Mike Leach died at the age of 61
On Friday, Washington State will play Houston in a game that connects back to Lubbock, Texas, at the turn of the century. It will be a matchup between mentor and protégé, between Mike Leach and Dana Holgorsen, the coach who among the dozens of Leach assistants in the past 20 years seems to be most like the godfather of the Air Raid in personality.
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Holgorsen played wide receiver under Leach, who was the offensive coordinator at Iowa Wesleyan on Hal Mumme’s staff. Holgorsen also was the last assistant coach Leach officially hired in his first season as a head coach on the 2000 Texas Tech staff. “He’s like Mike Jr.,” said SMU head coach Sonny Dykes, Leach’s first receivers coach at Tech. “I used to call him Little Leach all the time. It’d piss him off. They have the same cadence. The older Dana gets, the more he morphs into Mike. Don’t tell him that. He’ll get pissed off, but it’s true.”
Dykes, Leach and Holgorsen are a small fraction of the number of high-level coaches who have emerged from the 2000 Texas Tech staff. Combined with the Red Raider players on that squad, eight people from that team are or were head coaches of FBS programs, eight more have been coordinators at the FBS level, and in all, 23 have been college or NFL coaches. “The level a guy was coaching at never mattered to Mike,” said Manny Matsakis, Leach’s first special teams coordinator at Texas Tech. “There’s great coaches everywhere. It’s just getting the right mix together. And Mike was a master of that.”
The group made Texas Tech nationally relevant and revolutionized the game of football. This is the story of the first Leach staff.
Patty Ross, senior administrative assistant, Texas Tech 1975-2010: I’d actually worked for five other head coaches prior to Mike. I’d been there forever. I’d started out in the ’70s working with Steve Sloan. Then, it was Rex Dockery, Jerry Moore, David McWilliams and then Spike Dykes. Spike was about to retire. He told me if they do what they ought to, they should hire Mike Leach. He’s a smart guy and up and coming. I thought they were leaning towards hiring Rich Rodriguez. They didn’t really tell us a whole lot about it. Then, in walks Mike.
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You don’t know if you’re gonna get to keep your own job. I worked for Spike for 16 years. He was the sweet, good ol’ boy West Texas guy. You meet Mike and you’re like, who is this awkward guy? I remember going home telling my husband, “Oh my gosh, he is really different.” Mike was really awkward. He can change a subject in a heartbeat. He’s just so odd. So different. His mind just goes a million miles an hour every day. How is this guy gonna work out in West Texas?
Manny Matsakis, Defiance College head coach, Leach’s first special teams coordinator at Texas Tech: We knew each other for a while when I was at Emporia State and he was at Valdosta State. I started a magazine, American Football Monthly, that was a trade journal for football coaches, in the basement of my house when I was at Kansas State. I’d got to be friends with (Leach’s mentor) Hal Mumme.
It was sort of wild the way it worked out when Mike got the OC job at Oklahoma. Bob Stoops and I work together at Kansas State. The publisher of my magazine was a guy named Barry Terranova. I think Bob was talking to him about something regarding the staff he was putting together for OU at the time.
Barry actually brought Mike’s name up to him. I think he was originally going to hire a guy that was the OC at Syracuse (Kevin Rogers) and they were like an option team. I think Barry’s conversation somehow got Bob thinking about Mike because when he was at Florida, (Leach and Mumme) were at Kentucky and doing all that stuff. So one thing led to another and he hires Mike at Oklahoma.
Then, Terranova got the search for Texas Tech because the magazine had a search firm called Professional Services Group. Gerald Myers, the old AD at Tech, was a former basketball coach, and he wanted to make sure they got it. I know they interviewed Terry Bowden and Rich Rodriguez, who was the OC at Clemson. Then Mike got interviewed right after OU plays Tech in Lubbock and OU got beat by Tech.
Leach’s post-game interview with Tech was awful, but the school gave him another interview and liked the idea of Leach, who had just turned the Sooners from the Big 12’s No. 11 offense to No. 1, coming in and shaking things up in Lubbock — and the conference. The school hired the 38-year-old on Dec. 9, 1999.
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Kliff Kingsbury, Arizona Cardinals head coach, Leach’s first starting QB at Tech: I’d seriously thought about going to Kentucky because of Tim Couch and all of the stuff they were doing down there in the SEC. I’d studied their staff and their program. I knew what Mike was about before he got to Tech, knowing that he would throw the ball like crazy. It was him and Rich Rodriguez, and I knew I didn’t fit Rich Rodriguez’s system, so I was excited that Mike was the guy that ended up getting it.
