Like I said, Leach had a bonus of $800k due to him if he was the coach on January 1st. The university is making sure they fire him before that.
Welp, I didn’t see THAT coming, but I wonder if Texas Tech thought the suspension wouldn’t stand up in court, or if Leach suing them was just the last straw. I’m still curious to see what, if anything, comes of the investigation.
I don’t think so. They have to know he’s going to litigate this thing, and in the long run, I suspect they’ll end up paying him more than that, plus they’ll have some hefty legal bills.
Wouldn’t it be something if the assistant coaches all took a hike in protest? Would they have to forfeit the game?
It all depends what facts were stated that Leach didn’t dispute.
If in fact James was diagnosed with a “mild concussion”, did the doctor specifically order that James not play OR practice? Did Leach have a copy of the doctor’s finding, regardless of what they said?
Did Leach in fact order that James be put into the nearest dark place, or order him to be put in a dark place and not allowed to sit down?
What the ‘facts’ consist of seems to be in dispute among the various reports, so that the additional fact that the coach has “admitted to” the ‘facts’ tell us essentially nothing.
He’s going to sue no matter what, so they might as well save a little bit of money.
What I’m saying is that I don’t think it is going to save them money. The guy just signed a new contract. He’s probably going to argue Texas Tech acted in bad faith, and does not have sufficient grounds to fire him for cause, and may add a claim for defamation as well. If the case settles, they’ll have to pay him a substantial chunk of the contract, possibly including the bonus. If it goes to trial, everything is on the table, including possible tort damages.
Worse, I think they’re going to have some trouble attracting a good replacement coach after this fiasco, may lose some alumni support, and recruiting ain’t gonna be easy for them either. TT may have just doomed their football program to mediocrity for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, I didn’t think I was being hyperbolic when I said that earlier. Texas Tech is a team that doesn’t have a storied football history. They were built from essentially nothing into one of the best teams in college football (last year) solely by Mike Leach and his innovative offense.
Which in itself poses some problems. The “air raid” is a very specific style of offense that isn’t ran by a huge number of teams, meaning unless they promote a Leach assistant to HC this offense will most likely be “on the way out” at Texas Tech. That means in the short term you have a team full of kids recruited with one system in mind who may be looking at another system.
The “air raid” attracts lots of wide receivers just like the spread-option rush scheme attracts a ton of good running backs. High School kids want to go where they believe their NCAA stats will end up the most impressive so that they have the best chance possible of going pro. This means even a large part of the Texas Tech current recruiting class will be in doubt.
If I was a wide receiver wanting good numbers and I just found out Mike Leach got fired, you’d better believe I’d start looking at other options (and commitments aren’t binding until February IIRC.)
From what I’m reading on the Texas Tech message boards, Leach is expected to end up with around $1.6m + $800,000 when the dust settles. The $1.6m is the contractual buyout Tech has to pay if they want to just ditch Leach for “any reason they please” (essentially, “firing without cause.”) According to recent reports there was a clause in Leach’s contract concerning the $800,000 bonus payment that essentially says if Leach is fired and would have hit that bonus date within ten days after the date of termination he is still owed said bonus. So essentially we’ll probably see him get $2.4m or somewhere in that ballpark. If that is true (and I’ve read the bonus thing is true both on the Texas Tech forums and it was just reported by Joe Schad on ESPN) it makes it odd that Texas Tech fired Leach today. Speculation was if he was fired today it would be to avoid having to pay the bonus, but if the contract was set up so that he was protected in the case of a last minute firing, there must have been something else at play.
Anyway, the reason I suspect Leach will get $2.4m is that is the “minimum” Texas Tech can safely get out of this with; apparently if they go to court and lose in their case they could end up on the hook for the full $10m (the entire amount of his outstanding contract), that seems too risky and isn’t in line with what I see college football programs do in these situations.
I’m aware of an event in baseball history in which the Detroit Tigers refused to show up at a game in protest of Ty Cobb being suspended.
I’m not aware of it ever happening in NCAA football, but would interesting if a NCAA football historian could dredge it up.
I doubt the assistant coaches will do this for a few big reasons. One is, most of them are probably pissed their friend Mike Leach got fired. But right now, Mike Leach is just a millionaire without a job. They still have a job at the university and there is a potential that someone from within gets promoted to HC, meaning most of the assistants would probably keep their jobs. For that reason I don’t see them doing anything out of protest.
Remember, Mike Leach (if he has been smart) has made enough money while coaching at Texas Tech to stop working right now and live comfortably until the moment he croaks (while providing for his family and then some.) However, he was a “name” FBS coach. Typically FBS assistants make around $250,000-300,000; damn fine money for coaching football, but not enough that any of those guys are ready to retire by any means. (Because of the personality of people that coach football at this level, Leach won’t be ready to retire either, and he’ll probably land somewhere else after a season off.) These guys need their jobs too much to risk anything by protesting the bowl game.
I don’t know what would happen if the players refused to play. I guess theoretically the interim coach could kick all of them off the football team and revoke their scholarships. But how does that work? You get rid of your entire roster and you essentially have just given yourself an SMU-style death penalty and truly destroyed your football team for probably a decade or more, with no hope of avoiding said fate. So I guess if the players had the cojones, they probably could refuse the bowl bid and come out unscathed, I can’t see how TTU could punish them.
