Sooner, p.6
Sooner, page 6
He’s a coach in large part because of that offense of his, which he’d spent years developing alongside another coach named Hal Mumme. And it’s important here to get an idea about who Mike Leach was, to fully appreciate just how outside-the-box his thinking was, and the way that showed Lincoln how to think likewise. The best way to understand that is to look at how Leach became a coach at Texas Tech at all. He was a lesson for Lincoln in many ways, most of all being one of the simplest, most difficult things for a young man to learn: Just be yourself.
There were many times in Mike Leach’s life that people around him were telling him he was wrong and he just didn’t listen, and things somehow worked out in his favor. That started with how he became a coach in the first place. He hadn’t played much football even in high school—he rode the bench—but went on to graduate in the top third of his class at Pepperdine’s law school, and he became a successful lawyer.
He didn’t love it, though. And one day he impulsively quit the profession and announced to his family that he was becoming a college football coach.
His first job paid $3,000 a year, and he bounced around for a little while until Hal Mumme hired him as an assistant coach at a tiny NAIA school, Iowa Wesleyan.
It was Mumme who first introduced Leach to the spread offense.
Mumme had discovered it first while at the University of Texas, El Paso, coaching against LaVell Edwards at Brigham Young. Edwards was the first college football coach to use a “spread offense,” spreading receivers across the line of scrimmage, so that he could then “throw the ball all over the place.”
Mumme and Leach were both weary of college football’s self-serious traditions. They wanted to experiment. They wanted to throw the ball and they wanted to do so as many times as possible in a game. This was about overwhelming a defense, but it was also about fostering a new psychology in players: “With so many people touching the ball,” Leach said, “it elevates the enthusiasm of the whole team.”
That was the core foundation for what they wanted to do: make football fun.
They loved visiting places like the Alamo, and not to motivate their players with overwrought pontification on the nature of football and war and the strange analogies men like to make between them—they went to such places to gain perspective. Yes, the game of football was violent and warlike and, to them, beautiful for it—but it was a game, and games were meant to be fun, and the way most coaches coached football was a snooze compared to what they saw as possible.
Everywhere they went, people reacted badly at first. Even when they took over teams that were in the range between mediocre and downright awful, the locals complained about their new offense. (Change is hard, even when you’re terrible.) And everywhere they went, after they began to win—and they always did—they would become beloved. In three years at Iowa Wesleyan, they took a team that had gone 0–10 their first season and went 25–10, ranked second in the nation in passing two seasons, and ranked first the other. They passed like mad. One game, their quarterback went 61 for 86.
From there, they went to Division II Valdosta State. The local reporters said their wacky newfangled offense wouldn’t work at all. Fans who ran into them in public straight-up told them to just run the ball right up the middle. Mumme and Leach ignored them all—naturally—and did their thing. They set all manner of Division II records. Their quarterback won the Division II equivalent of the Heisman. They went 40–17–1 over the next seven seasons.
Part of their success came because they never stopped learning, never stopped challenging even their own ideas about what would work best. They made trip after trip to BYU to learn from LaVell Edwards. They spent hours in local coffee shops and restaurants scribbling plays on napkins. (One restaurant manager got mad because they wrote all over their reusable cloth napkins.) They’d take what Edwards was doing, pull it apart, and piece it back together. They sketched crossing routes and screen plays and put wrinkles on them that would confuse defenses and give their players unprecedented advantage. Eventually, they boiled it all down to a handful of running plays and a few key passing concepts, and they started having their quarterback throw out of the shotgun more. “We knew we were changing the game,” Mumme told ESPN’s Kevin Van Valkenburg. “We just weren’t sure if anybody else was going to change with us.”
After seven seasons in Valdosta, Mumme and Leach were hired away to a Division I school, the University of Kentucky, where they went through more of the same. More controversy, more proving everyone wrong, more fun. Kentucky’s quarterback, Tim Couch, had thrown for fewer than a thousand yards the year before they got there. In their first season, Couch threw for more than three thousand yards. The Wildcats’ offense went from 109th in the country to No. 6. Couch became a Heisman finalist, Kentucky’s first in decades, and was drafted No. 1 overall by the Cleveland Browns. For seven seasons under Mumme and Leach, the Wildcats went for it on fourth down forty times a season, nearly double any other team in the conference, and they shocked college football superpowers like Alabama. Attendance surged from about forty thousand fans to nearly sixty thousand per game.
This was also when their offense became known as the Air Raid. Leach worked with Kentucky’s marketing team on that. They made up AIR RAID T-shirts and bumper stickers. They blew an air horn in the stadium during games. When they got in trouble for that, they moved the horn to a building across the street from the stadium to skirt noise ordinance laws designed to prevent the stadium from getting too loud on game days.
Mumme and Leach became the ones getting visits from other colleges—even from coaches at big-name schools like Auburn, Florida State, and Georgia, who wanted to know what they were doing. One was a young coach from Notre Dame named Urban Meyer. And there was Oklahoma’s first-year head coach, Bob Stoops. In 1999, he hired Leach to install his offense for the Sooners.
