One can quickly assume from my blogging obsession with Mike Leach's firing that I liked Mike, and indeed I did. Most Red Raider fans loved his unconventional approach to football. He became a sort of icon whose quirkiness subtly hypnotized the media into drooling over him. This put Texas Tech on the map. It made the world aware of Lubbock, Texas (Buddy Holly's star is fading a bit). But, Leach never fit the good old boys of coaching network. He didn't look or act like a cookie-cutter product. Andrew Sharp of SB Nation captures the essence of his downfall:
And that wisdom rarely gets challenged. Except when a lawyer, with a wife and a child, up and decides he'd like to try coaching football. That's what happened with Mike Leach. This wasn't a career track for him. He didn't start out as a grad assistant in college, or emerge, like Urban Meyer, as a "34-year-old whirl of activity ... an assistant coach on the rise. Big-name coaches had marked him; boosters were taking note." That's from a Sports Illustrated profile this month, relating a scene from Meyer's early years as a Notre Dame assistant coach.
Mike Leach's first job was with California Polytechnic State University. Did you know they played American football in Finland? Well, Mike Leach coached there. And he went just about anywhere else that would have him. Whether that was a tiny school in Valdosta, Georgia, or the University of Oklahoma in 1999, where he installed an offense that Bob Stoops and the Sooners still run today. And every place, he did things different, with a perspective culled not from years of waiting his turn and holding clipboards, but with the help of tireless work ethic, creativity, and a curious spirit that made him hugely popular with fans and media alike.
So, Texas Tech officials including the prototypical West Texas redneck Gerald Myers may have inadvertently confirmed to the rest of the world their pre conceived notions regarding Red Raiders-we are a bunch of gun totin' whiskey drinkin' cowboys who attend classes in order to perfect the sport of bull riding and bronco busting. Way to go Techsans. You good old boy farts just shot our program in the foot. In my 49 years as a Red Raider I don't believe I have witnessed such a blatant display of egotistical idiocy. Go ahead and find your good old boy coach. Perhaps he will light up our hungry lives with a 500 season and satisfy your over inflated egos with his embarrassingly hillbilly public demeanor every time he opens his mouth, much in the same way as Gerald Myers and good old Spike Dykes. (via DoubleTNation)...And ultimately, that's what this is all about. Power and resentments. The James family resented Coach Leach because they thought he'd been unfairly wielding his power, and wasting their son's talents. But more important, it became evident during last year's contract negotiations that Texas Tech's Athletic Director, Gerald Myers, along with a few other powerful voices, agreed with the James family. Maybe not that Adam James was the future of Texas Tech football, but agreed insofar as Mike Leach had become too damn powerful, and he didn't deserve it.









