Mike Leach - RIP

Are you just guessing on how he treated his players or do you have insight?

I think Bobby Knight is a much bigger jerk and not just for the way he treated players and/or the media.

 

His treatment of players cost him his job at Texas Tech. It also led to an investigation by the university at WSU.

He routinely shit on his players in interviews, always blaming them for any failure.

Yeah, Bobby Knight was a bigger jerk, but that's not saying much.

 

Craig James virtually disappeared off the face of the earth after the incident with his son. He resurfaced in 2012 to run against Ted Cruz for the Senate nomination and got a smooth 3.6% of the vote. He played the vangie card in the heart of the Tea Party era.

Other than getting fired from Fox Sports after one appearance as an analyst, he hasn't been heard from since.

 

Hey, well-behaved men rarely make history.

The guy obviously wasn't a saint, and he probably was a flaming asshole to a lot of people. But he was authentic, which counts for something nowadays.

 

Well he didn’t kill one of his players like DJ Durkin.
Or George O’Leary.
Or look the other way to sexual assault like Art Briles.
Or Bo Schembechler.
Or James Franklin.
Or “Doctor Tom.”

Truth is the majority of these people have used and abused free labor to enrich themselves, which is why i snicker at the hand wringing over NIL.

 

Craig James has 3,044 followers on Twitter.

Elon is slacking.

 

Probably because you didn’t have 30 minutes to watch.
The guy was fascinating. But he could digress. NYT obit said he once talked to his team for three hours after a game.
But he’s right about student loans repo people.

 

Coaching, at its most basic, is about getting people to do things they wouldn’t do if someone wasn’t making them do it. If you’re a nice guy all the time, you’re going to fail miserably. Very few people are going to work hard enough to be successful at that level without holding their feet to the fire. It may not be the way I’d like to be treated but it works.

 

This.
Really sums up my ambivalent feelings about him. All the tributes today from prominent members of the media should be balanced with the negative impressions he left on what seems to be a critical mass of players.

 

Another good read on this contrarian.

Commentary: Mike Leach was as complicated as all of us

 

Very, very good retrospective.
Spoiler alert (which really hit home for me):

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In a profession full of clones and caricatures, Leach was an individual.

I still don’t know if I liked the man. But I sure will miss him. May his memory be a blessing.