Jump to content

Mike Leach to the SEC (Mississippi St)

Hiphopopotamos

By Hiphopopotamos
in Football

 Share

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 489
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Popular Posts

msucolt45
msucolt45
Damor
Damor

This is awesome.  Wife is a State grad, so I've loosely paid attention to them in the past, but now I think I'm more excited about this hire than I am our coordinators.  

Hiphopopotamos
Hiphopopotamos

Posted Images

Bullneck

Bullneck 19,454

Posted
Posted
6 hours ago, Liquor and Poker said:

Aside from the aggy lulz, it's a really interesting hire to me.  I always took MSU fans for reactionary, angry, inbred folks who long for the days when football was played by "tough guys" and scores were in the 6-3 range.  

+ rep for the proper use of the word "reactionary."

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32,543

Posted
Posted

Not sure if this is in the other Leach thread, and they are from last summer, and it's paywalled on The Athletic (not gonna copy the entire thing here, go subscribe if you haven't already) but there were two Leach stories---one is about what goes on in his QB room, and the other was about his first team at Tech.  Great, great articles:

https://theathletic.com/1138379/2019/08/15/what-the-is-going-on-right-now-inside-mike-leachs-qb-meetings/

 

Spoiler

Austin Apodaca, 2012-13: It’s something you can’t really fabricate. All this stuff is true. You can ask any of us who have been in the room with him.

Connor Halliday, 2012-14: His first meeting, he had just gotten there and I was expecting him to install the offense. Everybody had their notebooks out ready to go. I think we got there at like 6 o’clock at night and were there until 9:30. He didn’t speak one word about football.

Jesse Brown, 2012-13: I had heard stories that he was this pirate guy when he first came, and he really wasn’t into pirates as much as I thought he was going to be. He wasn’t what I was expecting. But I don’t really know what I was expecting, either. I guess I didn’t expect him to be, uh, so weird.

Halliday: On his way in from Spokane, he almost got in a car crash. There was a snowstorm that day and a semi truck had rolled, and he was talking about how dangerous it is for semis to drive in the snow…I was already a huge Leach fan, so I knew a little bit about his formations and a few plays, so I wrote down a few things in my notebook. I was excited to get the meeting started. But the only thing I wrote down in big, bold letters was, “What the fuck is going on right now?”

Christian Jorgensen, 2015: I’ll never forget the first meeting. It was fall camp, and I remember we were slotted for a two or two-and-a-half-hour meeting. It ended up running like five-plus, and it was insane. I remember at that point being like, “OK, we’re in this …”

Apodaca: Every single day there was some shit that popped off that you were like, “What in the world?”

Casey Brink, 2016-18: It’s crazy.

Jorgensen: It was crazy.

Brink: Did you see our Christmas card photos we took as a quarterback group this year when we were holding Leach up? Other programs don’t have stuff like that. Nobody is having that much fun.

 

Here is your Coug QB Group Christmas Card (featuring our fearless leader)! Merry Christmas ya filthy animals!

View image on Twitter
 
 
 
 

 

Brink: Everything with Leach at first glance is crazy, right? But then you’ve got to unpack it and be like, “OK, but is it that crazy?”

 

 

Brink: Our No. 1 rule was: Never say or ask or do anything that would get him talking about anything besides the film.

Apodaca: We would get pissed at people in the meeting room if they asked a question toward the end of the meeting. We would have these fall camp meetings that went until 9:30 at night and if there was a young freshman in there asking questions, we were all looking at him like, “Oh my God, dude, shut up because we will be in here for an hour and a half more on this subject alone. Stop asking questions, damn it.”

Brink: We’d have people sit in our meetings all the time, and it got to the point that our quarterbacks would say to the guys coming to the meeting, “Look, we’re glad to have you here. But don’t. Say. Anything. Because the second you do, that’s going to be the focus of this meeting, and then we’ll all be here all night.”

Tyler Bruggman, 2013: There was one time Connor, a veteran, made a rookie mistake. Sundays are typically long days, and we had finished the film from the game before. We were ready to head off to dinner. And then Connor made a rookie mistake and asked about the economy crash. I just remember Coach Leach putting the film clicker down and saying, “You know, it’s kind of a long answer, but it’s worth talking about.” So at that point, I knew we were going to be stuck in there for a while.

