association of Intercollegiate
Athletics playoffs, with a 10-2
record. The 1990 team led the nation in passing
offense; in 1989 and 1991 it finished second.
Over a three-year stretch, Iowa Wesleyan
quarterbacks threw for more than 11,000 yards
and broke 26 national records. For Leach,
who considers Mumme “one of the greatest
coaches there is,” it was a formative experience.
Like many coaches at small schools, he
did a bit of everything. He was offensive line
coach, offensive coordinator, recruiting coordinator,
video coordinator, equipment coordinator,
and sports information director. For his
labors he was paid $13,000 and eventually got
a raise to $22,000. He taught classes in criminal
justice and history to make extra money.
He also took several courses so that he could
defer his student loans. “I would talk to my law
school friends, and they were talking about
condos and tax shelters,” Leach said. “But they
were fascinated by what I was doing.”
In 1992 Mumme and Leach moved to Valdosta
State, in Georgia, another school with
an abysmal record, where they did even better.
Over the next five years, they went 40-17-1.
The once faltering team now ranked consistently
in the top twenty Division II schools in
the country. In 1994 Leach’s offense shattered
35 conference records and 7 national marks.
Quarterback Chris Hatcher was named Division
II player of the year.
Leach, meanwhile, was finally making
enough money to live on his coaching salary.
“We had a great two-bedroom apartment
in a complex with two pools,” he says. “We had
a parking lot with speed bumps, so I would
Rollerblade around it and hop over the speed
bumps. Then I would go the other way so I
would wear my wheels evenly.”
By 1997 the rest of the college football world
was paying close attention to the Mumme-
Leach aerial circus. That year Mumme got the
job of head coach at Kentucky, and he took his
offensive coordinator with him. Over the next
two years, Leach ran an offense that set 41 SEC
records and acquired a name: the Air Raid. In
Leach’s second year there, quarterback Tim
Couch threw for 4,275 yards and became the
number one pick in the NFL draft.
Then came an even bigger break. In 1999 a
new coach named Bob Stoops took over the
troubled Oklahoma football program, and
he hired Leach away from Kentucky and his
beloved mentor to be his offensive coordinator.
Leach wasted no time installing—to the
dismay of many Oklahoma fans who did not
want to become a passing team—the offense
that he and Mumme had perfected. He also
quickly demonstrated another of his remarkable
talents: the ability to spot great players
where no one else did.
Unhappy with the quarterbacks he had inherited,
Leach traveled to the outer reaches
of the college football world, to Snow College,
in Ephraim, Utah, to recruit a young quarterback
named Josh Heupel, who had been a bust
at another Utah school, Weber State, and was
playing only half the time at Snow. He had a
deeply flawed throwing motion, falling back
on his heels while he released the ball. Leach
liked him anyway and especially liked his
sense of timing and his ability to read defenders.
Oklahoma diehards were less enamored.
“There was a time when the two most wanted
people in the state were me and Josh Heupel,”
says Leach. “I was the guy who thought
we were going to throw the ball. Heupel was
the quarterback who couldn’t run.”
Heupel fit Leach’s system perfectly. Proof
came in a scrimmage between the Oklahoma
offense and the defense in the spring of 1999.
While Oklahoma’s defensive coaches looked
on in horrified amazement, Heupel rang up
more than 700 yards on them. Oklahoma defensive
coordinator Brent Venables later described
the “deep, deep state of depression
in the locker room afterwards.” That season
Leach more than doubled the points scored
per game, from 16.7, in 1998, to 36.8, in 1999,
while the offense went from 101st in the nation
to 11th and from last to first in the Big 12.
The next year Heupel led an undefeated Oklahoma
team—using the Leach offense—to the
national championship. He was a runner-up
for the Heisman Trophy.
But by then Leach had moved on. In 2000
Texas Tech had decided to take a chance on
a 38-year-old Rollerblading lawyer-turnedoffensive-
coordinator who had never been a
head coach before.
Lubbock had never seen anything quite
like Mike Leach. He was, to begin with, the
polar opposite of popular former coach Spike
Dykes, an old-school guy from West Texas.
He did not schmooze with alumni or play
golf with the boosters. He also did things
that seemed, in football terms, completely
insane. Like going for it on fourth-and-five
from Tech’s own 36-yard line in a close game;
to Leach punting was simply a missed opportunity.
That did not comfort Tech fans when
the fourth-and-fives didn’t work out. Nor did
people understand his habit of running up
the score, which infuriated coaches and led
to one tense moment in a blowout against
SMU, when the Mustangs coach ran at Leach
as though he wanted to decapitate him. Leach
didn’t think it was poor sportsmanship for
his no-huddle offense to be driving toward
the goal line when the Red Raiders were up
14 points in the game’s closing seconds. Scoring
is what Leach teams do, and it is a testament
to his style of coaching that they don’t
really know how to do anything else.
On the other hand, the Red Raiders were
phenomenally entertaining, as was he. He
went on Lubbock television to give the local
weather forecast. After announcing that
there were going to be “serious storms,” he
observed, “Well, you’re going to be dead in a
hundred years anyway, so live dangerously.”
His coaches and players loved him. He appeared
in a video giving dating advice to Tech
students, counseling young men to take a
girl out to dinner on the first date. “The girl
will be forced to eat in front of you,” he said,
“which is something that women hate, but if
you can make them do it, the earlier the better,
the more they’ll converse and tell of themselves.”
Later, when a 60 Minutes reporter
cited a story suggesting that Leach was “a
football madman directing a sideshow,” he
replied, without apparent irony, “I don’t have
any disagreement with it, really.”
Leach’s conversational tendency to drift
off into digressions about all sorts of unlikely
subjects has only affirmed the sense many
people have that he is, to some extent, mad.
During one of my talks with him, he suddenly
began interviewing me, asking me questions
about my background, my work, my hometown,
the college I went to, the towns I had
lived in. When he found out I had once lived
in Hollywood, he said enthusiastically, “Oh,
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that must have been an awesome place to
live! I would love to go up there! It’s so full
of history.” So we talked Hollywood history.
For a long time. Had I ever gone to the Black
Dahlia mansion? How close had I lived to the
LaBianca house, where some of the Manson
murders took place? His questions kept coming.
Most big-time football coaches are relentlessly
and aggressively on point. Leach
is relentlessly off point. This is the essence
of his personality, and it explains why people
find him both charming and odd. He is so intensely
curious about the world around him
that he doesn’t think twice about interrupting
the topic at hand with something others
might consider irrelevant.
But those were just his personal quirks.
On the field he was widely feared. No coach
wanted to play a team that could spontaneously
rain down fifty points. And absolutely
no one wanted to play Texas Tech in Lubbock.
“When he first came here, you could hear
the gasps throughout the stadium,” said talk
show host Hyatt. “What the hell is he thinking?
After a couple of years people said, ‘All
right, if you like beating Nebraska on a fourthdown
play or if you like beating Texas on a
fourth down, then you’ve got to live with it all
the other times.’ ” Under Leach, attendance
soared to record levels. Fund-raising rose 180
percent. Money for other sports, which comes
mostly from football revenue, increased dramatically.
The stadium was massively renovated
in 2003, and another major upgrade will
be completed next year. All the suites have already
been sold. The sports budget, which was
$9.4 million just six years before his arrival,
now stands at more than $50 million.
As always, Leach had an uncanny ability
to produce brilliant quarterbacks. In his first
three years, the lightly recruited Kliff Kingsbury
became only the fourth player in college
history to throw for 3,000 yards three times.
