Sooner, p.10
Sooner, page 10
Wood would regularly send film for Lincoln to watch, knowing there was a problem but not quite able to identify it himself. Sometimes a quarterback was waiting too long for one receiver to get open and missing other receivers who were already open. Other times a receiver running his route was accidentally bringing his defenders with him, jamming up the route of another receiver who could have been open had the first receiver gone in a different direction. “And he’d tweak it,” Wood says, “and sure enough, he was usually right. He could see how it was all fitting together, how all the routes are fitting together … and he could say, This one guy is messing the whole thing up.”
Lincoln stayed in close contact with Wood as the Mules moved through the playoffs. “He was involved a lot,” Wood says. “Anytime we had a question, we’d pick up the phone and call him.”
And then, as the team prepared for the state championship game, the town held a pep rally, for which Lincoln made the drive back to Muleshoe. He was to be the guest speaker. Lincoln walked back into his old hometown gym, where he was given quite the introduction by David Jenkins, the recently retired high school principal. Jenkins called him “a young man who has qualities that impress me more, probably, than anyone I have ever associated with in my almost forty years of education,” and he went on to say, “I’ve never seen a young man that was as competitive as he was, or displayed the leadership that he had.”
As he took the mic, Lincoln said, in an embarrassed drawl, “I don’t know if I’m worthy of that introduction. I’m just glad if I don’t pass out giving a speech up here.”
But Lincoln knew what he needed to say. After introductory remarks praising the coaching staff and the team’s achievements, he turned to the players, drawing on his own experience during Texas Tech’s own chase for a championship. “Just do what you got here,” he said. “Don’t change anything. Just because this is a state championship game doesn’t mean you have to try any harder, do anything more than you do every time. We always tell guys before every game, We don’t need any superheroes. We need everybody to do your job, and do what you’ve done all year. That’s why you’re fourteen and O. That’s why you’re in a state championship game. Because you’re a damn good football team.”
“Seeing you guys in the state championship—it’s very special,” Lincoln went on. “I’ll leave you with this one thing. I think it’s very important. When you get out there between those lines tomorrow night, don’t waste one second. Get out there the very first snap, the kickoff or kickoff return, those boys from Kirbyville will be on the opposite side of you—get out there and hit them in the mouth from the very first snap.”
The crowd erupted at that, electrified, roaring louder than it had all night, drowning some of Lincoln’s last words before he concluded, “Take it home, and make us all proud.”
Two days later, Muleshoe beat Kirbyville by a score of 48–26, and their quarterback threw for three touchdowns to put him at sixty-one for the season, just three shy of the state record. He went on to be named the state’s Player of the Year for his division. His name was Wes Wood, and he was Coach Wood’s son.
* * *
By 2009, Texas Tech had established itself as a true force in college football, and Lincoln had established himself as a young man who was going places. “Donnie [Duncan] and I would talk,” Charlie Sadler said, “and he asked me what I thought about Lincoln. I identified Lincoln as one of the top young coaches. He’s highly intelligent, knows what he’s doing.”
Gil Brandt, a Dallas Cowboys executive for nearly three decades before retiring to become an analyst, marveled at what he saw when he spent time at Texas Tech’s practices. He told a reporter that Lincoln was “the next great young coach in college football.”
And soon Lincoln would be granted yet another incredible opportunity, one on par with when Mike Leach first offered him a job as his personal assistant six years earlier. Once again, the opportunity would change the course of his life. Once again, it would teach him things he did not know he did not know. But once again, it would come about as a result of impulsive decisions made in anger, so once again, first, it would hurt.
7
Chaos
AS THE 2009 SEASON got under way, Lincoln called Adam James into his office and informed him that his practice performance had been poor and his effort lackluster, and as a result he was being demoted from second team to third.
Mike Leach would later recall in his book Swing Your Sword that Adam “stormed out of the office” and yelled “Fuck this!” in a lobby full of people. Leach also said that Adam “rammed through the door of the football office so hard that the door split and came off the hinges. It cost us eleven hundred dollars to fix.” He would also say that his biggest regret from his time at Texas Tech was not cutting Adam from the team.
This was the same Adam James whom Leach had recruited to Tech at the insistence of his father, Craig James—the same Adam James whom Lincoln had found to possess an “unbelievable sense of entitlement” that “hurts himself and people around him.”
The damage Adam’s sense of entitlement could do was about to get a lot worse.
“Adam,” Lincoln said, “is the kind of person that makes excuses or blames people for things that go wrong in his life.”
And not only that, when things did go wrong, he responded to such setbacks by lashing out and then getting his father involved. After storming out of Lincoln’s office, his father was the first person he called.
Turns out that not only was Craig James a former NFL running back and a famous football broadcaster, he was also, in Leach’s words, “the ultimate Little League dad.”
After Adam called him, Craig James called Tommy McVay, the director of football operations at Texas Tech, and questioned the coaches’ mental state, insisting that they were, as Leach recalls, “screwing” his son. Next, Craig James called Lincoln and left a voicemail that went something like this, in Leach’s recollection: “You don’t know what you’re doing! Adam James is the best player at the wide receiver position … If you’ve got the balls to call me back, and I don’t think you do, call me back.”