Jorgensen: There were definitely games going on within the quarterbacks. Leach would cycle through stories and then you’d get guys trying to trigger certain stories. They knew what to say in order to get him to go off on a tangent.

Brink: One of the great stories on that was early on my first year. Luke (Falk) was getting so perfect at his craft, and Luke loved making sure he got out to the practice field early enough to get his full warm-up in. So we would be in there waiting for Leach, and Luke would put on this serious face and be like, “I don’t care what you guys do, no matter what, nobody say shit, nobody ask anything, just let him come in and do his thing because I need to get on the practice field.” Classic Tyler Hilinski, he would wait until there would be maybe five or 10 minutes left in film and he would just be like, “So, Coach, what do you think about …”

Connor Neville, 2017-18: You could see Luke losing his shit in the corner. Just like, “Come on, I just want to get the fuck out of here.”

Brink: Luke would be staring daggers across the table, and Tyler would be covering his mouth because he would be cracking up.

Isaac Dotson, 2013: I was playing QB at the time, and we had our first position meeting, and 90 percent of the meeting had nothing to do with football. Maybe five plays into watching film, something happened that sparked a classic Mike Leach tangent. For at least an hour, he sat there rewinding and playing the same play over and over while he talked about everything from growing up in Wyoming to having a pet raccoon, getting paddled by the principal at his junior high, the origins of football and eventually just a full-blown Native American history lesson. The one-hour meeting lasted probably three hours. I remember looking at the veteran QBs in the room with a ‘what is happening right now?’ look on my face, but I could tell by their reactions that this was just a normal thing.

Brink: Sometimes they’re literally out of nowhere. We’ll be watching film and he’ll be like, “Throw it to this guy here. On this play, we could have checked to this play. And you know what? That reminds me …” And now we’re on some story that happened in Key West and some guy with one eye and a peg leg that he met at whatever bar.

Erik Anderson, 2014-16: My first year, I was really just a scout-team quarterback, and a lot of the stuff didn’t really pertain to me because we were watching film of other guys. I definitely found myself after a long day dozing off in those meetings. He’d go on some side story and you’d get lost in it.

Apodaca: I remember one story in particular. I can’t remember where he was at, but a neighborhood dog kept going up to him and barking at him or something when he was a small kid. To get this dog to stop barking, he apparently went up to it and peed around it or something so the dog wouldn’t bother him. Since that story, I was like, “This dude is another level of different.” He was just so happy to tell that story.

Bruggman: One of the quarterbacks at Texas Tech took notes on Leach’s stories, and he would quote Leach but he wouldn’t say the F word and he wouldn’t write the F word. He left his notebook behind one day and somehow Leach got a hold of it and was looking at it, so the next day in the meeting he said, “I want you to get up on the board and write the word ‘fuck.’”

 

 

 

 

https://theathletic.com/1194109/2019/09/11/a-crazy-cradle-of-coaches-mike-leachs-original-texas-tech-staff-and-team/

 

 

Spoiler

For his new players and for his new staff, adapting to life in Leachland was quite the change. Lord knows, it was never dull.

Harris: It could be Sunday, Monday or whenever, he’d have his cup of coffee and come over to your office and he’d stay there for 30 minutes and he’d just talk a lot about things other than football, whether it was politics or movies or who knows. He made you feel very relaxed.

Dykes: I’ll never forget this: I took to him to the state track meet in Austin. We walk out of a late-night taco place at 2 in the morning. Mike runs into some homeless guy and starts talking to him. I’m sitting in the car, it’s running, and two hours later, he’s still talking to the guy. I’m just like, “What the fuck?!” That’s just Mike.

Bedenbaugh: I knew him since I was 17. He was my coach. He recruited me. It was crazy. I’m not a big talker. We’d be on the phone for an hour, and he’d be the one doing all the talking — heck, I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about half the time. He’d be driving somewhere or sitting somewhere and just call and start talking — “What’s this like?” and “What’s this town like?”, all of that stuff.