He was followed by fifth-year senior B. J. Symons,
who set a single-season college record
for passing yards (5,833). Next came a fifthyear
walk-on named Sonny Cumbie, who also
led the nation in passing. He was followed by
Cody Hodges, a quarterback with a belowaverage
arm, who led the nation’s number
one offense and threw for 643 yards against
Kansas State, the fifth-best performance in
NCAA history. Leach’s most recent quarterback,
Graham Harrell, was the best of all: In
three seasons as a starter he passed for 15,738
yards, second all-time in the NCAA, and set
the college record for touchdown passes (134).
Those quarterbacks became famous for their
ability to put up implausibly large numbers of
points very quickly. In the 2006 Insight Bowl,
against Minnesota, Tech trailed the Golden
Gophers 38–7 with 7:47 to go in the third quarter.
Harrell and the offense calmly proceeded
to rack up 31 unanswered points in less than
twenty minutes, then won the game in overtime,
44–41. In 2004, against a ranked and unbeaten
TCU team, Tech trailed 21–0 near the
end of the first half. Under Cumbie the Red
Raiders scored three times before the half and
seven more times in the second, winning 70–
35. This was football in the Leach era.
Perhaps most impressive of all was that
Leach was doing this with players that most of
his rivals did not want. Except for Harrell, his
quarterbacks were not courted by other major
football schools. Most of his recruits could
properly be described as rejects. In fact, Texas
Tech was typically fourth in line—at best—for
players in the phenomenally fertile Texas market.
Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas A&M all took
precedence, as did other Big 12 universities.
According to Rivals.com, the national ranking
of Texas Tech’s recruiting classes averaged
thirty-seventh over the past five years. By
comparison, Oklahoma ranked eighth, Texas
eleventh, and Texas A&M twenty-first. Leach
worked the margins, finding players like current
New England Patriots star Wes Welker,
whom nobody else wanted. Or Michael Crabtree,
a quarterback from Dallas Carter whom
no one could quite figure out what to do with
and whom no one except Leach saw as a receiver.
Crabtree won the Biletnikoff Award
as the nation’s best receiver during his freshman
and sophomore years and was this year’s
tenth pick in the NFL draft.
The rest of the world, meanwhile, could only
guess at what sort of dark magic was abroad on
the West Texas plains. Most people assumed
that Leach’s offense was demonically intricate,
a tangle of x’s and o’s so thick defenders
couldn’t parse it. In fact the reverse is true.
Leach has stuck steadfastly with his old formula:
no playbook, just a simple, straightforward
set of fewer than two dozen plays, many
of which he and Mumme discovered on their
cross-country odysseys. “He is very, very reluctant
to change anything,” says Dana Holgorsen,
a former Tech assistant coach who
played for Leach at Iowa Wesleyan, coached
for him at Valdosta State, and is now the offensive
coordinator for the wide-open, passhappy
program at the University of Houston.
“He always runs the same system, and
most of his coaches are system guys like me
who know exactly how it works. It was why I
got hired at Tech from a Division II school at
the age of twenty-eight.” The offensive line
also employs the basic techniques Leach and
Mumme came up with at Valdosta State, right
down to the lingo used to describe them. But
there too simplicity rules. “We do the most
144 | September 2009 t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m
simple stuff,” said Matt Moore, who played for
Leach at Valdosta and used Leach’s offense
to win four of five Alabama state high school
football titles and now coaches the Tech offensive
line. “Most people are way more complicated.
I know when [Steve] Spurrier was
at Florida, he had eighteen different types of
protections. We’ve got two.”
The result is that Leach and his coaches are
able to spend most of their time relentlessly
drilling. “Everything is about repetition,” said
Cody Hodges, Leach’s 2005 starting quarterback,
who arrived in 2001, one year after
Leach. “Last year I was in Lubbock and went
out and watched practice, and it was exactly
the same as it was in my first year. That’s why
the quarterbacks have so much success. You
learn just a few plays and you perfect that.”
Leach’s quarterbacks have become so proficient
that he allows them to change any play
at the line of scrimmage, a freedom almost
no other major football program offers. His
drills include making receivers run in a 40-
yard sandpit he installed to strengthen their
ankles. His coaches fire tennis balls at high
speed at receivers and defensive backs, fifty
at a time. His offensive linemen put on boxing
gloves and do battle to learn to protect the
quarterback. His players do no sprints after
practice: Almost all of their running is done
as part of actual plays. Leach’s offense is not
about tricks or complexity; it is about minutely
coached execution of basic techniques.
Leach’s approach does involve, it must
be noted, a bit of fairy dust. Because Tech is
forced to hustle to persuade players to come
to West Texas, Leach dazzles recruits with
jokes and his trademark rambling, not-sureexactly-
what-the-point-is stories. He brings
forth and swings his pirate sword, which turns
out to be an important coaching technique
(“How are you going to swing your sword?”
he likes to ask of his players). He also does
card tricks. One, witnessed by Chancellor
Kent Hance, features a mysterious character
known as “the Wizard.” In Hance’s account,
Leach was interviewing two recruits.
He took out a deck of cards and asked one
recruit to turn over a card. He then made a
phone call and put the recruit on the line with
the Wizard, who correctly guessed the card.
“The kid goes, ‘Wow!’ ” said Hance. “And he
signed with the team.” Leach used the Wizard
trick with Harrell too. He also told the young
quarterback and his father stories about pirates,
coaching in Finland, and World War
II. Somehow it all worked. What Leach was
really offering Harrell, though—and Harrell
knew it—was the chance to put up numbers
that would rewrite the record books.
As the years went by, recruiting aboveaverage
players like Harrell, however, was not
Leach’s only challenge. His overwhelming
focus on offense had an unfortunate result:
His teams were becoming famous for their
lack of defense. Texas Tech, it was said, was
a team that could score 43 points but would
give up 44. On one level, Leach was known
as a nutty professor who scared the hell out
of everyone. But he had a reputation for being
inconsistent and vulnerable to a competent
offense, of which there was no shortage
in the Big 12. Tech was an unbalanced team.
Interesting but unbalanced.
The problem came to a head on September
22, 2007, when Tech, whose defense had been
allowing more than 400 yards per game—
seventy-fourth in the nation—gave up 610
yards of offense to Oklahoma State and lost
49–45. The normally mild-mannered Leach
unloaded. “The entire first half,” he told a
TV interviewer, “we got hit in the mouth and
acted like somebody took our lunch money
and all we wanted to do was have pouty expressions
on our faces until somebody daubed
our little tears off and made us feel better.” The
next day he fired his defensive coordinator,
Lyle Setencich, the man who had given him
his first job at Cal Poly, in 1987. “That was a
big growth moment for Coach Leach,” said
Hyatt. “A big seismic shift. Setencich was a
close, close friend. Mike made the decision
and sent the message that ‘I am not just an offensive
guy. I can take ownership of this whole
program.’ ” He promoted assistant coach Ruffin
McNeill to succeed Setencich, and since
then the team has gone 17-5, driven largely by
improvements on the defense. Those changes
were behind the team’s transformation last
year. The nutty professor was still there, but
now his defense had teeth.