Sonny Dykes, SMU head coach, Leach’s first receivers coach at Tech: The good thing was Mike had a year at Oklahoma. When he first left to go with Bob, Mike had paid attention to his own stuff, but I’m not sure how much he’d paid attention to some of the other stuff. Chris Hatcher really coached quarterbacks at Kentucky. I remember Mike calling me for all the practice scripts when I was still (a grad assistant) at Kentucky.
Hal liked playing with a tight end. Mike didn’t care for it. Hal liked a lot of two backs. Mike was more of a four-wide guy. Hal was more of a West Coast guy. Leach was not as much 49ers true West Coast. I knew Mike well enough to know that it was gonna be pretty different, but I thought it was really the perfect deal for him there at Tech. At that time, the Big 12 was pretty run-heavy. It was an I-formation league. I just thought it was gonna be so unique and so different that we could carve a niche for ourselves.
One week after Leach was hired, he made his first wave of staff moves, hiring Greg McMackin as his defensive coordinator, Robert Anae as the offensive line coach, the younger Dykes as Tech’s new receivers coach and Matsakis as his special teams coordinator. In addition, two of Leach’s former players from his days as an assistant to Mumme at Iowa Wesleyan, Bill Bedenbaugh and Dana Holgorsen, were brought on in staff roles.
Bill Bedenbaugh, Oklahoma offensive line coach and co-offensive coordinator, Leach’s first offensive GA at Tech: It was typical Leach. I was at Ferris State. Everybody had heard he was getting the job. He just called me, goes, “Hey, you wanna be the GA here?” I said, “Hell, ya.” I was really young. I think I was 25 or 26. I knew Sonny. I was at Kentucky for a little bit, and I lived with Sonny. Obviously, I knew Dana and Leach. That was really it.
Matsakis: Barry Terranova had approached me with Mike about me joining his staff. It was because Mike wanted a guy that had been a head coach before on his staff and can handle a lot of things for him because he really wanted to focus a lot on the offense in the first years.
Ross: Manny’s probably one of the reasons I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stay or not. He wanted to be in charge. He was like, “You need to ask me if you have a question. You don’t need to go to Mike.” I said I work for Mike, not you. Manny had a hard time getting along with a lot of people that worked there. He wasn’t well-liked.
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Mike delegated a lot of the stuff to me. “You’re gonna oversee the budget.” I said, “I don’t know if I want to do that.”
“Well, you’re the perfect person for it because you have no trouble telling people no.”
Leach: Patty was my right-hand person. I considered her every bit of an assistant coach.
Ross: I’ve known Sonny since he was a child. He was always at the office when he was a kid and right in the center of everything in that he wanted to absorb everything his dad knew. He was always asking questions. Sometimes we’d be like, “Go away, Sonny.”
Dykes: It never was awkward with Mike taking over for my dad. Mike was good about it. He was respectful. They had had enough success there through the years where I think he thought they did a pretty good job. I don’t think he didn’t dog out the previous staff because of me. I just don’t think that’s him. It’s just not what he does, and that’s a real credit to him.
I think in a lot of ways, my dad and Mike are really pretty similar. Just in the fact that they really appreciated tough guys and guys that are committed. They’re not blueblood guys. They respected hard work. They didn’t care if you came from Notre Dame or Whitehouse High School.
Matsakis: Mike wanted to hire some guys that I think Gerald had some reservations about. I remember him saying he wanted to hire Bill Bedenbaugh to be his O-line coach. And Bill was at one of those D-II schools in Michigan. Gerald was like, “Hold it.” Like he didn’t want Mike to hire both Bill and Dana Holgorsen because they’re both small college guys. They couldn’t handle him hiring both, which I thought was crazy.
Leach: I wanted to hire Robert Anae as my O-line coach. He played (at BYU) under Roger French, who is one of the greatest offensive line coaches the game of football has ever known. Robert GA’ed there. Hal and I met there at BYU and I got to know Robert.
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I thought he’d be a great O-line coach, and he was.
Bedenbaugh: Robert was awesome. He didn’t know me. He knew that I played for Leach and that I had worked in it. He’d ask me, “How do we do wanna block this? How do we do that?” And he’d put his tweaks on it. He’s a great dude. He did a hell of a job there. We had a really good working relationship. I really appreciate that he let me coach. That’s what I do with my GAs to this day — I let ’em coach. He taught me how to coach. He let me run meetings sometimes. He helped me become a better coach.
About a week after the first wave of hires, Leach added defensive line coach Ron Harris, who had been connected to McMackin, and Art Briles, who had come from Stephenville High School, where he’d won four Texas state titles in the previous 12 seasons.