B.J. Symons, banker, JPM Chase in Houston, Leach’s second starting QB at Tech: His quarterback meetings were so different. He might go on and on about what was on Howard Stern last night and shit that wasn’t even football-related. And then it’d be, “This guy’s covered. This guy is covered. Throw it to this guy.” It’s not like, “They’re in Cover 2 or they’re in Cover 3.” It was, “This guy is open. Throw it here.”

Kingsbury: He’s gonna get his knowledge across to you on a wide array of topics in those quarterback meetings. As a young quarterback, you learned not to ask too many questions other than on football.

Symons: You’re trying to learn the new offense, but there’s no playbook. They would just install plays and we would watch film and they would have each play was on tape. Then, we would take notes on the play. So it was, “Hey, we have no playbook. We’re gonna start with our quick game. Today, we’re gonna learn 6, which is four verticals, and we’re gonna learn 66, 617 and 619, and we’re gonna learn 8 and 618.”

They would put in a few plays at a time on a whiteboard and then each play had a videotape, and it was old-school VHS tape and we’d pop it in after the team meeting on offense, where we’d talk about the play. We’d break up for our position meetings and we’d watch, “OK, this is 6,” and we’d watch for 15 or 20 minutes or 30 minutes on that one play. The beauty of Mike Leach’s system is there’s not like 500 plays. There’s less than 50. Maybe not even that many. What he teaches is repetition. There’s like maybe 30 plays, and you’re gonna practice each one like 25 times, so by the time you’re on the field, nobody’s thinking about what they’re doing. You know where everyone’s gonna be.

Kingsbury: I think we were all excited. It was definitely a unique style with his approach to coaching and how simplistic he makes it. The thing that really jumped out to me was how he instills confidence in you with giving you free rein. From day one he lets you check stuff at the line of scrimmage.

It was different. I’d played in a spread in high school but never had that type of freedom to where you’re literally looking at the defense and if there’s a better play that you like, you’re able to check to it — just have a reason for doing it. Nobody was doing that at the time in our league, and probably not too many cats in the country were either.

Ross: Kliff’s great. He was really quiet at first. He was always there watching film. Then he started coming out of his shell, showing more personality.

 

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Walden Ponderer

Walden Ponderer 12,639

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, kopp0e said:

 

If Larry Scott is happy to be rid of Mike Leach, it is just one more pebble in the mountain of evidence that Larry Scott is one of the dumbest motherfuckers alive.

The PAC-12 has ZERO excuse for failing at all, let alone failing as badly as it is doing. Larry Scott is not the entire problem (the member schools are doing a pretty good job of fucking things up on their own, with the exceptions of the Northwest schools, which have been shouldering more than their fair share of the burden), but Scott is definitely exhibit 'A' in the stupidity of that conference.

Mystifying that people that smart (I'm looking at you, California PAC schools) could do so many things that are so stupid.

  • Like 7
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Cajun

Cajun 11,771

Posted
Posted
16 minutes ago, Walden Ponderer said:

If Larry Scott is happy to be rid of Mike Leach, it is just one more pebble in the mountain of evidence that Larry Scott is one of the dumbest motherfuckers alive.

The PAC-12 has ZERO excuse for failing at all, let alone failing as badly as it is doing. Larry Scott is not the entire problem (the member schools are doing a pretty good job of fucking things up on their own, with the exceptions of the Northwest schools, which have been shouldering more than their fair share of the burden), but Scott is definitely exhibit 'A' in the stupidity of that conference.

Mystifying that people that smart (I'm looking at you, California PAC schools) could do so many things that are so stupid.

All. Of. This

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Tommy Shelby

Tommy Shelby 189

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, ousux said:

Does the SEC mandate each new coach must get a tin pot dictators welcome to their new school? Just watched the arrival video...at least Leach got cheerleaders instead of Hitler youth.