On the night of November 1, 2008, Leach
fielded an offense that was nearly identical
to the one he and Mumme had cobbled
together at Iowa Wesleyan College nearly
twenty years earlier. The difference was that
instead of playing Olivet Nazarene University,
Leach was playing the University of Texas,
the number one team in the nation, a dazzling
array of all the talent he had no access
to. Tech was 8-0, ranked sixth, and coming
off a 63–21 dismantling of nineteenth-ranked
Kansas. UT had just beaten, consecutively,
the first-, eleventh-, and seventh-ranked
teams in the country. The game, which pitted
the Mad Pirate against the CEO-like Mack
Brown, had quickly spooled up into a nationalmedia
event. ESPN’s Game Day carnival had
moved in (with 15,000 fans in tow), as had
ABC’s game-of-the-week crew. An enormous
tent city known as Raiderville had materialized,
with a population of 1,700. The place
was so pumped up with digital technology and
generator-powered electricity that it glowed
at night. Pirate flags—a symbol that Leach
had introduced and that Raider fans had embraced—
were everywhere. Leach sent a truckload
of barbecue to Raiderville as a gesture of
appreciation. By the time the Masked Rider—
a Tech student on a black stallion wearing a
black costume and a red cape and making the
famous “guns up” sign with his hand—thundered
through the goalposts at Jones AT&T
Stadium, a record 56,333 fans were screaming
their lungs out. It was the biggest game in
Texas Tech history.
Leach’s cohort came out firing. In the first
half, Tech was so dominant that the game began
to look like a replay of what the Red Raiders
had done to Kansas. They scored 22 points
to Texas’s 6, made 17 first downs to Texas’s
5, and put up 326 yards against Texas’s 108.
Tech’s kicker alone outscored UT. That might
not seem so bad except that the kicker, Matt
Williams, had been playing college football
for only a few weeks. He had won a contest
during a home game against Massachusetts
by booting a 30-yard field goal during a halftime
promotion in which the winner would
receive a month’s free rent. Leach, who was
unhappy with the team’s kickers, liked the
quickness of Williams’s approach and offered
him the position. First-half score: Matt Williams
8, Texas 6.
The second half was more in line with expectations.
Texas, under its brilliant quarterback,
Colt McCoy, clawed its way back. The
two heavyweights traded punches. With 1:29
left, the Longhorns took their first lead of the
game, 33–32. Leach was unperturbed, as he
often is in times of great crisis. “That’s just
his mentality,” said Holgorsen. “He’s never
too high, never too low. He has the same facial
expression regardless of what is happening,
and he preaches to the kids every single day
to be like that. The message is ‘I don’t care if
you are winning by a hundred or losing by a
hundred, you are going to keep playing, keep
playing.’ ” They did.
As the clock wound down, Harrell coolly
drove the team downfield. With eight seconds
to go on the Texas 28-yard line and 56,000 fans
shrieking bloody murder, he launched a sideline
pass to Crabtree, who beat two defenders
and caught the ball at the 6, twisted away,
and scored with one second left on the clock,
while McCoy and Mack Brown looked on in
flabbergasted disbelief. It is impossible to fully
express the depth of the happiness of Texas
Tech fans at that moment. Years of perceived
disrespect by UT and everybody else had been
instantly obliterated. They went crazy.
t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m September 2009 | 145
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The victory lifted Texas Tech to number
two in the BCS standings. A week later, with
Raiderville in full flower and the same national
broadcast teams back in Lubbock, Tech
dismantled Oklahoma State. For the first time
in its history, the team now had a clear shot—
with only Oklahoma and the subsequent Big
12 title game standing in the way—at a national
championship. How did Leach feel?
“It will probably be more fun to remember it,”
he says now, “more enjoyment to think back
on it because at the time there is no wistful
‘Look, oh gee, these are the times of our lives’
or any of that bull*&^!#*&^!#*&^!#*&^!#, and the reason is because
next week you are playing Oklahoma
or Oklahoma State. The win at Kansas was
huge, but guess what? It’s Sunday and we’re
playing Texas in six days . . .”
Tech’s win over Oklahoma State was the season’s
high point, the moment when it seemed
that anything was possible, when Raiders fans
everywhere finally believed that Leach could
really pull it off. A week later all those dreams
were mere wreckage on the ground. The team,
which had sustained an unimaginably high
level of football for three weeks against ranked
teams and in the national spotlight, fell apart
against Oklahoma in an ugly, humiliating rout.
Almost everything went wrong. Tech, whose
magnificent offensive line had allowed a total
of five sacks the entire season, gave up four, including
back-to-back sacks of Harrell in the
first quarter. Crabtree, the nation’s touchdown
leader, had a poor game and no touchdowns.
Leach’s famous idiosyncrasies were partly to
blame. In the second quarter, on fourth-andthree
from the Oklahoma 15, Leach decided to
go for it instead of kicking a field goal and didn’t
make it. Five plays later OU scored. In the second
quarter he gambled again on fourth-andfour
from the Sooners 45 and failed there too.
Down 35–7 with less than a minute remaining
in the second quarter, Leach, who is never content
to run out the clock, had Harrell launch
a deep pass down the middle of the field. OU
intercepted, returned the ball to the 1-yard
line, and scored on the next play. The score
at halftime was 42–7.
In the locker room Leach tried to calm his
team down. Since there was no mechanical
explanation for what was going on, he believed
that his players were too keyed-up. “I
think we wanted to do well and overtried,” he
said after the game. “Rather than just trying
to make little routine plays, we tried to make
super plays. I felt that we squandered the first
half trying to make too much happen and trying
to be too good.” He told them as much and
managed to settle them. They played a respectable,
if somewhat flat, second half. But
the game was already over. When asked about
it today, Leach just shrugs. He obviously does
not torture himself with the memory. “To
my knowledge no team in the history of college
football has beaten four top-twenty-five
teams in succession,” says Leach. “We wanted
to be the first. I think we were suffering from
a kind of mental, emotional fatigue.”
The next week Tech barely beat a weak
Baylor team, and only by coming from behind
and scoring three touchdowns in the second
half. On January 2 the lingering shock of the
Oklahoma loss gave way to the dull pain of an
uninspired 47–34 loss to Mississippi in the
Cotton Bowl. There was really no explaining
this one either. Leach took it with equanimity,
said he was proud of his 11-2 record and
the shared championship of the Big 12 South.
The loss to a 9-4 team was reminiscent of all
those years when Tech lost to teams it should
have beaten and suggested perhaps that there
are limits to what even superb coaching can
do with thirty-seventh-ranked recruits. Tech
ended its season ranked twelfth, which in
most years would be cause for celebration but
now seemed like a crushing defeat.
A few weeks later, Leach’s surprisingly
nasty contract dispute with his employer
spilled into the national press. The fight ended
when Leach and Chancellor Hance sat down
and personally negotiated a five-year contract
that will pay Leach $2.5 million a year
and make him the third-highest-paid coach
in the Big 12. Leach seemed unperturbed by
this controversy too. “I expected everything
to work out,” he says, “but it took a little more
circuitous route than I expected. I have been
thrilled to be here from the beginning, and
there has never been a point where I wasn’t
thrilled to be here.”
Though the team is losing Harrell, Crabtree,
and several outstanding offensive linemen,
Leach says that this spring he had his best recruiting
class ever, one that included two of
the most highly rated defensive tackles in the
country. “I am very excited about this fall,” he
says. “I think we’ll be as good as we were last
year. We don’t have a single receiver who is
as good as Crabtree, but as a whole they are
better.” There is no reason why his quarterback
du jour—Taylor Potts—should not, like
his predecessors, put up phenomenal passing
yardage. Perhaps most interesting of all, three
of Leach’s recruits this year chose Tech over
scholarship offers at Oklahoma, which presents
a dazzling prospect for most Red Raiders
fans. They are all captivated, as anyone even
remotely interested in football should be, by
the idea of what might happen if the piratein-
chief ever gets hold of an entire team of
top-tier recruits. T
on the wall of Mike Leach’s office
reads eleven p.m. He likes
the deep night hours, when he is
free of the constant demands of
his job and can pursue his many
intellectual interests, which include
Apaches, sharks, whales,
pirates, Australia, Daniel Boone,
the tango, Wyatt Earp, Vikings,
Doc Holliday, chimpanzees, Winston
Churchill, grizzly bears, Napoleon
Bonaparte, the philosophy
of John Wooden, and the dynamics of the offshore surf
breaks at San Onofre, California. Tonight he is working
on an article for the Texas Tech Law Review about the relationship
between practicing law and coaching football.