Matsakis: We were looking at hiring him or the coach at Midland Lee, John Parchman. Those were the two guys that Mike wanted to hire. We’re going to hire one because very few of us were from Texas. We needed some type of a connection to Texas. Mike thought Art is a spread offense guy, where Parchman was a power run game guy. It wasn’t necessarily what Mike was into. So he thought maybe he could learn something. I felt like he thought it would be a good fit, but it never really jelled.
Ross: I knew Art from back to his high school days. Art liked to always be in control of everything. He wanted to oversee everything his way. And there was only one boss, and that was Mike. Art was good at what he did. He wasn’t really cut out to be an assistant coach.
Dykes: Most of us all knew each other with the exception of Art. He was the outlier. I knew Art through my dad and through recruiting. I was the one who talked to Mike about why it might be a good idea to hire a high school coach. The great thing about Mike is he does what he wants to do. He was a little bit resistant but thought it made some sense. Bill was a GA. He had worked for us at Kentucky before he went to CMU. I knew Dana. Robert Anae was the one guy on offense that I didn’t know.
Dave Nichol, Washington State outside receivers coach, former Red Raiders receiver and volunteer assistant on Leach’s first staff at Tech: Dana did a lot of the computer and video stuff for Leach. I remember thinking in those first two months, this guy is rough. He’s kind of a jerk. But then you realize he’s a great dude. To this day, the guys I learned the most about football from were him and Bill. Dana was just very brutally honest, good or bad. There was no fluff. I learned about pass concepts and how to coach QBs and receivers. These guys had come up from these smaller schools and they’d all done what I was doing.
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Ross: I love Dana. He had a lotta energy. Could be fussy. You know what I mean. Very brilliant. He was really young. He got it. He and Mike talked constantly. Mike was very respectful of Dana’s mind. I was never surprised he became a head coach.
Dykes: Dana is odd because Dana is just odd.
Dennis Simmons, Oklahoma outside receivers coach, Leach’s first quality control staffer at Tech: I love Dana, but when you first meet him, he’s like scotch. Either you really like him or you really don’t.
Dana Holgorsen, Houston head coach, Leach’s first inside receivers coach at Tech: When Mike gets the job, obviously me and him were boys and everything. I’m this little 29-year old, small college guy in Wingate, North Carolina. I’m not really a sexy hire, obviously. For about 48 hours, he didn’t call. And I called him a couple of times. Finally, like three days later, he calls me, like Mike does, it’s 3 in the morning. He’s like, “Hey, do you want to come to Texas Tech?” I was like, “Yeah, well, no shit. Of course I want to come to Texas Tech.”
He goes, “Well, I got something.” I think he ended up hiring me like as a quality control guy or something for 50 grand or something like that. I don’t know.
I drove there the next day, and I was there for probably two months and he is still trying to hire this other guy. And it got to a point where it’s like, spring practice starts tomorrow. He brought me in. He goes, “Hey, do you want this receiver position?” I’m like, once again, “No shit. Of course I want this receiver position.” So he goes, “Well, I’ll give you a raise.” So I was the last guy to get hired on the staff.
Dykes: Mike was trying to hire a guy at Arkansas to coach receivers and Dana was gonna be a QC, but it didn’t happen.
Matsakis: That’s funny Sonny remembered that. Yeah, Fitz Hill, that’s the guy. I remembered visiting with him. I think he has his Ph.D. I know in my conversations with Mike, he always wanted Dana — or as he called him, Little Dana. It was for the same reason as why he wanted Bill Bedenbaugh. They played for him in the system. And it was more important to him to have guys that had a really good understanding of what it felt like to be in the shoes of a player.
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Leach: Fitz is a great guy. I was definitely planning to hire Dana. Gerald and the administration wanted me to hire people from big schools. They wanted to check my work. From a practical standpoint, I figured I’d slip (Dana) in last.
Matsakis: I think Mike made a pretty significant hire in bringing Dennis Simmons into the fold. Mike had known of him a little bit through Robert and I. Dennis had been at Cornell and he worked for a buddy of mine. Another guy who we interviewed and we didn’t hire was (former 49ers GM) Trent Baalke (a Jets scout at the time).
Simmons: I had no clue what I was getting into. My interview with Leach lasted til 4 a.m., just talking Mike kinda stuff. He had coached one of my older cousins at Valdosta. Robert (Anae) was falling in and out of sleep. Finally, he goes, “There’s no need to check him into the hotel.” It was time to go right back to the airport to fly home. I didn’t even know if I had the job or not.
I said, “Did I do well at this or not?” A couple of days later, Patty called me. They housed me in this tower. All of the coaches had already moved into places when I got there. All but Leach. He was across the hall from me. I was the last one to get there, so everybody but Mike moved out. That’s how he and I became so close. I would drive him to work. I was driving him home.
