Leach dismissal no shock

Texas Tech’s firing of football coach Mike Leach isn’t near the surprise the national media is making it out to be.

The real shocker, especially to those who have been around the Big 12 since he arrived 10 years ago, is that Leach’s rebel-for-his-own-cause act lasted this long.

Leach, the 13th head coach at Tech, has more wins (84) and the second-best winning percentage (.661) in the school’s 84-year football history.

In the early years, the quirky guy with the law degree from Pepperdine and the crazy Air Raid offense was a national media darling and a local folk hero.

Leach, whose coaching stops include Iowa Wesleyan and a club team in Finland, took great delight in ignoring the traditional axioms of successful football.

He passed nearly every play. He gambled on wild fourth-down chances. He called timeouts to try to change tempo like a basketball coach. He ran up the score. And he said about anything he wanted — out loud, too.

But it didn’t take long for those of us who wander the Big 12 to begin hearing that Leach’s iconoclastic behavior wasn’t limited to the football field.

Word was he was awful at the schmooze-the-boosters game. He didn’t just snub them. At some gatherings, he told them that they didn’t know what they were talking about. That’s a huge no-no.

In time, Leach’s “I don’t suffer fools’’ approach extended to the Tech administration, too.

His seemingly constant sniffing around for other jobs irked his bosses and led the agent community to refer to him as “Happy Feet.’’

Leach has been linked in the past with openings at Tennessee, Auburn, Illinois and UCLA. Two longtime coaching acquaintances told me that Leach nearly begged Miami of Florida to hire him. But no one ever did. Wonder why?

Then about a year ago, Leach injected himself into the coaching search at Washington without telling Tech Athletic Director Gerald Myers.

During ensuing contract extension talks at Tech last winter, Myers wanted a clause inserted that any similar future act by Leach would be a fireable offense and would subject Leach to a $1.5 million penalty.

When Leach and Myers reached an impasse, personally and professionally, Tech Chancellor Kent Hance finished the five-year, $12.7 million deal. That occurred less than a day before a special meeting of the Tech Board of Regents to discuss Leach’s fate.

Leach’s response to the uneasily acrimonious situation that humiliated some of his superiors: “I have no regrets.’’

Moral to the story: You can poke your bosses with a stick for only so long, regardless of your success. For a recent example, see “Mark Mangino, University of Kansas, resigned under pressure, Nov. 2009.’’

Today, the talking heads are way too fixated on Leach’s alleged mistreatment of Red Raiders wide receiver Adam James as the main reason for the firing. The James allegation simply sets up a firing “for cause’’ case for Tech to try to avoid a big buyout.

It was Leach thumbing his nose at authority far too many times over far too many years that got us to this point.

Tech folks also squirmed uncomfortably over Leach regularly showing off for the media while his players — many of whom didn’t get near the national attention they deserved — were kept away from reporters and far from the spotlight.

Leach, who has chastised players for being prima donnas and glory hounds, posed for a Texas Monthly cover shot in September dressed in a pirate’s eye patch.

Leach, who has lambasted players for being lazy and not putting in the time needed to get better, spent the night before the Texas game this season filming a cameo for the TV show “Friday Night Lights.’’

And then there is this beauty of a story, recounted by former Minnesota coach Glen Mason to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Texas Tech and Minnesota were picked to play in the 2006 Insight Bowl. One of the perks was a trip to New York to promote the game and be present when Nasdaq opened on Wall Street.

Mason said Leach showed up for dinner at a fancy Manhattan restaurant wearing an Under Armour T-shirt, khakis and a sport coat. After dinner, Mason went back to his hotel, while Leach said he wanted to stay out a while.

The next morning, Mason said, Leach showed up at Nasdaq in the same clothes after an apparent all-nighter. Both head coaches and their athletic directors were asked to speak for about 30 seconds.

Leach went last. His comment: “I don’t have much to add. So as we say in Lubbock, ‘Guns Up!’” That led stock traders to dive for cover and security forces to come running.

That stuff is funny for a while. Then it grows stale. Eventually, it becomes embarrassing and reason to make changes.

Last winter, when it appeared Leach might get dumped, the hot replacement candidate was BU coach Art Briles, a Tech graduate and a former Red Raider assistant to Leach but with a much more benign personality.

Such a coaching move from one Big 12 South Division school to another would be a rare and surprising development.