He can do this because he is the only head coach at a major
football university to have a law degree and because
he is, well, the sort of person who would be inclined to
do such a thing. ¶ I am meeting with him in the sanctum
sanctorum of Texas Tech football, a cramped conference
room that is festooned with skull-and-crossbones flags, a
type design by L I K E M I N D E D STUDIO
portrait by lionel deluy
September 2009 | 93
t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m
painting of Leach in imitation of a Van Gogh self-portrait, a photograph
of Sarah Palin, a sign that reads “You are either coaching it,
or you are allowing it to happen,” and several drawing boards full
of football hieroglyphics, in the middle of which appear Leach’s
weight and cholesterol counts. He has a large,
elegantly appointed office next door that contains
such curiosities as a copy of Geronimo’s
death certificate and a motion-activated, sixfoot-
tall pirate skeleton that says, “Yarrrr,” and
scares the daylights out of the cleaning people.
photograph by ART I E LIMMER
Opening spread: Leach,
photographed on July 19, 2009.
This spread: Leach’s office is
a testament to his many varied
interests—and his knack for
finding unsung quarterbacks
and making them stars.
But the 48-year-old Leach has no real use for such luxury. He
meets various grandees and visitors there when he has to; he
sometimes uses the room to entertain recruits by doing card
tricks and telling pirate stories. He prefers the intimate clutter
of his conference room, where he spends most of his time watching
film and huddling with his coaches. (He also has at his disposal
a domed practice facility meant to shelter his players from
94 | September 2009
t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m
the blazing heat and bitter cold of the High Plains. He has no use
for that either, insisting that his team experience the full fury of
the local weather.)
Leach and I are talking football—specifically, what makes him
so good at coaching it. Like many football fans around the country—
especially those who followed Texas Tech’s dramatic run at
a national championship last year—I am fascinated by how such
a personality, one that suggests rather more of a bohemian intellectual
than a square-jawed drill sergeant, can also house one of
the greatest offensive minds in the history of the game. Leach has
developed an offense that is as close to unstoppable as anything
we are likely to see and that has been working brilliantly for so
long—twenty years at five colleges in three collegiate athletic divisions—
that his success cannot be regarded as a fluke. During his
nine-year tenure as head coach at Texas Tech, Leach has never had
a losing season, compiling a 76-39 record. He has done that
while playing in one of the nation’s toughest conferences
and using players that few or no other elite college football
programs wanted. In five of those nine years, Texas Tech led
the nation in offense, routinely hanging ungodly numbers
of points on opposing defenses. Its quarterbacks have led
the nation in passing eight of the past nine years. In 2007
and 2008 Graham Harrell became the first player in college
history to throw for more than 5,000 yards in consecutive
seasons. Unlike almost all major college coaches, Leach is
his own offensive coordinator; he calls the plays.
Though Tech has had many big wins during the Leach years
and even flirted with a top-ten finish in 2005, nothing compares
with its string of victories last fall. For a scintillating
month or so, millions of fans who had never paid attention to
Texas Tech football were suddenly focused
intently on this sprawling, monumental
campus in West Texas. In one spectacular
three-game run, the Red Raiders put up
158 points against the nineteenth-, first-,
and eighth-ranked teams in the country.
As Tech knocked off one ranked team after
another, the hordes that descended on Lubbock
were as interested in the team as they
were its coach, a man who never played college
football, rode the bench in high school,
and, as Lubbock radio talk show host Ryan
Hyatt puts it, “looks like he just got off tour
with Jimmy Buffett.” Texas Tech is not exactly
America’s team, but for a few shining
moments last autumn it was the team much
of America was rooting for.
Then it all came crashing down. On November
22 Texas Tech, ranked second and
seemingly unstoppable, rolled into Norman,
Oklahoma, and suffered one of the
worst losses in school history. The lopsided
score, 65–21, does not fully convey the extent
of the damage the Oklahoma Sooners
inflicted: Tech simply did not look as if it
belonged in the game. Leach’s Red Raiders
had arrived with the leading Heisman Trophy
candidate—Harrell—and a team that
not only was undefeated but had beaten
Oklahoma two out of the past three years.
And suddenly, in the bloody chaos of a second quarter in which the
Sooners outscored the Red Raiders 35–7, it was all gone: the national
title hopes, Harrell’s Heisman, the magic of the greatest season in
Texas Tech history. Tech would go on to lose its bowl game to Ole
Miss and finish twelfth in the country.
Leach, a man of exquisitely even temperament, was unbowed
and unshattered. He even seemed to enjoy his new celebrity. In
the off-season he won two prestigious coach-of-the-year awards
(the George Munger and the Woody Hayes). He was invited
to the White House to meet President Bush and was featured
on CBS’s 60 Minutes. His name was mentioned in almost
every coaching search, and he interviewed for a job at
the University of Washington. Then came a long, nasty contract
dispute with Tech. All of which prompted Raider fans
to wonder: Was Leach going to desert them now? Just when
they were starting to hit the big time?
In the end Leach signed a new contract and Lubbock breathed a
sigh of relief. He was staying. But now fans are asking another set
of questions. Was last season an anomaly? Or was it the dawn of a
golden age in Tech football? Are Leach and his ragtag band of rejects
fi nally ready for full-time prime time? And, perhaps most important,
the question that has been asked everywhere Mike Leach
has ever coached: How in the world does he do it?
one aFTernoon durinG SprinG FooTball,
Leach and I were camped out in the conference room, studying fi lm.
Unlike most coaches, he is completely unguarded around reporters.
He does not edit what he says, nor does he have any apparent sense of,
or need for, privacy. In a world typically veiled in secrecy, he is an open
book. He was seated in his favorite chair at the head of the table, remote
control and laser pointer in hand. He is an interesting-looking
man, with a round, softly contoured face that can best be described
as cherubic, a prominent nose, and a pair of startlingly bright
blue eyes. He has a low-pitched, gravelly voice that he rarely
raises and that often comes out no louder than a mumble. Onscreen:
the Texas Tech–Oklahoma State game from November
8, 2008, a superb example of what the Leach off ense can
do. OSU was ranked number eight with an 8-1 record, having
beaten number three Missouri, piled up 56 points against Texas
A&M, and lost to top-ranked Texas by less than a touchdown.
The Cowboys had their best team in years.
“The basic idea here is that you have to make the defense
cover the whole field,” Leach said as the film rolled. “Not
just part of it. If you do it right, it makes life very diffi cult for
them.” Instead of a dense, seemingly impenetrable off ensive
line, Tech’s linemen are spaced three to four feet apart, twice
the norm, leaving enormous gaps that seem to invite tackles
and linebackers to stroll right through them. The quarterback
operates from the shotgun, and on most plays four
or fi ve receivers are spread across the breadth of the fi eld.
This creates huge amounts of space between players, making
the whole thing look porous and vulnerable, even skeletal,
until it swings into action. Which it does between 85
and 90 times a game. A typical off ense snaps the ball 65 to
70 times a game, but Tech never huddles. It is all attack,
all the time. Leach attempts few fi eld goals and
rarely punts, even when he is deep in his own territory.