On Jan. 3, 2000, Leach filled out his defensive staff by hiring defensive backs coach Brian Norwood from Navy and Ruffin McNeill from Fresno State as linebackers coach. The only spot missing was a defensive grad assistant.
Ron Harris, San Antonio Churchill High School head coach, Leach’s first defensive line coach at Tech: Our first staff meeting had great energy. There were quite a few guys that already had previous relationships, and there was a lot of familiarity with a lot of guys on the staff. We just hit it off.
Holgorsen: It happened at like midnight, which is just so much Mike Leach, you know. We’re waiting on people to get in. Ruffin and Coach Anae were getting in late. Finally, everybody gets there. It’s like the most unofficial staff meeting ever. We’re just basically just sitting around BS-ing with each other. It’s like social hour. It’s not like a real staff meeting. It’s just social hour. We weren’t having beers or anything like that. There’s like a whole bunch of different conversations happening in one room. We’re planning recruiting because we’re going out on the road the next day, and nobody really kind of knew where to go. We all kind of had these separate little private conversations on trying to figure out where we need to go. It was like, I don’t care where you go, just go get players.
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We’re all like, “Where do we go?” He’s like, “Well, let me tell you.” So here’s a map of Texas. He drew nine circles across the map of Texas and says, “You nine guys go to these nine places.” And so we all like picked one of those little circles and we all just went to those nine places.
Clay McGuire, Texas State offensive line coach, Leach’s first recruit at Tech: I’d committed to the previous staff and I knew the coaching change was happening with Spike. I hadn’t heard anything from Leach and them. I got a call from a coach at Tech. I couldn’t understand a word he said other than he was coming to my house and he wanted directions. It was Bill. They put him on the road as a GA.
I was the only kid committed. Luckily for me, had they had any other guys on the board, I’d probably have been dropped. Since I was just the one, they were able to live with that one. I was it. I went on my official visit. I went by myself. I remember going in to talk with Mike and there was no big recruiting spiel. I go into the head coach’s office. We sit down. It was about a five-minute meeting. Usually, those things go 30 or 40 minutes. I was a quarterback in high school. I said, “I know what I did in high school doesn’t fit your offense. What position do you see me playing?”
“I just don’t see you playing quarterback here,” Leach says, “but we’ll figure it out when you get here.” It went into that kinda awkward silence where he doesn’t know what to say. After a few more seconds, he goes, “You good? Alright, I’ll see you in August.”
Nichol: You never knew when the staff meetings were gonna be. There was just so much that needed to be done. Hardly anybody had a computer in the office then. I remember hearing those conversations, how they were doing it on a mom and pop level. Somebody had said Spike had to pay out of his own pocket to fertilize the practice fields.
Dykes: I was the boring guy because I was the only sane person in the room. Nichol is definitely normal, but he has his own quirks, but he’s definitely normal. Ruffin’s normal. The defensive guys were all pretty normal except for McMackin. He was out there but sharp and really smart. He and Mike got along great. I think he would shake his head — this sumbitch is crazy — but they got along good.
Simmons: Everybody had strong personalities and big egos. McMackin had a huge ego. I think he liked Mike because he reminded him a little of Dennis Erickson. Manny was kinda slick about it, but he had an ego. He’s a good dude though. He did a lot of the stuff that Mike didn’t want to deal with when it came to administration, so he’d pawn it off on Manny. Manny created a lot of enemies that way. If we’re gonna be a top-notch program, I have an idea of what it looks like. At Tech, everything was about the cost.
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Mike doesn’t like conflict, so Ruff was his muscle before he had (strength coach) Bennie (Wylie). Mike used to call him the Prince of Darkness and Destruction. He was the discipline guy.
In a staff full of colorful characters, including the head coach, Brian Walsh was the consensus pick for the most unusual dude among the group.
Matsakis: He came from somewhere up in Kansas, I think. He was Greg McMackin’s guy.
Brian Walsh, car sales in Omaha, Neb., assistant on Leach’s first staff at Tech: I met McMackin and Leach through the Glazier Football Clinics. I was a clinic director. Before that, I’d been a GA at Washburn.
Bedenbaugh: He was like an intern. We were pretty good friends. He was an interesting dude. He was a great dude.
Leach: His office was in a closet. He was loyal as could be. He wasn’t always delicate about getting it done. He’d come over to people, “Coach McMackin needs it now!”
Walsh: I ruffled some feathers.
Ross: He was weird. He didn’t like me. He and I butted heads a lot.
Leach: Yeah, they did butt heads. It was kinda funny.
Dave Aranda, LSU defensive coordinator, Leach’s first defensive GA at Tech: That staff, man.