Colorado’s Dan Hawkins is still a Big 12 football head coach, while Leach and Mangino aren’t.

As long as college athletics are more important than college academics, this will continue to be a problem. How can we tell that college athletics trump all at these school? Show me ONE professor—anywhere—whose college paycheck exceeds 2-1/2 million dollars a year. Athletic scholarships are given to hundreds upon hundreds of students and the students who are more interested in actually learning something have to pay higher tuition to compensate for it. “Athletes” on a free ride take up scarce slots in courses.

We watched for years as Bob Knight plied his boorish behavior all over Indiana, and later Texas, whith his sole justification being from the moronic callers into my Indiana-based radio show who repeated the same brain-dead refrain when asked to justify Knight’s existence and indefensible salary: “Budd-eee wins BAWLLL-games!”

Coaches like this are frequently quivering cowards outside the locker room where no one would dare challenge their wrath: Knight had a weekly call-in radio show but callers were never, ever allowed to actually talk directly to Knight—their questions were written down by screeners and the in-studio hosts asked only those questions that would not upset Indiana’s basketball messiah. Broadasters or print journalists who asked questions that upset the cowardly Knight found their press credentials pulled.

Even more pathetic is that these young adults who were in fact students were taught to idolize such jagdorkery and eventually accepted this as acceptable adult behavior. Just like Ward Churchill who hid behind the farcical shield of “Academic Freedom” while spewing his hatred all over Colorado, the Knights of the world cloak themselves in their contracts and administrators who are even more weak-kneed who dare not challenge the coach. This sad sack in Texas has been widely quoted calling the college’s administration names, he should have been launched for that the first time it happened, just as the rest of us would be launched for publicly denigrating your employer’s senior leadership. The fact that they allowed him to stay “caussee wins bawwll games” instead of ridding the school of this pot-bellied cancer makes them guilty by complicity. It is ironic that the coach that must also promote physical fitness among athletes is so morbidly obese himself—”those tho can’t...teach.” Shame on the university president as well—he should be replaced immediately by a college administrator who wants to run a college and not a football program.

The real fault, however, does not lie with these coaches—they are a symptom of the diesase. The cause is college adminitrators who let these oversized contracts to athletics coaches without instant termination clauses for asinine behavior, and the host organism is colleges who cowtow to alumni who demand football and basketball dominance.

I have no problem with college athletics—but its importance in this country is shameful, and sends a deafneningly loud message to the rest of the world: We’re ready to have our butts handed to us. Make athletes find the cash or loans to attend these uber-expensive schools like people who can’t throw or catch a ball have to do.

Nor is this a blanket indictment of athletics coaches. Many are hardworking employees with a real talent for the games that they coach, a love for the players in their charge, and who want to see their students succeed off the field of play. You rarely hear of these people because they just do their job, frequently at smaller scale schools whose sports teams are what they are supposed to be—an adjunct to the higher ideal of higher education. And for their quiet, unassuming performance they earn around what professors do, and frequently less, rather than quintupling the salary of the presient of the university.

Perhaps, in fact almost certainly, the caliber of college athletics will suffer, but if all schools are forced to select athletes from among deserving students, instead of seeking people solely based on athletic ability and making them students ahead of others whose intellectual performance actually merits admission, college athletics will still be competitive, albeit at a lower overall level of performance. But until this country really needs to compete on the world economic stage based on the pass-rush or accuracy form the three point line, this change is what we really need.

You don’t see college baseball or hockey coaches inking 12.7 million dollar contracts...because education in America turns out what America demands of it:

Good football players and good basketball players.

—PP

And we know all of the dirt in this article is true because.... I don’t know a thing about Leach but I should think his players will have more real information than the media.

And maybe the team trainer and team physician would know, too:

A Texas Tech athletic trainer told university officials he did not agree with Mike Leach's treatment of receiver Adam James after the player was diagnosed with a concussion.

In an affidavit released Saturday by the university, Texas Tech trainer Steve Pincock said he told James he was "sorry" for having placed the player inside an equipment shed near the practice field.

On Dec. 21, Pincock spoke with Tech officials, telling them that he did not agree with that "form of treatment for anyone" and that Leach "wanted James to be uncomfortable."

In an interview a day later, team physician Dr. Michael Phy told university officials that James "may not have been harmed" but he "considered this practice inappropriate."

The affidavits were dated Jan. 1.

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