Lincoln Riley opens up on memories of Mike Leach, his impact on college football

USC head coach Lincoln Riley spent his early coaching days under Mike Leach, one of the most brilliant offensive minds the game has seen who passed away last December. What Leach brought to college football on and off the field was hard to quantify, but on the ‘Move the Sticks with Daniel Jeremiah & Bucky Brooks’, Riley did his best to detail his impact on himself and the college football landscape as a whole.

“Yeah, it’s a huge loss for obviously his family, for a lot of us as colleagues, friends personally, just kind of a shock. One of those kind of figures in your life that you feel like is always gonna be there,” Riley said. “It brings back a lot of great memories, obviously he opened doors for myself and so many of us other coaches. His coaching tree is pretty well documented and really pretty unbelievable for the amount of time he was a head coach of what all these different people have been able to go out do.”

Before Lincoln Riley became one of the most accomplished young head coaches in college football, he was a walk-on quarterback at Texas Tech under then-head coach Mike Leach. Riley would go on to join Leach’s coaching staff in 2003 and stay a part of it for seven seasons, learning the offensive principles that he and many others would go on to use for years to come.

“Had a huge impact on the game, you look at how the game’s played now today primarily from the shotgun, the way the passing game’s evolved at really all levels of football to being such a primary part of the game. Mike had an impact on that,” Riley explained. “And then on top of it the things I’ll miss the most, the crazy stories, the fun experiences, the late hours together. Too many to really count.”

Leach’s air raid offensive attack was a revolutionary scheme with plenty of lure surrounding it, as Brooks referenced a story where Leach apparently spent an entire week just running the four verticals passing concept at practice.

“Mike was really a master of that,” Riley said. “Our game-planning sessions there, we were game-planning but it was just more what formation are we gonna run four verts out of this week. That was about the extent of it. But I think it was a great lesson for all of us that came up in that because as coaches we can make the mistake of outsmarting ourselves or at times outsmarting our players.”

Leach’s methods may have seemed puzzling at times, but they worked. His coaching philosophies were effective and are still a major fabric in how offense is played to this day, and will likely continue to be for many years to come.

“Deep down competitively you want to do your part, you want to have your impact and you feel this push at times to do something new when in reality teach what you do very well. Like you said, build up their confidence and then the guys ability to take that and go apply that in pressure situations and really be able to execute at a high level,” Riley said. “That’s what he built it upon and it really withstood the test of time, from Kentucky where he was with Hal Mumme those early years all the way on to Mississippi State there at the end. The offense was always relevant, it was always productive and it did not change much but he was very very committed to it and that’s why it worked so well for all those years.”