Another bad news hits the Mississippi: The head coach of the Mississippi shed tears as four of his star players made a final decision…
In the grand sweep of college football, the majority of coaches who stand out as unique individuals did so as a result of their consistent winning performances. In fact, Mike Leach won a lot. But Leach, who passed away on Monday at the age of 61 from a heart ailment, according to his family, made his mark on the annals of the sport by being unique rather than superior to everyone else. There will always be juggernauts in college football. Just as Saban demonstrated that the game could find another Bear Bryant, it will eventually find another Nick Saban. There won’t be another Mike Leach found.
Right now, hardly much in college football is novel, particularly when it comes to game strategy. Someone has called before for each play that we see on Saturday or Sunday. If not, the If nothing else, the coach who dialed it up today took a lot of cues from what other coaches did yesterday. Every configuration, personnel package, and tiny imperfection in the pre-snap motion has been used on another field.
Leach, however, did not use the same plans. He had all the coaching of one. Leach changed an entire sport by being relentlessly himself. It would have been easier to count the number of his peers who didn’t offer well wishes to the public than to count those that did, despite the fact that he made innumerable friends while he struggled for his life this week. During his career, Leach faced opponents as well, and occasionally, those opponents had strong arguments that were overshadowed by the cult of personality surrounding him. The designer A person of stark contrasts in a sport full of them was behind one of the few offenses in the sport that was truly distinctive. His absence will be felt in his game.
With his mentor and coaching partner Hal Mumme, Leach brought to college football an offensive that was that most uncommon of things: novel. Their system was dubbed the Air Raid. It is precisely what it sounds like: a plan based on a flurry of passes. Its brilliance is not in the quantity of passes, but rather in the way they emerge from a select few formations and with a limited number of route-running combinations that quarterbacks and wide receivers must become proficient in. The Perfect Pass, a book about the method that author S.C. Gwynne describes and which my mother once told me I should read, Mumme and Leach’s invention of the Air Raid at an Iowa college in the late 1980s and early 1990s represented a major change. They progressively advanced their program within the sport until they were appointed head coaches of the major conferences.
Leach’s imagined Air Raid was as much a playbook as it was a way of life for football players. Mumme and he hypothesized that by having their offensive become exceptionally proficient at a small number of passing plays, they could compensate for a lack of talent. After that, they may keep calling them. Leach-coached teams would use passes intended to split the defense and create conflict instead of the run plays that had historically dominated the game. The plays would be successful.
