Mike Leach changed recruiting in the same way he changed offense
There will be a lot written and said about Mike Leach over the next hours and days. He will be rightfully remembered as one-of-a-kind, a trailblazer on and off the field, a man who bucked convention at every turn.
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Unfortunately, I did not know Mike Leach personally. I met him a dozen times or more, but he wasn’t really a recruiting guy, at least not in the traditional sense of many of his contemporaries, so we never struck up a relationship.
Yet I learned something from him, and it’s something not many will talk about this week. So I’m going to mention it here.
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Folks talk about his “offense” and all of the inventions of it.
At its core, it’s about execution, timing, and spacing. It’s “basketball on grass”, or that’s what it was called at the very start.
As a byproduct of that offense, he should be credited with a recruiting innovation, too.
That invention is the creation of a slot receiver who was not the typical personnel the “star gazers” such as myself were looking for at the time. Leach found value in smaller, productive high school players that others eschewed.
Red Raiders like Nehemiah Glover, Wes Welker and Danny Amendola were relatively unknown names in recruiting. Yet Leach saw something in each of them that would make his offense tick.
None of those Tech receivers had another Big 12 offer to my knowledge.
Welker was going to walk-on elsewhere before Leach offered him a scholarship at the very last minute. Glover was so small, his own high school coach wasn’t exactly sure if he could make it against bigger competition. And Amendola, well, he was the most recruited of the bunch. But he didn’t have an from Texas, A&M, OU or LSU even though he was right there at The Woodlands.
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Leach’s legacy will be talked about for days, years even. But few will mention just how he changed recruiting.
Of course, it wasn’t just the receiver spot he corrected for.
It was also at quarterback, where he much preferred accuracy and intelligence over NFL attributes like size and arm strength. Kliff Kingsbury, Sonny Cumbie, and Graham Harrell were never the prototypical guys that would be offered by bigger programs. Of those, Harrell was the only one with offers from larger schools.
With his offensive inventions, Leach required a new prototype of talent.
It was no longer about who ran the fastest or who threw the ball the hardest or could take the biggest hit, it was about who ran the best routes and who could get the ball there quickly and on time.
I’m sorry for the loss of Mike Leach. He was an unapologetic innovator. And the game of football is better for it.