Harris: Dave had found out through the grapevine that we had an opening for a GA. Now I can say I knew him when. You knew almost instantly this guy is really, really, really smart. He was the proverbial gym rat, always asking questions, always watching film. Such a sponge.
Aranda: Ron Harris was a Cal Lu graduate (just as Aranda was), and he’d been on the staff (at Cal Lutheran), and I go visit him. I figured I know Ron. He’ll get us in and all of that. While I’m up there visiting him during his first spring, he offers me the GA job.
Simmons: He’s pretty much just like he is now. He was like the Bulls coach, Phil Jackson. He was a philosopher. He would walk around with the small dry erase stuff, drawing up formations all the time. You knew Dave was gonna be a good football coach. Greg liked him because he was smart and all about football. He’d make suggestions and Greg would be like, “Yeah, yeah, we probably need to do that.”
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Ross: I love that Dave Aranda has done so well. He was just a worker bee all of the time. Very zen. Didn’t talk a lot.
Ruffin McNeill: David did a great job for us. Worked his tail off. He was zen for days. “The Art of War” was Dave Aranda. It was fun.
Leach: He was very studious. He did dabble in philosophy a lot. He’d talk to the team, “If there is a crow, a wise man and a rock, what happens next?” He’d have some good circuitous points. A bunch of people would be confused. But it was fun.
Bill and Dave shared that office together. I think they both just ignored each other.
Bedenbaugh: We shared a downstairs office. Dave is Dave, you know I mean? Into all of that stuff, whatever you call it. Great dude. He would always eat strictly vegetables and noodles damn near every day.
He was really into football. Always visiting people. Always calling people. Very inquisitive about our offense and about what we’re trying to do. He was always learning.
Aranda: I enjoyed the talks with Leach all of the time. They were just so random and in-depth. I would drive him around. In recruiting, you could do that back then. He was just so insightful and so smart. He’s the only coach I’ve ever been around who just plays with people intellectually. It’s like exercise for him. I learned a lot from him.
For his new players and for his new staff, adapting to life in Leachland was quite the change. Lord knows, it was never dull.
Harris: It could be Sunday, Monday or whenever, he’d have his cup of coffee and come over to your office and he’d stay there for 30 minutes and he’d just talk a lot about things other than football, whether it was politics or movies or who knows. He made you feel very relaxed.
Dykes: I’ll never forget this: I took to him to the state track meet in Austin. We walk out of a late-night taco place at 2 in the morning. Mike runs into some homeless guy and starts talking to him. I’m sitting in the car, it’s running, and two hours later, he’s still talking to the guy. I’m just like, “What the fuck?!” That’s just Mike.
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Bedenbaugh: I knew him since I was 17. He was my coach. He recruited me. It was crazy. I’m not a big talker. We’d be on the phone for an hour, and he’d be the one doing all the talking — heck, I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about half the time. He’d be driving somewhere or sitting somewhere and just call and start talking — “What’s this like?” and “What’s this town like?”, all of that stuff.
B.J. Symons, banker, JPM Chase in Houston, Leach’s second starting QB at Tech: His quarterback meetings were so different. He might go on and on about what was on Howard Stern last night and shit that wasn’t even football-related. And then it’d be, “This guy’s covered. This guy is covered. Throw it to this guy.” It’s not like, “They’re in Cover 2 or they’re in Cover 3.” It was, “This guy is open. Throw it here.”
Kingsbury: He’s gonna get his knowledge across to you on a wide array of topics in those quarterback meetings. As a young quarterback, you learned not to ask too many questions other than on football.
Symons: You’re trying to learn the new offense, but there’s no playbook. They would just install plays and we would watch film and they would have each play was on tape. Then, we would take notes on the play. So it was, “Hey, we have no playbook. We’re gonna start with our quick game. Today, we’re gonna learn 6, which is four verticals, and we’re gonna learn 66, 617 and 619, and we’re gonna learn 8 and 618.”
They would put in a few plays at a time on a whiteboard and then each play had a videotape, and it was old-school VHS tape and we’d pop it in after the team meeting on offense, where we’d talk about the play. We’d break up for our position meetings and we’d watch, “OK, this is 6,” and we’d watch for 15 or 20 minutes or 30 minutes on that one play. The beauty of Mike Leach’s system is there’s not like 500 plays. There’s less than 50. Maybe not even that many. What he teaches is repetition. There’s like maybe 30 plays, and you’re gonna practice each one like 25 times, so by the time you’re on the field, nobody’s thinking about what they’re doing. You know where everyone’s gonna be.
Kingsbury: I think we were all excited. It was definitely a unique style with his approach to coaching and how simplistic he makes it. The thing that really jumped out to me was how he instills confidence in you with giving you free rein. From day one he lets you check stuff at the line of scrimmage.