When the ball is snapped, you can see how the magic
works. Receivers stretch the fi eld from chalk to chalk,
taking the defensive backs with them. The defensive
linemen—who are forced to spread out too, lest they
lose their rushing angles—must therefore attack from
longer range, creating even more room. Suddenly the
grid opens up, and the quarterback is looking at what
Leach calls “pieces of space.” Lots of them.
On the fi rst set of downs against Oklahoma State,
Texas Tech lost a fumble, and the Cowboys promptly
marched in and scored. What happened next, though,
amounted to a clinic on off ense, conducted by Leach at
OSU’s expense. Tech scored on its next seven possessions.
On fi lm the mismatches caused by the spread
were easy to spot, as was the horrifi c task the defense
had of covering such a vast expanse of real estate, while receivers
like Michael Crabtree, who appeared to be equipped with bat sonar,
worked the spaces of the grid. Final score: 56–20.
So how did Leach fi gure out the system? That is what everyone in
the football world—pro, college, and high school—wants to know.
There is certainly no shortage of theories on how to stop him. Sports
Illustrated reported this year that the market is booming for “instructional
videos, Internet forums, and dissertations in publications by
coaches from high school to the pros” that address how to stop spreadstyle
off enses, which have begun to proliferate—not coincidentally—
in the wake of Leach’s success. The answer lies entirely in his past.
Leach’s offense actually came into being
CLOCKWISE, TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF THE LEACH FAMILY; ANDY LYONS/ALLSPORT/GETTY IMAGES; RONALD MARTINEZ/GETTY IMAGES; JAMIE SQUIRE/GETTY IMAGES
Clockwise from top left:
Leach in the late seventies;
Coach Hal Mumme,
Leach’s early mentor at
Iowa Wesleyan, in 1998;
Leach with Graham Harrell
during the 2006 A&M game,
which Tech won 31–27;
Leach fi lling in for the
weatherman on Lubbock’s
KAMC; Tech fans swarming
the fi eld at Jones AT&T
Stadium, in Lubbock, after the
Red Raiders defeated the UT
Longhorns in the fi nal seconds,
39–33, on November 1, 2008. | CONT I N U E D ON PAG E 1 4 1
t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m September 2009 | 141
two decades ago, long before he ever set foot
in Lubbock.
Leach grew up in a Mormon family in Cody,
Wyoming, and attended Brigham Young University,
where he was nowhere near talented
enough to make the football team. But he studied
hard and made it to law school at Pepperdine
University, in California, graduating in
1986 in the top third of his class. Bright and
personable, he appeared destined for a successful
law career. Except he did not want to
be a lawyer. After graduation he decided, to the
dismay of his wife’s parents, that he wanted to
be a football coach. He had coached various
youth sports before, and the idea stuck. So he
did what no sane Pepperdine law school grad
would do: He enrolled in the United States
Sports Academy, in Daphne, Alabama, to earn
a master’s degree in coaching.
Over the next few years he managed to land
a couple coaching jobs, in spite of his complete
lack of experience. The first was with Cal Poly
San Luis Obispo, a Division II school in California.
For $3,000 a year, he coached safeties
and offensive linemen. It is not clear how he
knew how to do that. He supplemented that
income by working as a substitute teacher;
his wife, Sharon, became an administrative
assistant at a local vineyard. They were raising
a daughter and somehow made ends meet.
In 1988 Leach got a job coaching linebackers
at College of the Desert, in Palm Desert, California—
a junior college—where his salary
jumped to $12,000, while Sharon worked at
an office on campus. Early the next year he
accepted a brief engagement coaching professional
football in Finland, where the players
smoked cigarettes on the bench.
In 1989 he found the job that would change
everything: offensive line coach at Iowa Wesleyan
College, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, a
school with eight hundred undergraduates
and a bad football team. Most aspiring
coaches would have considered it a backwater;
for Leach it was a revelation. That
was because of the remarkable man who had
just taken over as head coach. His name was
Hal Mumme. In the early eighties Mumme
(rhymes with “tummy”), while at the University
of Texas at El Paso, had been a sort of
prodigy—the youngest Division I offensive
coordinator in the country. But he had fallen
on hard times. After the head coach at UTEP
was fired, Mumme lost his job and wound up
coaching at perennial loser Copperas Cove
High School, in Central Texas. Leach was one
of the first coaches Mumme hired at Iowa
Wesleyan. “He probably thought I was ambitious
and would do anything he told me,”
Leach says. “He was right.”
Mumme, as it turned out, was on to a big
idea. He was a disciple of LaVell Edwards’s,
the brilliant Brigham Young coach who in
the eighties was lighting up college football
with the most potent passing attack in history,
one that won him a national championship
in 1984. Mumme had studied Edwards’
schemes closely, and at Copperas Cove he had
put those ideas to work. He installed a radical
offense that featured widely split linemen,
passed on most downs, and used four
or five receivers. In less than two years he
had turned Cove into one of the state’s most
prolific passing offenses, knocking off such
powerhouses as Austin Westlake, Killeen Ellison,
and Temple—which had beaten Cove
70–0 the last time they’d met. Each spring
Mumme made a pilgrimage to BYU, where
Edwards would open the film room to him.
By the time Mumme arrived at Iowa Wesleyan,
he knew exactly what he wanted to do.
Leach hit it off with him immediately, meeting
at BYU in the spring to watch practice and
later spending most of his free time driving
with Mumme all over the country to study
other teams’ passing schemes. “Hal was really
driven as far as studying football,” Leach
said. “We’d drive through snowstorms and rainstorms.
We’d go to some little high school that
had something we were interested in seeing.
We would go visit the Chicago Bears, the Green
Bay Packers. We would weasel our way into the
Packers offices, and [head coach] Lindy Infante
would talk to us. We went to countless colleges,
anywhere that had somebody who was throwing
the ball.” Though Leach was the student and
Mumme the master, the two men developed
their offense together. “We spent a lot of time
talking on our trips,” said Mumme, who now
coaches at McMurry University, in Abilene.
“Florida is a long way from Iowa.”
At Iowa Wesleyan they put their theories to
work. In 1989 they began adopting the shotgun
as their primary formation. In 1991 they
installed a no-huddle offense. Like theoretical
physicists, they began to investigate the
nature of time. “We just saw time differently
than other coaches did,” said Mumme. “You
can replace personnel. You can replace equipment.
Time is the only thing you can’t replace
in a game. So we wanted to run as many plays
as we could in the time allotted.” Most teams
want to eat up the clock, using ball control to
increase their time of possession. Mumme
and Leach wanted nothing to do with slowing
down the game. Time of possession did
not matter. Running ninety plays did. Scoring
quickly did. The game itself—now with up
to five receivers streaking across the field on
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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 5
142 | September 2009 t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m
almost every play—became faster.
And all of it was based on simplicity. Where
many so-called genius offensive coaches keep
thick playbooks, Mumme and Leach had no
playbook. They ran roughly twenty basic plays,
which they disguised by running them out of
different formations: double tight ends, fourreceiver
spread, two running backs, et cetera.
The routes the receivers ran were the same,
but of course the defense did not know that.
To the defense, each play looked more hellishly
complicated than the last. Mumme and
Leach’s rule was that if they added a play, they
had to subtract one. Their idea was to keep
things as simple as possible for their players.
The simplicity helped with the speed too.
As former University of Texas coach Darrell
Royal once observed, “If a player is the least
bit confused, he can’t be aggressive. Tattoo
that on your wall. Or better still, on your wallet.”
Confused players could not, as Leach
would say, play fast.