* * *
Texas Tech ended up having a solid season in 2009, though not quite as strong as their on-fire campaign the year before. The Red Raiders finished with a respectable 8–4 record and ranked in the Top 25, earning a spot in the Valero Alamo Bowl against Michigan State.
As they prepared for the bowl game, however, the toxic situation with Adam James was only getting worse. Throughout the season, Lincoln and Leach had continued to have problems with Adam. Graham Harrell, a Texas Tech quarterback, once wrote in an email, “During the season [Adam] was often ‘injured’ (it usually seemed like a very minor injury that could keep him out of practice but never out of any other activity, including games) so he would not participate in some drills in practice.”
For his part, Adam frequently complained that the coaching staff singled him out for unfair treatment. “In the locker room and away from the facility,” Harrell said, “Adam used any opportunity he had to tell other players how he was being treated unfairly, how the coaches did not give him a fair chance, and how we did not have to do everything the coaches told us because they had no option but to play some of us.”
Harrell would disagree with Adam—“When I heard these kinds of things I usually tried to put an end to them,” he said—but it did little to stop him. “Adam pretty consistently talked bad about the coaches or downplayed the importance of working hard,” Harrell said.
About a week and a half prior to the Alamo Bowl, Lincoln and Leach felt that Adam was being lazy during practice and decided he needed some discipline. They sent him to “Muscle Beach,” a part of the practice field where strength coach Bennie Wylie managed injured players and administered discipline through workouts. Wylie made Adam and another receiver run laps and stadium stairs, but he felt Adam wasn’t taking the drills seriously. When Wylie also called him out for being lazy, Adam told him he didn’t know what he was doing.
Meanwhile, the other receiver, who was disciplined alongside Adam for his own reasons, had no complaint. “[He] agreed that his effort wasn’t his best,” Lincoln said of that player, “and had a good attitude with Bennie and also in meeting with me after practice.”
When Lincoln spoke with Adam after practice, “it was very clear to me that Adam did not agree with the punishment,” he said, “and believed that we were just mis-assessing his effort.” In fact, Adam told Lincoln that he wasn’t doing his job as a coach—that none of the coaches were doing their jobs—and that his effort was fine.
None of this surprised Lincoln. “Just another example,” he said, “of Adam thinking that he knows more about coaching than people who have been coaching for their entire lives.”
A couple practices later, Adam showed up twenty minutes late and wearing street clothes, a backwards cap, and sunglasses. Street clothes at practice and backwards caps were against team rules, which mandated that players dress for practice regardless of injury and participate to the extent the trainers permitted. When Leach asked Adam just what the hell he was doing, Adam said he had a concussion. Team trainer Steve Pincock confirmed to Leach that Adam had a concussion, hence the sunglasses on account of the resulting sensitivity to light, but Pincock had no further explanation for the remainder of Adam’s chosen attire.
The facts of what, exactly, happened next remain a source of contention among all involved, and it would reverberate throughout all their lives.
Leach says he told Pincock to “put [Adam] somewhere dark and have him do something,” and that’s the last Leach had to do with it, according to the coach. “I wanted him off the field so he wouldn’t be a distraction,” Leach wrote in his book.
Pincock told Adam to go to a large equipment garage and rest there. In the garage, there was an electrical closet, which Pincock later said he explicitly told Adam not to enter. Adam proceeded to enter the closet and shoot a video on his cell phone in which he acted as though he’d been locked in there by the coaching staff. “Even having that phone with him during practice time was against team policy,” Leach said, “but he ignored that rule, too, and used it to make his own little Blair Witch Project where he was seen whispering and scanning the electrical closet. He was specifically told not to be in that area, but there he was, acting like a captive.”
Then Adam sent the video to his father.
Craig James proceeded to tell anyone who’d listen to him that Adam had been forced to stand in an electrical closet for three hours.
In no small part because of Craig James’s influence as a broadcaster, the story quickly took off.
Texas Tech launched an investigation into the whole situation.
Specifics aside, what seems to have happened is that an immature kid got embarrassed, his overbearing father escalated everything, a coach who doesn’t take shit didn’t take shit, and all manner of chaos ensued. Leach’s staff sided with him, Adam’s friends sided with him, Craig James sided with his son, and ultimately, the only people who truly know what it was all about are those who were there that day. Leach has a theory that the whole thing wasn’t really about Adam James at all, but rather that Texas Tech used the situation to get revenge on Leach for contentious salary negotiations earlier in the year—and to have an excuse to fire him before an $800,000 bonus vested on December 31.
You can take all of them at their word or none of them at their word. The only thing that can be said with reasonable certainty is this: every year, coaches at all levels deal with players they regard as disrespectful, lazy, and entitled, and their helicopter parents with them, and most of those coaches have expressed displeasure with those players in a profane manner at one point or another. That is the way of this world. Whatever Leach’s intentions were for Adam James that day, it seems that Adam was disrespectful and Leach reacted accordingly—but it does not appear Leach ordered Adam locked in a closet, which was the claim that sparked the whole controversy.