It was different. I’d played in a spread in high school but never had that type of freedom to where you’re literally looking at the defense and if there’s a better play that you like, you’re able to check to it — just have a reason for doing it. Nobody was doing that at the time in our league, and probably not too many cats in the country were either.
Ross: Kliff’s great. He was really quiet at first. He was always there watching film. Then he started coming out of his shell, showing more personality.
Bedenbaugh: Heck, when I was a GA at Valdosta and (Leach) was the O-line coach, I didn’t know what I was doing. Leach was always open. He would listen and take your ideas, but he was gonna do what he gonna do. I felt comfortable saying whatever.
Symons: I remember my very first practice under Mike Leach. It was the spring of 2000. There was like a freezing rain storm of hail. It was so cold. Kliff and I were freezing. We’re looking at each other like, “This is nuts. Are we not gonna go inside?” We did have that bubble inside. My hands were shivering. The balls were so wet. My hand was red and brown. You couldn’t even feel the ball. Leach is out there, this is no big deal. We’re gonna execute. It doesn’t matter about anything. Elements. Wind. Snow. Rain. We’re gonna execute plays.
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Leach: We showed them this “Braveheart” film. Everybody charged out onto the field. It was a nice day. Then it started to get windy. Then it started to rain, then it started to hail — all in like an hour. So …
McGuire: I just remember it being insanely unorganized. Practices would go forever. We had crazy-long marathon practices. The structure and the schedule was so bad. I remember one time we had just enough time to get off the field after all of our post-practice work and go right to a meeting. A lot of guys got their ass ripped because they were trying to go over to the dorm to get something to eat. You just didn’t have time. Half of us just went right to the meeting and never had anything to eat. Kliff bought a bunch of guys calzones with his own money and brought ’em to the special teams meeting. Coach was hell-bent on his philosophy. He’s gonna get his work in. It doesn’t matter what the clock says. Obviously, over time it got better and better. It just seemed like nothing was ever how it was on the piece of paper you got. You just had to roll with it.
Simmons: Leach was big into movies. Every week you had to present a movie clip. So there was like a theme for the week. I think I did “Pulp Fiction” but I can’t remember. Brian Walsh did “Lonesome Dove.” We did it the whole year. You presented it to the whole team. At first, I think they liked it, but I think after a while it got kinda old.
Nichol: It was so different from Spike. We did a movie clip every single day. Every day. Dana was in charge of it and I’d help with it.
Aranda: Leach loved movies. He would have us get movie clips and the coaches would have to present them — “OK, here is the moral, here is the deal.” I think it was a good concept, but we did it like every day. Part of the game would be getting scripts together, getting these drawings together, getting the practice together and then Dana would have to go to Blockbuster Video and get videos. I would walk in and he’d be fast-forwarding this movie like “Tombstone”. “Hey, do you think you could talk about this?” It was crazy.
Leach: I think it did unify and bring things together. We were doing a quick message before each practice to show how it applies to integrate our philosophy.
In 2000, the Red Raiders went 7-6 and played in the GalleryFurniture.com Bowl. The low-point was a 58-3 home loss to No. 1 Nebraska. The staff says no one pointed any fingers in the wake of that loss, and the next week they went to No. 10 Kansas State and were barely beaten, 28-23. Kingsbury threw for 3,418 yards as a sophomore.
Leach’s second season saw his first win over a ranked opponent with a victory against No. 24 Kansas State, but a 7-5 season still had the Red Raiders fan base skeptical about the new coach.
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Ross: I think he owned one suit. I think one time he rolled it up and put it in a backpack. It was wrinkled. They wanted him to dress differently and keep different hours than he did. He just isn’t that person and isn’t ever gonna be that person. I said to him, “None of this will matter when you win. When you win and they get to know you, it’ll be different.”
Symons: Guys didn’t just buy in from the get-go. Guys didn’t buy in when you’re almost losing to North Texas at home. It probably took to year two or year three til people saw what you could do in this offense.
Simmons: The first two years was brutal. We’d spend half the time defending Mike. Most people there hated Mike. They wanted to run him out of town. It wasn’t til his last five or six years there where he was this beloved guy. The conference was different. Nobody was throwing the ball when he first got there. They saw him as this quirky dude with this quirky offense, and when you first meet him, he’s talking three steps ahead of you. Some of those people were like, “Is this dude high, drunk, on something?” He wasn’t a country club dude. He followed Spike, who was one of theirs, had all the one-liners, hung at the country club. Mike hates golf, so he wasn’t trying to do that. He’d show up for the dinner part and then we’d leave. Before him, they had Byron Hanspard and Bam Morris and a pretty decent running game and now this pass-happy guy is there, like if you don’t like me, I don’t like you.
