Things I learned from Mike Leach, forever a Pirate and an honorary DGD
Mike Leach left us and Mississippi State as ‘The Pirate.’ If you see the tributes that honor his life, you will inevitably see another term that describes our beloved bandit:
‘Treasure.’
I’m sure the late Coach, husband and father would recognize that ironic symmetry, if he didn’t appreciate it.
‘Ya know, it’s kinda crazy when ya think about that, ‘cuz I like pirates ‘a’course. And it’s not often that a pirate is actually the treasure he seeks.
Pirates aren’t that romantic or idealistic, ya see.
So I don’t necessarily subscribe to all ‘a that from a practical or historical sense, but I don’t know that I can disagree with it, either.’
The irony I see in Leach’s pirate persona is that, typically, pirates are the ones who do the plundering.
There’s a dozen casks of rum in a port halfway across the world?
Yo-ho, let’s chart a course.
Someone left a bunch of doubloons in an old, oaken chest on an island somewhere?
Arrgh, let’s get that booty.
There’s a job opening in Starkville?
Aye, fetch me my sword.
But in many ways, Mike Leach was anything but a pirate
He wasn’t eye-patched up and impulsively swashbuckling his way to someone else’s valuable possessions.
No, it was Leach’s route-tree treasure that College Football’s playbook pirates seized and used as they saw fit.
It was Leach’s mind that shared outrageous, witty gems on Pac-12 mascot battles, ‘The Art of War’ and marriage for us to take and enjoy.
Yes, he battled the crosswinds of College Football monotony in order to unearth his offensive revolution.
And Mississippi State did manage to fly its Jolly Roger aboard Captain Kiffin’s Oxford, Mississippi mast to end the Bulldogs’ regular season – and Leach’s career – with a victory.
But in a true, historical sense, greed motivates the pirate up until the very end.
The map to his treasure, folded neatly in his breast pocket, never sees the light of day.
Mike Leach bucked those buccaneer tendencies and dropped a pin at his trove’s precise, triangulated location.
It’s still right there at the top of his Twitter timeline.
All Mike Leach did was share his bounty with anyone who wanted to partake
And no matter which teams Mike Leach coached, he didn’t just leave a scrap of the map behind.
He Xerox’d copies and thumbtacked them to the walls.
He tattooed it on players’, staffers’ and colleagues’ psyches without fear, for better or worse.
Sometimes his maps were difficult to follow.
Not everyone enjoyed what it took to track his dotted lines. There were mutinies and defectors along the way.
He had to walk the plank.
But show me a life’s voyage without seasickness, sea monsters and cannon fire, and I’ll show you a voyage that isn’t worth its salt.
Mike Leach taught me that being an expert isn’t always an advantage
A one-on-one pirate fight is a duel.
Predictable, straight-forward, kind of bloody.
That’s what College Football used to look like back in the ’80’s when Leach worked closely – and learned differently – from LaVell Edwards’s BYU football program.
Leach’s offensive innovations alongside Hal Mumme and as a head coach proved that a pirate doesn’t always have to conquer the sea.
Some pirates change up the terrain and take to the air to do their raidin’.
And as it turned out, that’s where an ex-future-lawyer could really rattle his cutlass in a way that echoed through the football depths and ages.
It wasn’t a traditional duel anymore. But Mike Leach still wanted it to be bloody.
True innovators often think differently than the rest of their peers. They ask questions. They share what they’re thinking and don’t care if you think they’re wrong.
Yes, it’s a cliché, but Leach lived it and we all saw it.
Not only did he do it differently. He made others chart new courses, too.
Look at history. Look at your industry. Significant innovators don’t always cruise the calmest currents.
Some of the game’s most significant coaches don’t always play football at a high level.
They don’t always win awards, championships and accolades, either
Leach never won a National Championship. He never claimed a conference title.
He did not coach a Heisman Trophy winner.
True football historians and fans measure Mike Leach’s life and career with a different ruler.
They measure it by the tactical and strategic advantages he discovered within his industry. They measure it by the fact that he inspired other football minds to keep using them.
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He was, and will continue to be, the wind in so many sails.
Championship coaches and their Heisman Trophy-winning, first-round NFL Draft picks measure it by their resumés and by the generational-wealth contracts they sign.
We measure Mike Leach’s legacy by his persona, and in the curious spyglass through which he viewed our world.
If you’re a ‘Friday Night Lights’ fan, you measure it by Leach’s gas station ‘Swing Your Sword’ speech (in which the future Mississippi State Bulldog cameos with former Georgia Bulldog / ‘Coach Eric Taylor’ actor, Kyle Chandler).
Some of my best friends and I still measure it by the time we watched #6 Texas Tech upset #1 Texas in a Jacksonville hotel room after the Georgia-Florida game.
(Even though / because I was a Georgia undergrad at the time, I still remember Graham Harrell‘s dime to Michael Crabtree with much more clarity than that year’s Florida Cocktail Party.)
And that’s what made Mike Leach the best Pirate this sport ever knew
He discovered an entirely new part of the globe and all of the football riches it contained.
Then he invited all of his crew to one big pirate party every time he spoke.
Not all of them attended. Mike Leach wasn’t for everyone.
I can’t imagine all of his fellow coaches understood him. Many administrators probably avoided him in the halls. Players either bought in or shipped out.
But man, he was him.
If you appreciated him, you learned from him at some point. Maybe you even took his Mississippi State course in ‘Insurgent Warfare and Football Strategy.’
He probably made you laugh.
And I’m here to tell you, even if you didn’t appreciate him, you know exactly who he was. No cryptic treasure map required.
How many people can we say that about these days, or any days?
Leach was one of one, and no coach that comes after him will ever replicate it
Selfishly, I’m upset that we won’t ever get to hear him talk about the College Football Playoff again, and that no one ever asked him about Buc-ee’s bathrooms on the record.
There are more than enough YouTube videos and rambling press conferences to chuckle at and share, of course.
But more than that, Coach’s impact remains because his work is work that’s worth knowing.
His story is one that’s worth telling.
It lives on through the myth that is Mike Leach:
The human. The ball coach. The Pirate.