As the bowl game approached, Leach went about his business more or less as usual, traveling to New York City for several days for fundraisers, dinners, and media appearances. The Red Raiders flew to San Antonio, with Leach planning to fly down from New York, but soon after, Texas Tech suspended Leach over the Adam James allegations. He vowed to fight the suspension, but as of that moment he was barred from coaching the team for the Alamo Bowl.
Ruffin was informed of this news while everyone was settling into the hotel, about thirty minutes before a scheduled team meeting. “I’m not sure what’s gonna happen,” Ruffin remembers saying at the meeting, “but we’re taking over right now.”
He would be the interim head coach, and, turning to Lincoln, he said, “Linc, I’ll run the defense and run the game, and the offense—well, you got it.”
Running the offense in practice at just twenty-five years old—that was one thing. But being the official interim offensive coordinator? For a bowl game? That was going to be played in less than a week?
“When he first told me,” Lincoln says, “I was like, Oh, shit.”
As Leach fought the suspension, university officials told him that if he signed a letter of apology, he could keep his job—but he refused. Instead, he filed a lawsuit against the university.
In reply, they handed him a letter of termination.
Just like that, Mike Leach was fired.
Oh, shit, indeed.
* * *
Lincoln Riley and Ruffin McNeill now had to prepare for a bowl game while facing the very real possibility that they would soon be out of a job themselves. That’s how it goes in college football. When the head coach gets fired, the rest of the staff generally does, too. They both hoped Ruffin would get the head coaching job in Leach’s place, but they weren’t naive—they knew the university would likely want to move on from the whole fiasco, which would mean hiring a new coach, who would likely want to hire his own staff. On top of all that stress, Lincoln was also a young husband with a young wife, and children likely not too far in their future.
“You’re coaching and then you’re wondering, How am I going to take care of my family next year?” Lincoln said. “There was lot going on at that point.”
Meanwhile, Lincoln had to think about running the offense—which included coaching the player whose actions had set these events in motion. Adam James was still part of the team. “It was like a soap opera,” Lincoln later recalled.
And yet, for all his frustration with Adam and the situation at large, Lincoln still wanted to coach him as well as he could regardless of his feelings—and he really didn’t like the fact that some fans were actively threatening Adam and Craig James and their family. That was unacceptable. “We’re on different sides of the fence on this deal,” Lincoln told reporters, “but he’s still my player. All the threats on him and his family are completely ridiculous. I told him if he needs help as far as feeling in danger, I’ll help him any way I can.”
As maddening as the whole situation had become, above all, it was heartbreaking. “A lot of us guys had been there coaching since 2000,” Lincoln recalls. “And there’s 2009—and the previous year, we had a great chance to win the national championship. We all felt like we had been a part of bringing that program so far, and then just to see it all crumbling down like that, we were just like, this isn’t necessary. It was ugly. It was sad.”
The heartbreak over what was happening to Mike Leach, the frustration with Adam James, the fear of what fate awaited him following the game—Lincoln had a lot of emotions to manage. Meanwhile, there was football to be coached.
Lincoln looked to Ruffin for support. Twenty-five years older than Lincoln, Ruffin had an affable and laid-back personality that belied a sharp intellect, all of which provided a warm and grounding contrast to Lincoln’s coiled intensity. Ruffin kept his instructions simple when it came to Lincoln and the offense, telling him, “Just call it. Do what you want to do. Change what you want to change. Go for it.”
In other words, for better and worse, Lincoln had full control of the offense.
It helped Lincoln, too, for him to simply empathize with his new interim head coach—Ruffin was trusting Lincoln a great deal, and whatever stress Lincoln felt, Ruffin had to feel even more. “[Ruffin] was in the toughest position,” Lincoln says.
Even so, Lincoln said, “Professionally, toughest thing I’ve ever had to do. Don’t know that I’ll ever have to do anything tougher. Biggest mix of emotions I’ve ever had … It was just so many things pulling you so many different ways.”
And it didn’t help that he had media swarming everywhere, reporters constantly asking him questions about everything. “It was crazy,” he said. “You kind of had to catch your breath, settle your emotions.”
Amid the chaos, however, as often happens when all seems to be falling apart, other things were falling into place that would only be fully revealed later, as relationships began to form that would ultimately shape the trajectory of Lincoln’s life.
That week, Lincoln received a phone call from Donnie Duncan, the senior associate commissioner of the Big 12 Conference—the man who was Mike Leach’s mentor, and a good friend of Lincoln’s colleague Charlie Sadler, Texas Tech’s defensive ends coach. Charlie had urged Donnie to call Lincoln and Ruffin to help talk them through this. And if there was a man to lean on, it was Donnie Duncan.
A broad-shouldered man with a crown of white hair around his balding scalp, Donnie Duncan was similar to Ruffin in his personality, warm and approachable, but also with a sharp mind. “Whatever emotions you’re dealing with—and we all had a ton that week—he’s able to see through all that and think about things clearly, rationally,” Lincoln recalled. “He always keeps an unbelievable perspective on things, which is hard to do especially in times like that.”