State is pretty much aggy of Mississippi. Land grant school, with a good engineering program, has lotsa traditions, maroon and white, hell Starkville even looks like College Station did back in the 80s-90s. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ousux

ousux 5,635

Posted
Posted
State is pretty much aggy of Mississippi. Land grant school, with a good engineering program, has lotsa traditions, maroon and white, hell Starkville even looks like College Station did back in the 80s-90s. 
Leach is gonna have a field day trolling those bumpkins..
Link to comment
Share on other sites
taybo20

taybo20 3,008

Posted
Posted

Probably the best hire of the off season. As much I think it’s gonna be awesome to see what happens with Leach in the SEC west, I do actually think it’s a good hire for MSU and one that is outside the box of the SEC hive mind. Certainly will be better than Joe

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Iceman

Iceman 2,956

Posted
Posted (edited)
31 minutes ago, ClubWhatever said:

@msudawg how accurate is Shrader.  Leach must have an accurate QB for his system to work.  

Transfer portal closed?

See also: Leach has gotten production out of plenty of QBs other folks would not have done shit with...

 

Edited by Iceman
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Neonmoon

Neonmoon 38,130

Posted
Posted

A coach failing at MSU is not a rare thing. Many people have accomplished that. If MSU hired Napier and he failed, it would be just another year. It’s great MSU hired Leach because it’s an outside the box type of hire. Will he fail? I mean, there’s a good chance. But his scheme is all about doing more with less. And since MSU isn’t out recruiting anyone in their conference, it might give them a chance 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
msucolt45

msucolt45 4,213

Posted
Posted

IMO Leach’s offensive mind, coupled with defensive athletes he’s never had to scheme, equals a game plan he isn’t accustomed to.

He will succeed by his standards, but maybe not win the West, but he’ll be a thorn into the side of the powers that be (not talking to aggy).

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Cajun

Cajun 11,771

Posted
Posted
Quote

Looks like he landed on alien soil and the only thing he knows about them is that they like cowbell 
"Dont kill me, I bring cowbell, look, see, c-o-w-b-e-l-l"

I keep reading this over and over and can't help but thinking, "Wait a minute.  MSU fans are the aliens in this scenario and Mike is worried about them killing him?"

Just seems backwards.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
RollLeft

RollLeft 5,088

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, msucolt45 said:

IMO Leach’s offensive mind, coupled with defensive athletes he’s never had to scheme, equals a game plan he isn’t accustomed to.

He will succeed by his standards, but maybe not win the West, but he’ll be a thorn into the side of the powers that be (not talking to aggy).

Wasn't he at Kentucky under Mumme for years?  He's not new to the SEC so maybe he learned a thing or two the first time around.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Iceman

Iceman 2,956

Posted
Posted (edited)
4 hours ago, markstanco said:

If he coached at KY that was obviously over 20 years ago, and likely as a GA or position coach. Not sure how that makes him ready for the sec

He was the OC/ QB corch in 97-98 before doing the same at OU in 99.  In 1998,  his QB, Tim Couch  was productive as hell for the Wildcats coming in 2nd in the country in passing yards at 4275 behind Tim Rattay's 4943. In 1997, Couch was 51st.  In 1999, Kentucky's Dusty Bonner was 54th.

Almost certainly, Mississippi State's QB will become more productive, along with their OL dramatically improving as well.  Those are Leach's focal points.

Edited by Iceman
Link to comment
Share on other sites
LTtxfan

LTtxfan 49,908

Posted
Posted (edited)

Siap...

Mike Leach: Not only did Mike Leach get a great deal for himself, he significantly raised the pool for assistant coaches at Mississippi State.

https://footballscoop.com/news/details-for-mike-leachs-contract-at-mississippi-state/

Details for Mike Leach’s contract at Mississippi State

The details are fairly straight forward. He signed a 4-year deal (state law prevents Mississippi schools from offering anything longer) worth a flat $5 million per year. That represents a $1.25 million raise from what Leach earned at Washington State, and a $1.95 million increase from what State paid Joe Moorhead.

Moorhead was the lowest-paid coach in the SEC at $3.05 million. Leach’s $5 million salary leaps State from 14th all the way to sixth in the conference, based on 2019 figures.

Leach’s assistant salary pool will be $4.7 million, a $1.1 million increase from Moorhead’s staff that… still keeps the SEC in 13th among 13 known salary pools. Leach had $3.75 million to pay his assistants at Wazzu.