The result was startling. Iowa Wesleyan
had gone 0-10 the year before Mumme and
Leach arrived. Over the next three years
the program went 25-10. In 1991 Mumme’s
Tigers became the first team in school history
to make the National Association of Intercollegiate
Athletics playoffs, with a 10-2
record. The 1990 team led the nation in passing
offense; in 1989 and 1991 it finished second.
Over a three-year stretch, Iowa Wesleyan
quarterbacks threw for more than 11,000 yards
and broke 26 national records. For Leach,
who considers Mumme “one of the greatest
coaches there is,” it was a formative experience.
Like many coaches at small schools, he
did a bit of everything. He was offensive line
coach, offensive coordinator, recruiting coordinator,
video coordinator, equipment coordinator,
and sports information director. For his
labors he was paid $13,000 and eventually got
a raise to $22,000. He taught classes in criminal
justice and history to make extra money.
He also took several courses so that he could
defer his student loans. “I would talk to my law
school friends, and they were talking about
condos and tax shelters,” Leach said. “But they
were fascinated by what I was doing.”
In 1992 Mumme and Leach moved to Valdosta
State, in Georgia, another school with
an abysmal record, where they did even better.
Over the next five years, they went 40-17-1.
The once faltering team now ranked consistently
in the top twenty Division II schools in
the country. In 1994 Leach’s offense shattered
35 conference records and 7 national marks.
Quarterback Chris Hatcher was named Division
II player of the year.
Leach, meanwhile, was finally making
enough money to live on his coaching salary.
“We had a great two-bedroom apartment
in a complex with two pools,” he says. “We had
a parking lot with speed bumps, so I would
Rollerblade around it and hop over the speed
bumps. Then I would go the other way so I
would wear my wheels evenly.”
By 1997 the rest of the college football world
was paying close attention to the Mumme-
Leach aerial circus. That year Mumme got the
job of head coach at Kentucky, and he took his
offensive coordinator with him. Over the next
two years, Leach ran an offense that set 41 SEC
records and acquired a name: the Air Raid. In
Leach’s second year there, quarterback Tim
Couch threw for 4,275 yards and became the
number one pick in the NFL draft.
Then came an even bigger break. In 1999 a
new coach named Bob Stoops took over the
troubled Oklahoma football program, and
he hired Leach away from Kentucky and his
beloved mentor to be his offensive coordinator.
Leach wasted no time installing—to the
dismay of many Oklahoma fans who did not
want to become a passing team—the offense
that he and Mumme had perfected. He also
quickly demonstrated another of his remarkable
talents: the ability to spot great players
where no one else did.
Unhappy with the quarterbacks he had inherited,
Leach traveled to the outer reaches
of the college football world, to Snow College,
in Ephraim, Utah, to recruit a young quarterback
named Josh Heupel, who had been a bust
at another Utah school, Weber State, and was
playing only half the time at Snow. He had a
deeply flawed throwing motion, falling back
on his heels while he released the ball. Leach
liked him anyway and especially liked his
sense of timing and his ability to read defenders.
Oklahoma diehards were less enamored.
“There was a time when the two most wanted
people in the state were me and Josh Heupel,”
says Leach. “I was the guy who thought
we were going to throw the ball. Heupel was
the quarterback who couldn’t run.”
Heupel fit Leach’s system perfectly. Proof
came in a scrimmage between the Oklahoma
offense and the defense in the spring of 1999.
While Oklahoma’s defensive coaches looked
on in horrified amazement, Heupel rang up
more than 700 yards on them. Oklahoma defensive
coordinator Brent Venables later described
the “deep, deep state of depression
in the locker room afterwards.” That season
Leach more than doubled the points scored
per game, from 16.7, in 1998, to 36.8, in 1999,
while the offense went from 101st in the nation
to 11th and from last to first in the Big 12.
The next year Heupel led an undefeated Oklahoma
team—using the Leach offense—to the
national championship. He was a runner-up
for the Heisman Trophy.
But by then Leach had moved on. In 2000
Texas Tech had decided to take a chance on
a 38-year-old Rollerblading lawyer-turnedoffensive-
coordinator who had never been a
head coach before.
Lubbock had never seen anything quite
like Mike Leach. He was, to begin with, the
polar opposite of popular former coach Spike
Dykes, an old-school guy from West Texas.
He did not schmooze with alumni or play
golf with the boosters. He also did things
that seemed, in football terms, completely
insane. Like going for it on fourth-and-five
from Tech’s own 36-yard line in a close game;
to Leach punting was simply a missed opportunity.
That did not comfort Tech fans when
the fourth-and-fives didn’t work out. Nor did
people understand his habit of running up
the score, which infuriated coaches and led
to one tense moment in a blowout against
SMU, when the Mustangs coach ran at Leach
as though he wanted to decapitate him. Leach
didn’t think it was poor sportsmanship for
his no-huddle offense to be driving toward
the goal line when the Red Raiders were up
14 points in the game’s closing seconds. Scoring
is what Leach teams do, and it is a testament
to his style of coaching that they don’t
really know how to do anything else.
On the other hand, the Red Raiders were
phenomenally entertaining, as was he. He
went on Lubbock television to give the local
weather forecast. After announcing that
there were going to be “serious storms,” he
observed, “Well, you’re going to be dead in a
hundred years anyway, so live dangerously.”
His coaches and players loved him. He appeared
in a video giving dating advice to Tech
students, counseling young men to take a
girl out to dinner on the first date. “The girl
will be forced to eat in front of you,” he said,
“which is something that women hate, but if
you can make them do it, the earlier the better,
the more they’ll converse and tell of themselves.”
Later, when a 60 Minutes reporter
cited a story suggesting that Leach was “a
football madman directing a sideshow,” he
replied, without apparent irony, “I don’t have
any disagreement with it, really.”
Leach’s conversational tendency to drift
off into digressions about all sorts of unlikely
subjects has only affirmed the sense many
people have that he is, to some extent, mad.
During one of my talks with him, he suddenly
began interviewing me, asking me questions
about my background, my work, my hometown,
the college I went to, the towns I had
lived in. When he found out I had once lived
in Hollywood, he said enthusiastically, “Oh,
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that must have been an awesome place to
live! I would love to go up there! It’s so full
of history.” So we talked Hollywood history.
For a long time. Had I ever gone to the Black
Dahlia mansion? How close had I lived to the
LaBianca house, where some of the Manson
murders took place? His questions kept coming.
Most big-time football coaches are relentlessly
and aggressively on point. Leach
is relentlessly off point. This is the essence
of his personality, and it explains why people
find him both charming and odd. He is so intensely
curious about the world around him
that he doesn’t think twice about interrupting
the topic at hand with something others
might consider irrelevant.
But those were just his personal quirks.
On the field he was widely feared. No coach
wanted to play a team that could spontaneously
rain down fifty points. And absolutely
no one wanted to play Texas Tech in Lubbock.
“When he first came here, you could hear
the gasps throughout the stadium,” said talk
show host Hyatt. “What the hell is he thinking?
After a couple of years people said, ‘All
right, if you like beating Nebraska on a fourthdown
play or if you like beating Texas on a
fourth down, then you’ve got to live with it all
the other times.’ ” Under Leach, attendance
soared to record levels. Fund-raising rose 180
percent. Money for other sports, which comes
mostly from football revenue, increased dramatically.
The stadium was massively renovated
in 2003, and another major upgrade will
be completed next year. All the suites have already
been sold. The sports budget, which was
$9.4 million just six years before his arrival,
now stands at more than $50 million.
As always, Leach had an uncanny ability
to produce brilliant quarterbacks. In his first
three years, the lightly recruited Kliff Kingsbury
became only the fourth player in college
history to throw for 3,000 yards three times.
