He’s a friend of mine. I’ve got a lot of respect for him and everything he’s done in his career. He’s such a great guy to hang around with. The guy is intriguing, has a great sense of humor. He always has something very interesting to talk about. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent with him. – Utah head coach Kyle Whittingham
SALT LAKE CITY — Mike Leach may not be the most interesting man in the world, like that guy on the TV commercial. But he just may be the most interesting man in college football.
The life story of the Washington State football coach has been well-chronicled — how he never played college football, went on to earn a law degree as well as a master's degree and then decided to start from ground zero and pursue his real passion of coaching football and became one of the great innovative minds of offensive football.
Intrigued by the wide-open offenses he saw while attending BYU, Leach worked his way up through the ranks of NAIA and Division II on to assistant coaching jobs at Kentucky in the SEC and Oklahoma of the Big 12 before becoming a successful college coach at Texas Tech (10 straight winning seasons, 84-43 record) with high-powered offenses. After leaving under controversial circumstances and taking two years off, he landed at Washington State where he got the Cougars to a bowl game in only his second season.
Aside from football, Leach is a voracious reader of books and likes to spend his summers in Key West, Florida, and often travels around learning as much as he can about a particular subject from pirates to chimpanzees to the artist Jackson Pollack. He’s curious and inquisitive, always asking questions and studying other people.
Leach brings his Washington State Cougars to town Saturday evening (6 p.m.) for the Pac-12 opener for the Utah football team at Rice-Eccles Stadium. He’s been here before, many times, including his time as a student in Provo.
Two years ago, his Cougars were embarrassed by the Utes 49-6, a couple of months after BYU beat his team 30-6. Between coaching gigs at Texas Tech and Washington State, he visited the Utes during the 2010 season and helped his good friend Kyle Whittingham, who said, “We got some good stuff from him — he came in and gave us some really good ideas.’’
Saturday night Leach will be trying to use his own inventive ideas to knock the Utes from the unbeaten ranks and give the Cougars their first Division I win of the season, a week after giving No. 2 Oregon all it can handle.
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In his autobiographical book, “Swing Your Sword,” Leach talks about his early life and what shaped his personality and innovative coaching style.
He grew up mostly in Wyoming and Colorado, living in eight different places before the age of 12. He “hated” it at the time but in retrospect said it helped him to be adaptable to different situations and learn to analyze people, something important in coaching.
“I was curious about everything,’’ he wrote. “I knew everything there was to know about Tarzan, Daniel Boone and Geronimo.’’
He started coaching Little League baseball starting at age 15 and tried new things like using a different pitcher every inning or having his players warm up using “ghost” moves without a ball or bat, to unnerve the opposition.
He went to BYU because he was Mormon and wanted to get away from home, but he kept getting in trouble with what he called “the Honor Code Police” because his hair was often over his collar. Leach argued that some of the professors had hair as long as his and pointed out the statue of Brigham Young with flowing hair longer than his. (“Basically I’m a religious person, but with some clear obedience and discipline issues,’’ Leach once told the New York Times).
On the whole, Leach said he enjoyed his experience in Provo and is happy he went there because of meeting people from all over the world and mostly because he met his wife, Sharon, there.
He graduated with honors from BYU in 1983 with a degree in American studies. He got his law degree three years later at Pepperdine, where he said he learned all about problem-solving. He got another degree in sports science from a small college in Alabama, then sent out hundreds of resumes, trying to get a job as a graduate assistant.
His first job was as a part-time graduate assistant at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo. He recalls having to tell his wife that he would be making $3,000 — a year. He moved around almost every year, even spending a year coaching in Finland, where he recalls players smoking cigarettes on the sideline.
He coached with Hal Mumme at Iowa Wesleyan and Valdosta State in Georgia before the two moved on to Kentucky. After two years there he went to Oklahoma under new head coach Bob Stoops, and after a successful season there in turning around the offense, he was offered the Texas Tech job.
When he was at BYU, Leach said he used to study coach LaVell Edwards’ offense, and the first person he hired when he was named head coach at Texas Tech was former Cougar Robert Anae, who had played at BYU when Leach was a student. Leach also admired a certain Cougar linebacker from afar.
When asked about his relationship with Kyle Whittingham earlier this week, Leach said, “When I first became aware of him, he was a total icon there at BYU. There were the haves and the have-nots, and Kyle was definitely a have. We had a very good football team and he had bigger muscles than most people. (Our relationship) started out before we knew each other — we knew a lot of people the other knew.
“I was aware of him then, and as I’ve gotten into coaching, I’ve gotten to know him,’’ Leach continued. “He’s just a great guy, smart guy and very aware of what he’s doing. He personifies defensive toughness and a very interesting guy to talk to.’’
Whittingham smiled when asked about Leach and his “quirkiness.’’
“He’s a friend of mine,’’ Whittingham said. “I’ve got a lot of respect for him and everything he’s done in his career. He’s such a great guy to hang around with. The guy is intriguing, has a great sense of humor. He always has something very interesting to talk about. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent with him.''
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One thing about Leach is that he is blunt and usually says whatever is on his mind. Mumme, who Leach worked for as an assistant coach at three colleges, called Leach “the most brutally honest person I’ve ever met.’’
In his press conferences, Leach doesn’t give flowery answers or fall into coachspeak, which can be viewed either as rude or refreshing. He showed that earlier this week when talking about the upcoming game with Utah.
When a local reporter brought up something about his first year as Washington State coach, Leach replied tersely, “I’m not talking about the first year, I’m talking about this year.’’
Asked if he’d change anything in his preparations to play at altitude at Utah, he said, “No, we’re already at 3,000 feet here.’’
Asked what he thought about Travis Wilson as Utah’s quarterback, he said, “Good player, you know, solid player.’’
When a local reporter asked him about what were some of the subtle ways that quarterback Connor Halliday could improve that perhaps the average person couldn’t see, Leach simply said, “Everybody can improve.’’
When asked if his team was concerned about Utah’s punt returner Kaelin Clay and might kick away from him this week, he was a little more verbose.
“I hope we won’t kick it at all — let’s try to keep this glass half full here. He’s a good player but you’ve got to balance what you lose by him having it and what you lose by kicking it away from him. Either way you’re giving up something. We’ll look at that, plus it would pretty much be a secret, something we wouldn’t tell you anyway.’’
Two years ago when the Cougars gave up 49 points to Utah, Leach was of course, blunt in his assessment of his team.
“Our five couldn’t whip their two,’’ Leach said of his offensive line. “Sometimes they only brought two. Which means, if five of our guys went in an alley and got in a fight with two of theirs, we would have gotten massacred. That’s just ridiculously inexcusable.’’
You can bet that after Saturday’s game against Utah, win or lose, Leach will again have some interesting things to say.
After all, he is the most interesting man in college football.