Mike-Leach.jpeg?resize=768,1024&ssl=1

Edited by LTtxfan
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Handcruser

Handcruser 2,814

Posted
Posted
Siap...
Mike Leach: Not only did Mike Leach get a great deal for himself, he significantly raised the pool for assistant coaches at Mississippi State.
https://footballscoop.com/news/details-for-mike-leachs-contract-at-mississippi-state/
Details for Mike Leach’s contract at Mississippi State
The details are fairly straight forward. He signed a 4-year deal (state law prevents Mississippi schools from offering anything longer) worth a flat $5 million per year. That represents a $1.25 million raise from what Leach earned at Washington State, and a $1.95 million increase from what State paid Joe Moorhead.
Moorhead was the lowest-paid coach in the SEC at $3.05 million. Leach’s $5 million salary leaps State from 14th all the way to sixth in the conference, based on 2019 figures.
Leach’s assistant salary pool will be $4.7 million, a $1.1 million increase from Moorhead’s staff that… still keeps the SEC in 13th among 13 known salary pools. Leach had $3.75 million to pay his assistants at Wazzu.
Mike-Leach.jpeg?resize=768,1024&ssl=1

Southern conference? Nice. What a bunch of misfits.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Gil Bang

Gil Bang 26,174

Posted
Posted
On 1/10/2020 at 5:57 PM, Francisco 2.0 said:

Not sure if this is in the other Leach thread, and they are from last summer, and it's paywalled on The Athletic (not gonna copy the entire thing here, go subscribe if you haven't already) but there were two Leach stories---one is about what goes on in his QB room, and the other was about his first team at Tech.  Great, great articles:

https://theathletic.com/1138379/2019/08/15/what-the-is-going-on-right-now-inside-mike-leachs-qb-meetings/

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Austin Apodaca, 2012-13: It’s something you can’t really fabricate. All this stuff is true. You can ask any of us who have been in the room with him.

Connor Halliday, 2012-14: His first meeting, he had just gotten there and I was expecting him to install the offense. Everybody had their notebooks out ready to go. I think we got there at like 6 o’clock at night and were there until 9:30. He didn’t speak one word about football.

Jesse Brown, 2012-13: I had heard stories that he was this pirate guy when he first came, and he really wasn’t into pirates as much as I thought he was going to be. He wasn’t what I was expecting. But I don’t really know what I was expecting, either. I guess I didn’t expect him to be, uh, so weird.

Halliday: On his way in from Spokane, he almost got in a car crash. There was a snowstorm that day and a semi truck had rolled, and he was talking about how dangerous it is for semis to drive in the snow…I was already a huge Leach fan, so I knew a little bit about his formations and a few plays, so I wrote down a few things in my notebook. I was excited to get the meeting started. But the only thing I wrote down in big, bold letters was, “What the fuck is going on right now?”

Christian Jorgensen, 2015: I’ll never forget the first meeting. It was fall camp, and I remember we were slotted for a two or two-and-a-half-hour meeting. It ended up running like five-plus, and it was insane. I remember at that point being like, “OK, we’re in this …”

Apodaca: Every single day there was some shit that popped off that you were like, “What in the world?”

Casey Brink, 2016-18: It’s crazy.

Jorgensen: It was crazy.

Brink: Did you see our Christmas card photos we took as a quarterback group this year when we were holding Leach up? Other programs don’t have stuff like that. Nobody is having that much fun.

 

Here is your Coug QB Group Christmas Card (featuring our fearless leader)! Merry Christmas ya filthy animals!

View image on Twitter
 
 
 
 

 

Brink: Everything with Leach at first glance is crazy, right? But then you’ve got to unpack it and be like, “OK, but is it that crazy?”

 

 

Brink: Our No. 1 rule was: Never say or ask or do anything that would get him talking about anything besides the film.

Apodaca: We would get pissed at people in the meeting room if they asked a question toward the end of the meeting. We would have these fall camp meetings that went until 9:30 at night and if there was a young freshman in there asking questions, we were all looking at him like, “Oh my God, dude, shut up because we will be in here for an hour and a half more on this subject alone. Stop asking questions, damn it.”

