Mike Leach Firing

Things got even more interesting in college football when Texas Tech fired Mike Leach, their very successful, but very unconventional football coach. I have a lot of opinions on this, but not the sort that you might think.

The sort of opinions you might expect from me are whether or not Mike Leach should have been fired. Personally, I don't know. There is so much rumor and innuendo surrounding this situation that it is impossible to know what to think about the people involved. What I do know is that both sides' best interests are served by advancing their own versions of events, and the news people are, once again, probably getting the story all kinds of screwed up. Being first is much more important than being right in the news business, and now everyone is so deep into spin control at this point that there won't be any facts forthcoming from anybody.

What I do know is that Mike Leach cheesed off the administration when he used leverage to get a better contract after last year. Admittedly, he had a lot of leverage after last year. But much of it eroded this year when his team was good but not great. Then the allegations by Craig James' kid gave Texas Tech a window of opportunity to rein in their coach. As to whether Texas Tech was considering firing Mike Leach (admittedly likely), or just suspending him pending further investigation (still quite possible), Leach essentially made it impossible for them to keep him once he sued to be allowed to coach in the bowl game. Now he was not just a royal pain in the rear who may have done something very stupid, he was also now openly questioning the authority of his superiors.

Let's not forget that Mike Leach was an employee of the university. His direct supervisor was the athletic director, who himself is under the university president. Mike Leach may have made more than the two of them combined, but he worked for them, not the other way around. Had Mike Leach been successful in his lawsuit, he would have undermined the authority of his boss and even the university as the preeminent power on campus.

Come to think of it, having written the previous line, I have now come to the conclusion that firing Mike Leach became a good thing as soon as he filed that lawsuit. Universities are academic institutions, not excuses to have a football program. Had Leach been successful in his lawsuit, every coach at every school would have essentially been freed from institutional control and censure. That is not a situation that I would even want to imagine.

However, from a football perspective, the firing does not help anybody. Mike Leach is almost unhireable for the next year or two, and he will probably have to go back to an offensive coordinator role at a smaller school if he is going to have a chance to put his career back together. Meanwhile, Texas Tech just canned the most successful coach in school history, and it was his very iconoclastic, rebellious tendencies that allowed him to not only make Texas Tech successful, but also turned off potential suitors who might have otherwise lured him away from Lubbock.

Of course, the very fact that Mike Leach couldn't get a more glamorous job may have made him somewhat self-destructive too, which is often the end result of the iconoclast. Iconoclasts are very eager to be different than everybody, then they get frustrated and bitter when they don't fit in. So they become domineering to try to force the world to conform to them, but all they end up doing is alienating the people who they try to boss around. This may have happened to Mike Leach. If so, I hope he didn't wreck himself so badly that he can't recover. As for the Texas Tech Red Raiders, the crystal ball does not show a very promising picture.