And again, in Norman, more of the same. Sooner fans hated it all at first. Oklahoma was a proud program, one of the best in the country when coached by Barry Switzer decades earlier, under whom it had dominated rivals like Nebraska and Texas. They were built on the power-running wishbone formation, one of the hallmark running offense concepts of that time. Even Leach had love for it: “A thing of beauty the way it flowed.”
Despite differences between the wishbone and the Air Raid, the two approaches share the same spirit: they used every skill guy on the field. Even though basically every play out of the wishbone was a run, it was designed so that defenses never knew which player was going to get the ball. “It’s about constant threats,” said Emory Bellard, the coach who had created the wishbone decades earlier. “That’s why I like Mike Leach’s offense.”
Soon the Oklahoma fans did, too.
The Sooners won their first three games in 1999, averaging forty-four points per game through their first month. From there, Oklahoma had a solid but inconsistent year—they lost to archrival Texas 38–28, then blew out No. 13 Texas A&M 51–6, then lost to Colorado, then blew out Missouri and Iowa State, then lost to Texas Tech.
Still, Texas Tech liked what Leach had done with the offense at Oklahoma and wanted him to be the Red Raiders’ head coach. Leach knew about Spike Dykes and his legacy in Lubbock—“a local hero,” he’s called him—and phoned Dykes before taking the job, to ask his blessing. Dykes gave it.
As he settled in at Texas Tech, Leach became close with some older men who became friends and mentors to him, who believed in him even as the rest of the football world still figured out what to make of him. One was Barry Switzer, the legendary former Oklahoma coach who had run the football program there from 1973 to 1988, during which time the Sooners won three national championships. “Barry Switzer kind of took me under his wing,” Leach says. The other was Donnie Duncan, who’d been on Switzer’s staff as an assistant coach from 1973 to 1978, went on to become Oklahoma’s athletic director for a little while, and then ultimately played a critical role in forming the Big 12 Conference. “Donnie was the head of our conference,” Leach says. “So once I’m the head coach at Tech, I’m in meetings hour upon hour upon hour upon hour upon hour with Donnie Duncan … And Donnie became my friend and mentor, somebody I would call, touch base with, all the time.” By 2003, Leach and Duncan were close enough that Leach trusted Duncan’s word almost blindly, hiring a defensive ends coach named Charlie Sadler based solely on Duncan’s recommendation. “I hired Charlie, just straight out of the word of Donnie Duncan,” Leach says. “He steered me right on that … I wouldn’t have hired Charlie without Donnie. I wouldn’t have known about Charlie. And Charlie was just utterly outstanding. Outstanding, smart. Very stable. All of a sudden, some crisis is going on, you know, Charlie’s one of those guys, you can sit down and sort your way through it.”
Relationships such as these provided a valuable foundation for Leach as he let his active imagination run wild and went about upending the college football status quo.
* * *
Once practices began, Lincoln felt lost. He once recalled, “I had to go out there, and ask … ‘Guys, what the hell are we doing?’”
He asked older players and coaches a million questions. He wanted to learn not only how to run this offense and what that required, but why.
The why of it all had to go beyond just making football more fun, because there are lots of ways to have fun that might be entertaining for players and fans alike, but don’t necessarily lead to wins. Leach based his offense’s philosophy in no small part on a quote from The Art of War by Sun Tzu: “If he (the enemy) is superior in strength, evade him. If his forces are united, separate them. Attack him where he is unprepared; appear where you are not expected.”
Leach wanted to do the same thing every other coach in football wanted to do: make things difficult for your opponent. He just wanted to do that in a way that was opposite of almost everyone else.
Most coaches made things difficult for their opponent by developing a lot of complex plays and schemes elaborately tailored to fit a multitude of tricky concepts. Leach didn’t like that, because while it might have made things more complicated for the defense, it also made things complicated for his own players.
His approach was simple: fewer plays, more formations.
“That way,” Leach said, “you don’t have to teach a player a new assignment every single time, just a new place to stand.”
Basically Leach’s players learned a few plays, then drilled them relentlessly as they practiced running them out of myriad different formations.
The premise of the Air Raid offense is simple: allocate receivers across the field at varying depths with significant space between them, making it impossible for a defense to cover all of them—or stretch itself thin attempting to do so. The wishbone offense had used the running game to stretch out defenses horizontally, and used all of its skill players to do so. The Air Raid did likewise, with the additional benefit of stretching a defense not only horizontally, but also vertically. Leach liked to say it was “changing the geometry of the game.”
There are more defensive players than there are receivers, but since receivers can run short, intermediate, or long routes, the dimensions of defensive positioning can become challenging. The Air Raid offense is so pass-heavy that linebackers, cornerbacks, and safeties almost never get a break from the receivers. They’re chasing someone almost every single snap.
It’s simple.
It’s relentless.
More than being a mood of optimism, as Michael Lewis wrote, the Air Raid was an insistence that things could be improved from the status quo. It was a rebellion.