He was followed by fifth-year senior B. J. Symons,
who set a single-season college record
for passing yards (5,833). Next came a fifthyear
walk-on named Sonny Cumbie, who also
led the nation in passing. He was followed by
Cody Hodges, a quarterback with a belowaverage
arm, who led the nation’s number
one offense and threw for 643 yards against
Kansas State, the fifth-best performance in
NCAA history. Leach’s most recent quarterback,
Graham Harrell, was the best of all: In
three seasons as a starter he passed for 15,738
yards, second all-time in the NCAA, and set
the college record for touchdown passes (134).
Those quarterbacks became famous for their
ability to put up implausibly large numbers of
points very quickly. In the 2006 Insight Bowl,
against Minnesota, Tech trailed the Golden
Gophers 38–7 with 7:47 to go in the third quarter.
Harrell and the offense calmly proceeded
to rack up 31 unanswered points in less than
twenty minutes, then won the game in overtime,
44–41. In 2004, against a ranked and unbeaten
TCU team, Tech trailed 21–0 near the
end of the first half. Under Cumbie the Red
Raiders scored three times before the half and
seven more times in the second, winning 70–
35. This was football in the Leach era.
Perhaps most impressive of all was that
Leach was doing this with players that most of
his rivals did not want. Except for Harrell, his
quarterbacks were not courted by other major
football schools. Most of his recruits could
properly be described as rejects. In fact, Texas
Tech was typically fourth in line—at best—for
players in the phenomenally fertile Texas market.
Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas A&M all took
precedence, as did other Big 12 universities.
According to Rivals.com, the national ranking
of Texas Tech’s recruiting classes averaged
thirty-seventh over the past five years. By
comparison, Oklahoma ranked eighth, Texas
eleventh, and Texas A&M twenty-first. Leach
worked the margins, finding players like current
New England Patriots star Wes Welker,
whom nobody else wanted. Or Michael Crabtree,
a quarterback from Dallas Carter whom
no one could quite figure out what to do with
and whom no one except Leach saw as a receiver.
Crabtree won the Biletnikoff Award
as the nation’s best receiver during his freshman
and sophomore years and was this year’s
tenth pick in the NFL draft.
The rest of the world, meanwhile, could only
guess at what sort of dark magic was abroad on
the West Texas plains. Most people assumed
that Leach’s offense was demonically intricate,
a tangle of x’s and o’s so thick defenders
couldn’t parse it. In fact the reverse is true.
Leach has stuck steadfastly with his old formula:
no playbook, just a simple, straightforward
set of fewer than two dozen plays, many
of which he and Mumme discovered on their
cross-country odysseys. “He is very, very reluctant
to change anything,” says Dana Holgorsen,
a former Tech assistant coach who
played for Leach at Iowa Wesleyan, coached
for him at Valdosta State, and is now the offensive
coordinator for the wide-open, passhappy
program at the University of Houston.
“He always runs the same system, and
most of his coaches are system guys like me
who know exactly how it works. It was why I
got hired at Tech from a Division II school at
the age of twenty-eight.” The offensive line
also employs the basic techniques Leach and
Mumme came up with at Valdosta State, right
down to the lingo used to describe them. But
there too simplicity rules. “We do the most
144 | September 2009 t e x a s m o n t h l y . c o m
simple stuff,” said Matt Moore, who played for
Leach at Valdosta and used Leach’s offense
to win four of five Alabama state high school
football titles and now coaches the Tech offensive
line. “Most people are way more complicated.
I know when [Steve] Spurrier was
at Florida, he had eighteen different types of
protections. We’ve got two.”
The result is that Leach and his coaches are
able to spend most of their time relentlessly
drilling. “Everything is about repetition,” said
Cody Hodges, Leach’s 2005 starting quarterback,
who arrived in 2001, one year after
Leach. “Last year I was in Lubbock and went
out and watched practice, and it was exactly
the same as it was in my first year. That’s why
the quarterbacks have so much success. You
learn just a few plays and you perfect that.”
Leach’s quarterbacks have become so proficient
that he allows them to change any play
at the line of scrimmage, a freedom almost
no other major football program offers. His
drills include making receivers run in a 40-
yard sandpit he installed to strengthen their
ankles. His coaches fire tennis balls at high
speed at receivers and defensive backs, fifty
at a time. His offensive linemen put on boxing
gloves and do battle to learn to protect the
quarterback. His players do no sprints after
practice: Almost all of their running is done
as part of actual plays. Leach’s offense is not
about tricks or complexity; it is about minutely
coached execution of basic techniques.
Leach’s approach does involve, it must
be noted, a bit of fairy dust. Because Tech is
forced to hustle to persuade players to come
to West Texas, Leach dazzles recruits with
jokes and his trademark rambling, not-sureexactly-
what-the-point-is stories. He brings
forth and swings his pirate sword, which turns
out to be an important coaching technique
(“How are you going to swing your sword?”
he likes to ask of his players). He also does
card tricks. One, witnessed by Chancellor
Kent Hance, features a mysterious character
known as “the Wizard.” In Hance’s account,
Leach was interviewing two recruits.
He took out a deck of cards and asked one
recruit to turn over a card. He then made a
phone call and put the recruit on the line with
the Wizard, who correctly guessed the card.
“The kid goes, ‘Wow!’ ” said Hance. “And he
signed with the team.” Leach used the Wizard
trick with Harrell too. He also told the young
quarterback and his father stories about pirates,
coaching in Finland, and World War
II. Somehow it all worked. What Leach was
really offering Harrell, though—and Harrell
knew it—was the chance to put up numbers
that would rewrite the record books.
As the years went by, recruiting aboveaverage
players like Harrell, however, was not
Leach’s only challenge. His overwhelming
focus on offense had an unfortunate result:
His teams were becoming famous for their
lack of defense. Texas Tech, it was said, was
a team that could score 43 points but would
give up 44. On one level, Leach was known
as a nutty professor who scared the hell out
of everyone. But he had a reputation for being
inconsistent and vulnerable to a competent
offense, of which there was no shortage
in the Big 12. Tech was an unbalanced team.
Interesting but unbalanced.
The problem came to a head on September
22, 2007, when Tech, whose defense had been
allowing more than 400 yards per game—
seventy-fourth in the nation—gave up 610
yards of offense to Oklahoma State and lost
49–45. The normally mild-mannered Leach
unloaded. “The entire first half,” he told a
TV interviewer, “we got hit in the mouth and
acted like somebody took our lunch money
and all we wanted to do was have pouty expressions
on our faces until somebody daubed
our little tears off and made us feel better.” The
next day he fired his defensive coordinator,
Lyle Setencich, the man who had given him
his first job at Cal Poly, in 1987. “That was a
big growth moment for Coach Leach,” said
Hyatt. “A big seismic shift. Setencich was a
close, close friend. Mike made the decision
and sent the message that ‘I am not just an offensive
guy. I can take ownership of this whole
program.’ ” He promoted assistant coach Ruffin
McNeill to succeed Setencich, and since
then the team has gone 17-5, driven largely by
improvements on the defense. Those changes
were behind the team’s transformation last
year. The nutty professor was still there, but
now his defense had teeth.