Brink: We’d have people sit in our meetings all the time, and it got to the point that our quarterbacks would say to the guys coming to the meeting, “Look, we’re glad to have you here. But don’t. Say. Anything. Because the second you do, that’s going to be the focus of this meeting, and then we’ll all be here all night.”

Tyler Bruggman, 2013: There was one time Connor, a veteran, made a rookie mistake. Sundays are typically long days, and we had finished the film from the game before. We were ready to head off to dinner. And then Connor made a rookie mistake and asked about the economy crash. I just remember Coach Leach putting the film clicker down and saying, “You know, it’s kind of a long answer, but it’s worth talking about.” So at that point, I knew we were going to be stuck in there for a while.

Jorgensen: There were definitely games going on within the quarterbacks. Leach would cycle through stories and then you’d get guys trying to trigger certain stories. They knew what to say in order to get him to go off on a tangent.

Brink: One of the great stories on that was early on my first year. Luke (Falk) was getting so perfect at his craft, and Luke loved making sure he got out to the practice field early enough to get his full warm-up in. So we would be in there waiting for Leach, and Luke would put on this serious face and be like, “I don’t care what you guys do, no matter what, nobody say shit, nobody ask anything, just let him come in and do his thing because I need to get on the practice field.” Classic Tyler Hilinski, he would wait until there would be maybe five or 10 minutes left in film and he would just be like, “So, Coach, what do you think about …”

Connor Neville, 2017-18: You could see Luke losing his shit in the corner. Just like, “Come on, I just want to get the fuck out of here.”

Brink: Luke would be staring daggers across the table, and Tyler would be covering his mouth because he would be cracking up.

Isaac Dotson, 2013: I was playing QB at the time, and we had our first position meeting, and 90 percent of the meeting had nothing to do with football. Maybe five plays into watching film, something happened that sparked a classic Mike Leach tangent. For at least an hour, he sat there rewinding and playing the same play over and over while he talked about everything from growing up in Wyoming to having a pet raccoon, getting paddled by the principal at his junior high, the origins of football and eventually just a full-blown Native American history lesson. The one-hour meeting lasted probably three hours. I remember looking at the veteran QBs in the room with a ‘what is happening right now?’ look on my face, but I could tell by their reactions that this was just a normal thing.

Brink: Sometimes they’re literally out of nowhere. We’ll be watching film and he’ll be like, “Throw it to this guy here. On this play, we could have checked to this play. And you know what? That reminds me …” And now we’re on some story that happened in Key West and some guy with one eye and a peg leg that he met at whatever bar.

Erik Anderson, 2014-16: My first year, I was really just a scout-team quarterback, and a lot of the stuff didn’t really pertain to me because we were watching film of other guys. I definitely found myself after a long day dozing off in those meetings. He’d go on some side story and you’d get lost in it.

Apodaca: I remember one story in particular. I can’t remember where he was at, but a neighborhood dog kept going up to him and barking at him or something when he was a small kid. To get this dog to stop barking, he apparently went up to it and peed around it or something so the dog wouldn’t bother him. Since that story, I was like, “This dude is another level of different.” He was just so happy to tell that story.

Bruggman: One of the quarterbacks at Texas Tech took notes on Leach’s stories, and he would quote Leach but he wouldn’t say the F word and he wouldn’t write the F word. He left his notebook behind one day and somehow Leach got a hold of it and was looking at it, so the next day in the meeting he said, “I want you to get up on the board and write the word ‘fuck.’”

 

 

 

 

https://theathletic.com/1194109/2019/09/11/a-crazy-cradle-of-coaches-mike-leachs-original-texas-tech-staff-and-team/

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

For his new players and for his new staff, adapting to life in Leachland was quite the change. Lord knows, it was never dull.

Harris: It could be Sunday, Monday or whenever, he’d have his cup of coffee and come over to your office and he’d stay there for 30 minutes and he’d just talk a lot about things other than football, whether it was politics or movies or who knows. He made you feel very relaxed.