Year Three, the 2002 season, turned out to be Leach’s breakthrough. The Red Raiders went 9-5. They beat No. 23 Texas A&M in overtime and No. 4 Texas. Kingsbury threw for more than 5,000 yards and 45 touchdowns and came in ninth for the Heisman. Briles became the first Leach assistant to get a head coaching job when he was hired at Houston.
Dykes: It was fun to feel like you were doing something different. About my third year, I started seeing people do what we were doing and that’s when I started thinking, “Wow, there may be something here.” We started getting a little bit better players and you could start to tell where this thing was headed.
McGuire: We had a couple of stretches where we had 300-yard passing games and then, all of a sudden, we started leading the nation in passing. My sophomore year, Kliff threw for 5,000 yards and we won nine games. I never forget that somebody had mentioned, “What are we gonna do when Kliff’s gone?” B.J. heard ’em. He’s like, “What, you don’t think I can throw for 5,000?” Everybody just kinda looked at him like “Oh, shit.” Then, when B.J. threw for like 5,800 yards, everybody was like alright, whatever we’re doing is working.
Ross: Mike went from being this odd person to having this cult following.
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Kingsbury: There were a ton of college and high school coaches visiting us. Everybody wanted to figure out what the magic was. But there’s only one guy that has had that type of success everywhere he’s been and still remains true to the style of offense that he believes in.
Walsh: They would X and O with Billy or Sonny or whoever all day and then I would have to take them out for the evening and all that. By that third or fourth year, we’d probably have 80 to 100 staffs coming in.
I’ve forgotten a bunch — (Denver Broncos assistant) Zack Azzanni, Tom Herman, (Jets assistant) Derek Frazier, (Ohio State O-line coach) Greg Studrawa (who came to Lubbock while on Urban Meyer’s staff at Bowling Green), (Philadelphia Eagles assistant) Cory Undlin, (Texas OC) Tim Beck and the guy Mack Brown hired from Ole Miss (North Carolina OC Phil Longo).
Dykes: The big mistake we made, probably, was we were too open. It could have bought us a couple more years, and I was probably the worst one. I was always talking to people about what we were doing. I just thought it was part of what you’re supposed to do, but looking back I wish we would’ve buttoned it up a little bit more. It’s gonna eventually get out where you have a couple of guys leave and it permeates, but you can buy yourself years if you don’t share with everybody.
A lot of the guys probably learned and have been more secretive about who they talk to and who they don’t talk to based on that experience.
Kingsbury: I don’t think any of us knew all of the different ways that it would shoot off and the success it would have and how it would change the game of college football. I just knew at the time that these guys are really sharp and they knew what they were doing. I just wanted to play. I never expected to coach. Looking back, it was a blessing to be around all of those guys.
Holgorsen: I feel like I’m going through a damn Air Raid reunion this year. We got (former Leach assistant) Lincoln (Riley) and the boys game one. Mike and the boys game three. (Former Leach assistant) Seth (Littrell) and that group Week 4 and Sonny Week 7. How about that? And on top of that we play (Leach’s former quarterback at Oklahoma Josh) Heupel and Central Florida.
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Dykes: At the end of every year, he’d send us all out and say, “Go find something and bring it back.” We’d come back with all these ideas, and he’d say, “If we’re adding this, we’re taking something else out. What are we taking out?”
It always got frustrating. You always felt like it limited your growth a little bit, but that’s why it worked. But at the end of the day, Mike was the guy that was right. It works because it’s so simple. Your quarterback can get you out of bad plays instead of calling plays. Mike’s play calls are no big deal. He calls the game on 1st and 10 like he calls it on 3rd and 12. Just like he calls it on 3rd and 2. If you’re trying to defend it, it’s a pain in the ass. I remember being on the other sideline and going, “What the fuck? Why can’t we stop this? We know they’re gonna run a slant.” And it’s because it’s so simple and they rep the heck out of it and do it over and over again. It’s all about the execution. He gets that part of it. Everybody else has taken it and put this stuff on it.
Glenn Thomas, Baylor co-offensive coordinator, student manager on Leach’s first staff at Tech: He made the concept of simplicity something to be really conscious of.
Matsakis: Mike was so comfortable in his own skin, that he would take input from everybody and weigh it out. Mike’s secret weapon is his ability to ask a great question and come to a conclusion that makes him successful.
