Washington State University today hired one of the world’s best football coaches. Let me put that into terms non-college-football fans can understand: It’s like Dick’s Drive-In hiring one of the world’s best chefs.
From the end of World War I until Tuesday, Washington State had hired 16 head football coaches. Of those 16, only 1 had ever before won even a single game as major-college coach–Dennis Erickson, who’d won six. On Wednesday, WSU hired former college coach of the year Mike Leach. Total major-college football wins: 84.
As Texas Tech’s head coach from 2000-2009, Leach won those 84 games and led the Red Raiders to ten consecutive bowl appearances. He watched his innovative offense score 40 or more points in a game 56 times.Yet his pre-Texas-Tech career may be even more impressive. I’ll let Michael Lewis tell it, in his classic 2005 NYT mag profile of Leach:
(Leach’s) first year coaching Division 1 college football was 1997, at the University of Kentucky. He arrived from Valdosta State with the head coach, Hal Mumme, and turned the Kentucky offense from joke into juggernaut. The year before he arrived, Kentucky’s quarterback passed for 967 yards. In Leach’s first year, his quarterback, Tim Couch, threw for 3,884 yards; the year after that, Couch, who lasted for only a few disappointing years in the N.F.L., threw for 4,275 yards. After Kentucky, Leach moved to Oklahoma for a single season, 1999. That year Oklahoma went from 101st to 8th in the country in offensive scoring.
And Leach isn’t just interesting because of his offensive football acumen. Leach never played college football. After graduating law school, he decided against becoming a lawyer, and instead chose football coaching as his profession. He rose through a succession of piddly college jobs, his natural curiosity leading him to seek out new offensive innovations wherever he went. That curiosity didn’t leave him once he reached the major-college heights. Lewis again: “Each off-season, Leach picks something he is curious about and learns as much as he can about it: Geronimo, Daniel Boone, whales, chimpanzees, grizzly bears, Jackson Pollock. The list goes on, and if you can find the common thread, you are a step ahead of his football players. One year, he studied pirates.”
(Leach’s fascination with pirates has in turn fascinated football fans, which is why you might see this image come to you from a Coug fan friend.)
You may well ask: If Leach is so good, why was he unemployed? Well, it’s a long and confusing story. He was fired from Texas Tech in 2009 on flimsy grounds. The generally accepted view is that Texas Tech administrators thought Leach had amassed too much clout, and fired him for fear his eccentricity would embarrass the university. The same fear kept Leach from getting jobs at the University of Washington (he was interviewed, but never offered the job) and the University of Maryland (rumor has it that the school president vetoed Leach’s hiring over the objection of the athletic director). Is the man erratic? Sure. Geniuses often are.
You also may well ask: How did Wazzu do it? For generations, the school has been hiring from the bottom rung of the coaching ladder. Now, all of a sudden, they’ve plucked from the top. Wazzu fans can thank two other geniuses: Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, and WSU athletic director Bill Moos.
Last November, Scott negotiated a $3 billion television contract with FOX and ESPN. Washington State gets a 1/12 share of that cash, which works out to about $20 million/year, practically doubling their athletic department budget.
Moos, meanwhile, wooed Leach like a love-sick teenager. He flew to Key West to meet with Leach in November, and threw a huge figure at him: $2.25M/year, more than double what Washington State has ever paid for a coach. (Though slightly less than UW pays for Steve Sarkisian, who’ll make $2.4M in 2012 and remains the state’s highest-paid employee.) Leach will also have $1.8M with which to hire assistant coaches, $500K more than his predecessor Paul Wulff did.
Said Washington State president Elson Floyd: “I asked Bill Moos to select the best head football coach in the country, and I’m convinced he has done exactly that.” So am I.
Leach will make college football in this state much more awesome for three reasons. First, Leach’s track record attract better players to Washington State. Second, Leach’s offensive style (throw, throw, throw, throw, throw and throw some more) is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Three, the guy has personality. Wacky coaches have been a Washington State tradition up until the 2000s, it’s nice to see the Cougs getting back to their roots.
I hope I’ve put into words just how astounding a turn of events this is. I’m not sure I quite believe it myself. On the off chance that the world really has turned upside down, I’m headed out now to see if Dick’s is suddenly serving filet mignon.
