Some of the MSU media are reporting it’s a pretty dire situation- hate to hear he’s not doing well. He’s been one of my favorite coaches in college football for a long time and that didn’t change when he went to MSU. Thoughts and prayers for him and his family

This is truly sad.  The Pirate added a new dimension to football and was an offensive innovator.  Hopefully he will make it through this ordeal and then be able to get some rest in Key West.

UMCC has transitioned into comfort care treatments for Miek Leach.  This is essentially hospice care, so it is just a matter of time before Coach Leach is gone from this world.  Please keep him and his family in your prayers.

Shoot off those cannons on the Buccaneer pirate ship in the endzone after a touchdown.

I got to know the Pirate pretty well over the years. Been a sad few days. Spent many hours on the phone talking to my former colleagues in coaching and his former players that are scattered all over Texas coaching in HS and College.




My perspective is simply this: no one who has ever come through the state of Texas has  had a bigger impact on the way that the game is played within it than him.

When he arrived at Oklahoma in 1999 as the offensive coordinator for Bob Stoops, he was hired because Stoops had been the defensive coordinator at Florida and Leach had been the play caller at Kentucky. Leach had come up through the coaching ranks with a guy named Hal Mumme (who was the Wildcats' head coach) and they had modified the West Coast offense to become more a ball control offense via the passing game with short drops and throws to the backs.

It was called the Air Raid.

They made a quarterback named Tim Couch the number one pick in the 1999 NFL Draft and the Wildcats a New Year's Day bowl team. In fact, if you watch those 1998 Wildcats on Youtube, you'll see them them in split back formations and not the one back looks that we've become so familiar with.

Stoops found it difficult to game plan for and he brought Leach to Norman.

Leach left after one season to take over for Tech icon Spike Dykes (the late father of current TCU head coach Sonny Sykes) as head coach. Back then, the Big 12 and the state of Texas was an I formation state. The best players in the high school ranks were running backs and quality quarterbacks left the state to go elsewhere and throw the ball. Houston had popularized the Run N' Shoot with one back and four wideouts in the 1990's but it was difficult to protect quarterbacks or score in the Red Zone. It had gotten defensed out of existence by the time Leach showed up in Lubbock.

Then, Leach arrived using one back and four wideout sets and some quirky notions about how the game should be played. His teams ran just six basic plays out of different sets to simplify teaching. The concepts of each play were simple...throw the ball where the defense wasn't. Receivers adjusted their routes on the fly. The ball came out quickly so that it was difficult to get to the quarterback. He popularized receiver screens, especially the bubble screen, and used it like I formation offenses used the toss sweep.

Leach thought of balance in terms of each skill player having an equal number of yards, not touches. It didn't matter to him if his halfback got 1,000 yards both rushing and receiving as opposed to them being a 1,000 yard runner.

He popularized concepts like smash routes (slot running a corner route over a hitch route from an outside receiver) and four verticals (four go routes with an inside receiver being used as a "beater" to act as a checkdown guy). He even did things like call timeout when his defense was struggling just like basketball coaches. He liked the concept and applied it to football...and it worked.

Leach didn't have a personality that lent itself to recruiting and he coached in places that weren't destination spots for high school prospects. The closest he ever came to winning a conference title was when he got Tech to the number one ranking for a few weeks in 2008.

Yet in his early years at Tech, people noticed that his outfits were putting up big numbers with guys that lacked big arms and receivers that lacked speed. More than anyone else, the state's high school coaches noticed. They attended his lectures where he shared his secrets and installed the offense themselves.

While Leach's teams were putting up 40 points versus Texas and Oklahoma and beating them when they came out to Lubbock, teams in the high school ranks started scoring a lot as well. Both coaches in the Big 12 and Texas high schools found out the hard way that a ball control offense wasn't much good if you couldn't occasionally win a shoot out with someone.

For those of us that studied the game, we welcomed him the more we watched him.

In fact, something else happened as well...everyone thought those games were more fun and high octane offenses became the norm in the state and the Big 12. It got to the point that you would go to a high school playoff game and both teams were attempting on side kicks because they couldn't stop the other one on defense. They modified the rules to make them more friendly to the passing game.

For better or for worse, Leach changed the way football in this state is played from the lowest levels upward.

Not only that, Leach didn't start out to change the world but he ended up doing so. Teams now spread the field with three or more wideouts like Leach did but to facilitate the running game as much as they do their passing attack.

A&M took the Air Raid to the SEC in 2012 and now the league features high scoring contests every weekend. The NFL uses plays like mesh and gets in the gun on every down, even short yardage plays.

We should be grateful that a guy with a law degree decided to apply his talents to football and not the court room. He made the game so much more fun to play and watch.

When you think about it, he's probably became the most influential offensive mind in the history of the game...and we got a front row seat to his genius.