Dykes: The reason why Mike’s offenses are still good is because he is the one guy that still runs the pure Air Raid. The one guy who still vertical sets with the offensive line. And if you’re gonna do that, you have to get huge O-linemen and you’ve gotta have a real simple run game. You can’t pull guys. And you gotta completely, 100 percent buy-in, and he does. Dana is completely different. Kliff is more NFL stuff. They run a couple of Air Raid concepts. They’re gonna throw the screens but they’re not a vertical set team. They have a more diverse run game. I don’t know that anyone else in D-I is a true Air Raid guy. The thing is we all are Air Raid guys because we learned how to do it. The thing is the Air Raid is not really plays. It’s basically the drills, it’s basically the fundamentals and the simplicity and the repetitive nature in which you practice and packaging it all together. That’s what makes the Air Raid, in my opinion. It’s more of philosophy on how to do things.
Everybody’s running cross, stick, smash. What’s the true Air Raid, it’s mesh, curl-wheel, it’s cross. That was the old five-step passing game. Everybody has a more diverse rushing game and very few people run mesh any more, but if you watch Mike play, they run mesh 20 times a game. And everybody says the same thing — We’re just not very good at mesh — and then you watch Washington State and they just kick everybody’s ass on mesh. It’s because Mike runs it so much and they’re just so good at it. Nobody can stop it. That’s why they’re still just a pain in the ass.
Ruffin McNeill, Oklahoma assistant head coach, Leach’s first linebackers coach: Sometimes the hardest thing about keeping it simple is keeping it simple. My dad was a coach. He used to say, “Clear mind means fast legs,” and Mike understands that. The discipline means finding ways to keeping it simple.
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Bedenbaugh: I learned a lot of the mentality from Leach. He was my O-line coach. The mentality of how you play offensive line hasn’t changed. We still block certain fronts the same exact way that we did back then. We’ve changed splits and how we set, but I think what it goes back to my mentality. That, to me, is the most important thing.
Dykes: He’s the most authentic dude that I’ve ever met in my life. He’s so stubborn, and that’s part of what makes him so good. That’s why you don’t ever bet against him. It’s hard to be good friends with Mike Leach. He’s a remarkable guy to be an acquaintance with because he’s fun, but if you get too far in with him, it’s complicated. One thing that drives you crazy about Mike is it’s always about Mike.
I get fired at Cal, and everybody starts calling you. I get a phone call from Leach about an hour after. “What happened?”
“I got no idea.”
So he goes, “You got any players I need to recruit?”
I said Mike, “When a guy gets fired and he’s got a 3-month-old little baby, you gotta act interested for at least five minutes. That’s the rule. You have to act interested in somebody else’s well-being for at least five minutes before you can start talking about getting transfer players.” And that’s just Mike. And he’s like, “What does that mean?”
“It means exactly what I just fucking said. I’ve known you for 20 years. You’ve got to at least act interested for a little while.”
Everybody’s got friends like that. He’s still your good friend, but he just doesn’t get it.
Simmons: You can say he’s weird and say a lot of things about him, but there’s a lot of dudes in the profession whose careers were blossoming, who owe a lot to that man, myself included, and he revolutionized the conference.
Holgorsen: We all knew we had a niche that nobody was really doing, and all of us knew what it was. So we felt like we had a chance to be pretty successful. Now, did I ever imagine it’d catch like it caught? No. But back then, we were just known as a “system” offense and none of the quarterbacks had a chance to get drafted, few of the receivers had a chance to get drafted. We just felt like it was a niche that worked and nobody really gave us any credit for it. And all of that’s changed. All of the colleges out there want it and, obviously, a lot of our personnel is getting drafted.
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Dykes: My dad always said they really wanted different. Well, they got different. Mike was the perfect fit, at the perfect place, at the perfect time. I hated the way it ended there.
Walsh: I don’t think (AD Gerald) Myers was against us per se, but I know the president was. I know the old boy establishment there was. There were people that wanted us fired from the get-go. And we’re lucky we didn’t get fired. I know I ruffled feathers and there’s probably a handful of people that are there that still hate my guts, but I know that Adam James shit wouldn’t have gone down if I’d have been there. I’d have nipped it in the bud. I would’ve put Craig James in his place.
Dykes: Once every two years I write Leach a letter. And I write Hal Mumme a letter. I always say the same thing. I really appreciate what you guys have done for me. I would not be in the position I’m in were it not for you.
Ross: I still remember him coming in with his flip-flops, khaki shorts and Hawaii shirt and thinking, “How in the world is this guy gonna fit in?” As it turned out, we all fit into his world.
Editor’s note: Bruce Feldman co-authored “Swing Your Sword: Leading the Charge in Football and Life” with Mike Leach in 2011.
(Top photo of the 2000 Texas Tech roster, with current and future college and NFL coaches highlighted, courtesy Texas Tech Athletics)