On the night of November 1, 2008, Leach
fielded an offense that was nearly identical
to the one he and Mumme had cobbled
together at Iowa Wesleyan College nearly
twenty years earlier. The difference was that
instead of playing Olivet Nazarene University,
Leach was playing the University of Texas,
the number one team in the nation, a dazzling
array of all the talent he had no access
to. Tech was 8-0, ranked sixth, and coming
off a 63–21 dismantling of nineteenth-ranked
Kansas. UT had just beaten, consecutively,
the first-, eleventh-, and seventh-ranked
teams in the country. The game, which pitted
the Mad Pirate against the CEO-like Mack
Brown, had quickly spooled up into a nationalmedia
event. ESPN’s Game Day carnival had
moved in (with 15,000 fans in tow), as had
ABC’s game-of-the-week crew. An enormous
tent city known as Raiderville had materialized,
with a population of 1,700. The place
was so pumped up with digital technology and
generator-powered electricity that it glowed
at night. Pirate flags—a symbol that Leach
had introduced and that Raider fans had embraced—
were everywhere. Leach sent a truckload
of barbecue to Raiderville as a gesture of
appreciation. By the time the Masked Rider—
a Tech student on a black stallion wearing a
black costume and a red cape and making the
famous “guns up” sign with his hand—thundered
through the goalposts at Jones AT&T
Stadium, a record 56,333 fans were screaming
their lungs out. It was the biggest game in
Texas Tech history.
Leach’s cohort came out firing. In the first
half, Tech was so dominant that the game began
to look like a replay of what the Red Raiders
had done to Kansas. They scored 22 points
to Texas’s 6, made 17 first downs to Texas’s
5, and put up 326 yards against Texas’s 108.
Tech’s kicker alone outscored UT. That might
not seem so bad except that the kicker, Matt
Williams, had been playing college football
for only a few weeks. He had won a contest
during a home game against Massachusetts
by booting a 30-yard field goal during a halftime
promotion in which the winner would
receive a month’s free rent. Leach, who was
unhappy with the team’s kickers, liked the
quickness of Williams’s approach and offered
him the position. First-half score: Matt Williams
8, Texas 6.
The second half was more in line with expectations.
Texas, under its brilliant quarterback,
Colt McCoy, clawed its way back. The
two heavyweights traded punches. With 1:29
left, the Longhorns took their first lead of the
game, 33–32. Leach was unperturbed, as he
often is in times of great crisis. “That’s just
his mentality,” said Holgorsen. “He’s never
too high, never too low. He has the same facial
expression regardless of what is happening,
and he preaches to the kids every single day
to be like that. The message is ‘I don’t care if
you are winning by a hundred or losing by a
hundred, you are going to keep playing, keep
playing.’ ” They did.
As the clock wound down, Harrell coolly
drove the team downfield. With eight seconds
to go on the Texas 28-yard line and 56,000 fans
shrieking bloody murder, he launched a sideline
pass to Crabtree, who beat two defenders
and caught the ball at the 6, twisted away,
and scored with one second left on the clock,
while McCoy and Mack Brown looked on in
flabbergasted disbelief. It is impossible to fully
express the depth of the happiness of Texas
Tech fans at that moment. Years of perceived
disrespect by UT and everybody else had been
instantly obliterated. They went crazy.
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The victory lifted Texas Tech to number
two in the BCS standings. A week later, with
Raiderville in full flower and the same national
broadcast teams back in Lubbock, Tech
dismantled Oklahoma State. For the first time
in its history, the team now had a clear shot—
with only Oklahoma and the subsequent Big
12 title game standing in the way—at a national
championship. How did Leach feel?
“It will probably be more fun to remember it,”
he says now, “more enjoyment to think back
on it because at the time there is no wistful
‘Look, oh gee, these are the times of our lives’
or any of that bull*&^!#*&^!#*&^!#*&^!#, and the reason is because
next week you are playing Oklahoma
or Oklahoma State. The win at Kansas was
huge, but guess what? It’s Sunday and we’re
playing Texas in six days . . .”
Tech’s win over Oklahoma State was the season’s
high point, the moment when it seemed
that anything was possible, when Raiders fans
everywhere finally believed that Leach could
really pull it off. A week later all those dreams
were mere wreckage on the ground. The team,
which had sustained an unimaginably high
level of football for three weeks against ranked
teams and in the national spotlight, fell apart
against Oklahoma in an ugly, humiliating rout.
Almost everything went wrong. Tech, whose
magnificent offensive line had allowed a total
of five sacks the entire season, gave up four, including
back-to-back sacks of Harrell in the
first quarter. Crabtree, the nation’s touchdown
leader, had a poor game and no touchdowns.
Leach’s famous idiosyncrasies were partly to
blame. In the second quarter, on fourth-andthree
from the Oklahoma 15, Leach decided to
go for it instead of kicking a field goal and didn’t
make it. Five plays later OU scored. In the second
quarter he gambled again on fourth-andfour
from the Sooners 45 and failed there too.
Down 35–7 with less than a minute remaining
in the second quarter, Leach, who is never content
to run out the clock, had Harrell launch
a deep pass down the middle of the field. OU
intercepted, returned the ball to the 1-yard
line, and scored on the next play. The score
at halftime was 42–7.
In the locker room Leach tried to calm his
team down. Since there was no mechanical
explanation for what was going on, he believed
that his players were too keyed-up. “I
think we wanted to do well and overtried,” he
said after the game. “Rather than just trying
to make little routine plays, we tried to make
super plays. I felt that we squandered the first
half trying to make too much happen and trying
to be too good.” He told them as much and
managed to settle them. They played a respectable,
if somewhat flat, second half. But
the game was already over. When asked about
it today, Leach just shrugs. He obviously does
not torture himself with the memory. “To
my knowledge no team in the history of college
football has beaten four top-twenty-five
teams in succession,” says Leach. “We wanted
to be the first. I think we were suffering from
a kind of mental, emotional fatigue.”
The next week Tech barely beat a weak
Baylor team, and only by coming from behind
and scoring three touchdowns in the second
half. On January 2 the lingering shock of the
Oklahoma loss gave way to the dull pain of an
uninspired 47–34 loss to Mississippi in the
Cotton Bowl. There was really no explaining
this one either. Leach took it with equanimity,
said he was proud of his 11-2 record and
the shared championship of the Big 12 South.
The loss to a 9-4 team was reminiscent of all
those years when Tech lost to teams it should
have beaten and suggested perhaps that there
are limits to what even superb coaching can
do with thirty-seventh-ranked recruits. Tech
ended its season ranked twelfth, which in
most years would be cause for celebration but
now seemed like a crushing defeat.
A few weeks later, Leach’s surprisingly
nasty contract dispute with his employer
spilled into the national press. The fight ended
when Leach and Chancellor Hance sat down
and personally negotiated a five-year contract
that will pay Leach $2.5 million a year
and make him the third-highest-paid coach
in the Big 12. Leach seemed unperturbed by
this controversy too. “I expected everything
to work out,” he says, “but it took a little more
circuitous route than I expected. I have been
thrilled to be here from the beginning, and
there has never been a point where I wasn’t
thrilled to be here.”
Though the team is losing Harrell, Crabtree,
and several outstanding offensive linemen,
Leach says that this spring he had his best recruiting
class ever, one that included two of
the most highly rated defensive tackles in the
country. “I am very excited about this fall,” he
says. “I think we’ll be as good as we were last
year. We don’t have a single receiver who is
as good as Crabtree, but as a whole they are
better.” There is no reason why his quarterback
du jour—Taylor Potts—should not, like
his predecessors, put up phenomenal passing
yardage. Perhaps most interesting of all, three
of Leach’s recruits this year chose Tech over
scholarship offers at Oklahoma, which presents
a dazzling prospect for most Red Raiders
fans. They are all captivated, as anyone even
remotely interested in football should be, by
the idea of what might happen if the piratein-
chief ever gets hold of an entire team of
top-tier recruits. T