Dykes: I’ll never forget this: I took to him to the state track meet in Austin. We walk out of a late-night taco place at 2 in the morning. Mike runs into some homeless guy and starts talking to him. I’m sitting in the car, it’s running, and two hours later, he’s still talking to the guy. I’m just like, “What the fuck?!” That’s just Mike.

Bedenbaugh: I knew him since I was 17. He was my coach. He recruited me. It was crazy. I’m not a big talker. We’d be on the phone for an hour, and he’d be the one doing all the talking — heck, I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about half the time. He’d be driving somewhere or sitting somewhere and just call and start talking — “What’s this like?” and “What’s this town like?”, all of that stuff.

B.J. Symons, banker, JPM Chase in Houston, Leach’s second starting QB at Tech: His quarterback meetings were so different. He might go on and on about what was on Howard Stern last night and shit that wasn’t even football-related. And then it’d be, “This guy’s covered. This guy is covered. Throw it to this guy.” It’s not like, “They’re in Cover 2 or they’re in Cover 3.” It was, “This guy is open. Throw it here.”

Kingsbury: He’s gonna get his knowledge across to you on a wide array of topics in those quarterback meetings. As a young quarterback, you learned not to ask too many questions other than on football.

Symons: You’re trying to learn the new offense, but there’s no playbook. They would just install plays and we would watch film and they would have each play was on tape. Then, we would take notes on the play. So it was, “Hey, we have no playbook. We’re gonna start with our quick game. Today, we’re gonna learn 6, which is four verticals, and we’re gonna learn 66, 617 and 619, and we’re gonna learn 8 and 618.”

They would put in a few plays at a time on a whiteboard and then each play had a videotape, and it was old-school VHS tape and we’d pop it in after the team meeting on offense, where we’d talk about the play. We’d break up for our position meetings and we’d watch, “OK, this is 6,” and we’d watch for 15 or 20 minutes or 30 minutes on that one play. The beauty of Mike Leach’s system is there’s not like 500 plays. There’s less than 50. Maybe not even that many. What he teaches is repetition. There’s like maybe 30 plays, and you’re gonna practice each one like 25 times, so by the time you’re on the field, nobody’s thinking about what they’re doing. You know where everyone’s gonna be.

Kingsbury: I think we were all excited. It was definitely a unique style with his approach to coaching and how simplistic he makes it. The thing that really jumped out to me was how he instills confidence in you with giving you free rein. From day one he lets you check stuff at the line of scrimmage.

It was different. I’d played in a spread in high school but never had that type of freedom to where you’re literally looking at the defense and if there’s a better play that you like, you’re able to check to it — just have a reason for doing it. Nobody was doing that at the time in our league, and probably not too many cats in the country were either.

Ross: Kliff’s great. He was really quiet at first. He was always there watching film. Then he started coming out of his shell, showing more personality.

 

The Athletic employs Billy fucking Lucci.  They're not getting a dime from me.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites
NoName

NoName 17,105

Posted
Posted
10 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

The Athletic employs Billy fucking Lucci.  They're not getting a dime from me.

I get what you are saying, but no.

They "share" some content across platforms. Basically The Athletic went out and hired a handful of team specific beat writers, they probably discovered they could just sign this partnership with TexAgs - who already have "beat writers" and come out ahead. quick look at their Texas A&M football page looks like it is mostly game stories that came across the last part of the season.

I think Texas A&M is fairly unique in that they have TexAgs as a fairly large "independent" (not affiliated with a competitor like 247 or SBNation) websites. Either way, betting we see more of this moving forward from The Athletic. 

Anyway, feel free to pass on your sub but they are putting out fantastic content on a daily basis across every sport/team I follow.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing


Football ... Basketball ... Baseball ... Other Sports ... Futbol ... 🤫995🤫 ... Gambling ... Movies & TV ... Music ... Hobbies ... Lulz ... Food & Travel ... Daily Texan ... Business and Markets ... Cloak Room ... Help ... For Sale ... Board Discussion ... Subscribe!... Donate!... Advertise... COOKIE MONSTER!

×
×
  • Create New...