Rumors abound on the Texas Tech message boards that Ruffin McNeill (the guy named interim coach when Leach was just suspended and not fired) has quit. More speculation says that Sonny Dykes, the son of long time Texas Tech coach Spike Dykes is to be the next Head Coach at Texas Tech.
The way the folks in Lubbock are spinning it, the Dykes family is part of the “good ole-boy network” that never felt Leach was “Texan” enough to be HC at TTU, and said “good ole-boy network” has been wanting Leach out since last year in favor of Sonny.
I don’t know much about how civil trials are ran/how they work out. But would it be at all relevant for Leach’s lawyers to point out all the misbehavior of basketball coach Bobby Knight while at Texas Tech? Knight ran afoul of behavioral norms several times and was never so much as warned or reprimanded by TTU’s administration.
For example Knight had to be restrained by police officers because he wanted to rush into the stands of a basketball game to fight a heckler…to my knowledge TTU never even commented on this incident.
The famous Michael Prince incident, in which Knight essentially slapped a player “lightly” on the face, resulted in Greg Myers (the guy who was behind the Leach firing) vehemently defending Knight immediately and saying Coach Knight had done nothing wrong whatsoever.
I think it could be relevant depending on how the pleadings are written.
Leach made a big mistake challenging the bowl game suspension. Bringing lawyers into this was a bad idea. It’s not unusual for coaches to sit out a one game suspension for various NCAA violations.
Leach could have ridden this storm out by apologizing and accepting a one game suspension.
I’m familiar with Texas Tech’s Athletic Director. Gerald Myers was a legendary basketball coach in the old Southwest Conference. I watched his teams play Arkansas every year when I was growing up. Eventually Gerald Myers will step down and retire. But, it won’t be because of Mike Leach.
Mike Leach will be fine. I predict that he’ll be coaching at some other school very soon. It’s actually unusual he stayed so long at Tech.
He has been trying to leave for a few years but nobody else would hire him. Wonder if he finds it easier or harder to find a job now.
I’ve never heard of Gerald Myers before a day or two ago, but I know that the entirety of the Texas Tech message board fan base (both those that are so pissed they are threatening to stop all support of their alma mater and those that are saying they are still in full support of TTU) is clamoring for Myers’ head; so it doesn’t seem like his basketball accolades hold much water for the people of Lubbock. (Obviously the University Chancellor/President/whatever he is called at TTU is the only person who matters in that regard.)
I think the biggest problem with Leach is that while the spread-option offense is now used extensively across college football (at one point ESPN did a breakdown of the top 10 teams in the rankings during a week in the middle of the season and 5 of those 10 ran the spread-option), the “spread air attack” that Leach runs is still seen as being very gimmicky.
Then again I thought Paul Johnson would have trouble getting a job at a “name” school with his offense, and that doesn’t appear to have been the case.
With coaching changes a lot of it depends on what jobs are available.
Some teams are willing to go with guys who run strange offenses like Leach does. [I don’t really believe in the word “gimmick” when it comes to a football offense. The goal of football is to move the ball and score and to prevent the other team from moving the ball better than you and scoring more than you, all that matters in terms of moving the ball is that you have good results. Doesn’t matter how you get there and Leach’s offense is proven to work against some of the best teams in FBS football.] Obviously “elite mega-programs” are less likely to take a chance on “weird” offenses. Notre Dame, Ohio State, Texas, USC, Florida, obviously wouldn’t consider Leach. But there’s only 5-6 programs of that caliber in the country (and Notre Dame only is on that list out of tradition’s sake, in reality they aren’t even a top 25 team in football of the past 10 years), and none of them really have vacancies at the moment.
Leach’s move would at best be lateral (probably he’d go to a program no worse than what Texas Tech was when Leach arrived), that probably means lower-half of the division teams in the PAC-10, Big East teams, ACC teams, lower-half Big 10 teams, lower-half SEC teams et cetera.
If any of the lower-tier Pac-10 schools had an opening next year, he could end up there (I believe he has ties on the Pacific coast.) It’s almost a certainty given the timing of the firing that Leach won’t even really look for a job until after next season. With an outside chance he takes a coordinator position at a big school or in the pros.
I hope I can assume that the building/closets James was confined to were not locked form the outside.
I say he goes and OCs for the Raiders. Though I’d be highly entertained by him actually taking the spot at Florida. Just get him a good DC.
Or that Gundy hires him as an actual OC for OSU, not that that will ever happen.
Here is a video of the buildings/rooms in question.
Is the Airraid really seen as gimmicky? It is just another collection of pass-heavy spread concepts. BYU has had success running it, and Norm Chow has had success running his version of it.
One job that may open next year is NC State. Other open jobs could be Colorado and Maryland , those coaches just barely survived this year. Outside of NCSU and MD the other 10 ACC coaches should be OK through next year. The Va Tech coach could retire and so could Paterno. Both of those jobs could be filled from within.