At first glance, it also seemed wildly unbalanced—throw, throw, and throw some more—but Leach didn’t see it that way. He knew as well as anyone that a good offense is a balanced offense, but to Leach, “balance” didn’t mean what most people seemed to think it meant: “There’s nothing balanced about the fifty percent run, fifty percent pass,” he once said, “because that’s fifty percent stupid. When you have five skill positions, if all five of them are contributing to the offensive effort, then that’s balanced. But this notion that if you hand it to one guy fifty percent of the time and you throw it to a combination of two guys fifty percent and you’re really balanced, then you proudly pat yourself on the back and tell yourself that, well, then, you’re delusional.”
To Mike Leach, “balance” meant that every player who could make plays was given the opportunity to do so. Balance meant stressing out the defense as much as possible. Balance meant using the whole field. Balance meant using everything and everyone you had. That’s what Leach did. It was as though he saw parts of the field that others could not and thought of ways to use them that did not occur to anybody else. He wondered why others passed so little, why he should remain committed to the run when there were so many more ways to attack through the air.
And he imagined ways to maximize his aerial attack that were not directly related to it, such as when he changed what seemed to be one of the most basic, unchangeable aspects of any offense: the amount of space between offensive linemen. Traditional offensive lines had the linemen bunched together practically shoulder to shoulder. Better for protecting the quarterback and running backs in the backfield, it seemed. Leach, however, spread them as far apart as the rules allowed, sometimes up to six feet. At a glance, this appears disastrous—a full two yards suddenly existed between blockers, seemingly giving rushers all the room in the world to invade the backfield. If the defensive players rushed through those gaps, however, they would be funneled toward the middle of the field, allowing an easy handoff or pitch to the running back, who would then have a wide-open path around the outside. Leach knew that the defensive linemen would be forced to line up more or less in line with the now-expanded offensive line, which effectively created more distance between them and the quarterback, giving the quarterback more time to throw.
As for the receivers themselves: with four receivers spread across the line of scrimmage, Leach’s offense could do just about anything.
One play, you send all the receivers deep. The next play, you do the exact same thing, except then you have one or two receivers dart across the middle in a “mesh” play. Then the next play: three receivers bolt down the field, one simply stays at the line of scrimmage for a quick gain. And the halfback is always available out of the backfield in that formation, too, either for a quick out pass or to make a surprise run up the field himself.
Sometimes—more often than you might think—receivers were given a simple command along with their route: “Just get open.”
There was a wonderful philosophy at the core of all of this, too: not only was Leach making football more fun by getting more players involved and playing at a faster pace, but he was also showing his players just how much he trusted them. The traditional way of coaching—developing a slew of complex plays and ordering players to learn them—lorded the coach’s authority over players. Leach’s way of coaching—throwing a few cool plays into a bunch of different formations and telling players that they could do with them more or less what they wanted to once the ball was snapped—showed the players how much he believed in them.
And for all this, Leach once claimed not to even have an official playbook. Leach’s reasoning: “All a playbook does is document what you do.” Now he says that of course he had a playbook, but it wasn’t something he religiously adhered to. Rather, Leach’s playbook was like a set of guidelines to riff on. To teach his players, he mainly used film and on-field repetition. He and his coaching staff drilled the plays over and over—and over and over again—to make sure they knew how to execute them. This was all better than playbooks, to Leach. Playbooks were tedious and made players’ brains lazy, keeping them from concentrating on the field when it was time to learn. Without a playbook, they had to really focus: “You’re taking off their little swimming wings,” Leach said. “We’re going to be swimming in some pretty rough waters, so you’d better know how to stay afloat.”
The Red Raiders didn’t worry about trying to outsmart the defense. They just wanted to out-execute them. Rather than trying to be cleverer than the other team, Leach preached that the true goal was to simply do what they did better than the other team did what they did. And what Leach did was keep defenses off balance, either repeatedly lining up in the same formation only to use a different play every time, or line up in different formations only to run the same play out of it every time. And in Mike Leach’s offense, the options were virtually endless for a smart and capable quarterback teamed with a smart and capable coach.
Lincoln asked question after question, and he learned so much so quickly that Leach assigned Lincoln to be his scout team quarterback, a rare position of trust for a freshman. To many, it’s not a glamorous position, but the scout team’s job is to get the defensive starters ready for their next opponent, so the players have to be sharp. Leach chose Lincoln because he saw the same things in him that Lincoln’s people back home in Muleshoe had seen.
Lincoln wasn’t just smart for Muleshoe. He was just smart.
* * *
In the days after sitting through the ninety-minute lecture on the intricacies of dip tobacco, Lincoln watched as Leach rewrote some of his own plays in real time.
By this point in his career, Leach had committed to the four-receiver spread and stuck his quarterback in shotgun all the time. He took the tight end and lined him up to the right, and he moved the split end to the left. He quit worrying about whether the offense was symmetrical. He gave the quarterback the option to change the play at the line of scrimmage, and he committed to never backing down from a challenge. No “bunker mentality,” as he put it. Attack, attack, attack: “Okay, they’re blitzing from our left side. Good, good. Then let’s throw a slant right behind it.”
