It’s not so much the numbers. Even though he was averaging a career- high 21.8 points on better than 50 percent shooting through early January, what really makes Richard “Rip” Hamilton a key piston in the Pistons’ drive for a third-straight NBA Finals appearance is how he goes about compiling those figures. His relentless running and picture perfect jumper makes him Detroit’s most consistent midrange and perimeter threat.
"He's poetry in motion. He moves more without the ball then anybody in this league since Reggie Miller." – New Orleans Hornets coach Byron Scott on Pistons shooting guard Richard Hamilton
SLAM: You’re having the best season of your career statistically. What did you work on over the summer?
RIP: I do a lot of conditioning in the offseason. I don’t really take any time off. A lot of guys in the summertime say, “Oh, I can finally eat whatever I want to eat and relax.” I hire a chef in the summertime and work on my weaknesses. I focus on a lot of specific parts of my game— my handle, my midrange game, my three-point shot, and my post-up.
SLAM: People always talk about your conditioning. In the NBA, is that more important than speed?
RIP: I think conditioning is very important. If you are in great shape you separate yourself from a lot of people that might be quicker or more athletic because they will wear out. I get myself in such good condition that when it comes to the game, the game is easy for me. If you take care of your body and think of your body as an investment it will come through for you. I treat my body just like a car. If you put in great fuel and take care of it, good things are going to happen. I eat all the right foods and things like that
SLAM: Do you consider yourself fast, or is it more about just being able to keep going when everyone else is wearing down?
RIP: I consider myself fast, and I consider myself able to keep going. I’m a lot faster than a whole lot of people in the League, but that speed gets better and better as the game goes on. Sometimes guys start off fast, but then they wear down. I always think that when I’m moving fast, I’m able to maintain that same high level throughout the whole game.
SLAM: You mentioned working on your midrange game. When did you realize that could be your bread and butter?
RIP: When I was in the 11th grade I went to ABCD Camp and it seemed like everybody there could dunk and everybody there could shoot threes. I looked at everybody and I couldn’t understand why everybody there couldn’t go to the NBA. So I had to figure out a way to do something different than they were doing, and for me that became working on my medium-range game.
SLAM: How did playing in college help you develop your game?
RIP: Oh, a lot. I wouldn’t be the player I am today if I hadn’t played in college. When I went to Connecticut, Coach Calhoun showed me how to use my teammates. He showed me how to use my screens. I mean, I never knew how to use a screen until I went to Connecticut. That’s why I always tell people, if you’re a guard, you should go to Connecticut.
SLAM: I know you were a Bulls fan growing up. Were you picking up things from watching Jordan back then, too?
RIP: Yeah. I was always a student of the game, and my favorite players were Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. I never grew to be 6-9 and I never could jump as high as MJ, so I just studied the way they attacked the game, how they won at every level. I tried to take the one-two dribble pull-up from MJ.
SLAM: You have a little Reggie Miller in there, too.
RIP: Yeah, I watched him, too. I watched Reggie so much, him and Allen Iverson. I love the way Allen attacked on the break, and I always wondered how he was able to get to the basket and come off screens and use his teammates. Because, you know, he isn’t a heavy guy, either. I just loved his heart for the game. The same thing with Reggie—the way he would come off screens, the way he would get fouls, the way he was able to get his shot off regardless of who was on him. I studied those guys a lot.
9.27.2009
J.J. Redick
1.He is the NCAA’s career leader in free throw percentage at 92.1%.
2.He’s not perfect – Redick wasn’t always so committed to extraordinary conditioning. He once was more committed to his social life. “I think a lot of college students, when they go through those first two years, they’re trying to figure out who they are and who they’re going to be, and I struggled with that for a while.”
Raised in what he calls “a conservative family,” he says he got to college and saw things he’d never seen. He did not avert his eyes. “Maybe if you’ve never partied before and you go to a party on Saturday night and have fun – in your eyes – well there’s another party on Sunday night. Should I go to that, too? You just kind of get caught up in what everybody else is doing.”
Eventually Redick figured everything out for himself. “It was kind of like, Man what are you doing? We’ve got a game tomorrow,” says forward Lee Melchionni “it’s sort of hard being in that place, but I needed to say that for the good of our team.”
“At some point, you wake up one day and think, ‘I’m not really headed down the road I want to head down.’ And I had that day. In mid-May 2004 he went to see Krzyzewski and spoke with him about redirecting his life. Ten months later, Redick was ACC Player of the Year.
3.Conditioning - “I was impressed with his physical conditioning,” says Texas coach Rick Barnes, whose team allowed Redick a career-high 41 points. “He’s like a mountain stream of running water. It goes up against one rock and turns another way – it never stops flowing.”
With help from assistant coach Chris Collins, Redick studied players such as Reggie Miller and Richard Hamilton, guys known for running defenders through an armada of screens. “Those guys never wear down as the game goes on,” Collins says. Redick averaged 36.8 minutes per game over the past two seasons.
2.He’s not perfect – Redick wasn’t always so committed to extraordinary conditioning. He once was more committed to his social life. “I think a lot of college students, when they go through those first two years, they’re trying to figure out who they are and who they’re going to be, and I struggled with that for a while.”
Raised in what he calls “a conservative family,” he says he got to college and saw things he’d never seen. He did not avert his eyes. “Maybe if you’ve never partied before and you go to a party on Saturday night and have fun – in your eyes – well there’s another party on Sunday night. Should I go to that, too? You just kind of get caught up in what everybody else is doing.”
Eventually Redick figured everything out for himself. “It was kind of like, Man what are you doing? We’ve got a game tomorrow,” says forward Lee Melchionni “it’s sort of hard being in that place, but I needed to say that for the good of our team.”
“At some point, you wake up one day and think, ‘I’m not really headed down the road I want to head down.’ And I had that day. In mid-May 2004 he went to see Krzyzewski and spoke with him about redirecting his life. Ten months later, Redick was ACC Player of the Year.
3.Conditioning - “I was impressed with his physical conditioning,” says Texas coach Rick Barnes, whose team allowed Redick a career-high 41 points. “He’s like a mountain stream of running water. It goes up against one rock and turns another way – it never stops flowing.”
With help from assistant coach Chris Collins, Redick studied players such as Reggie Miller and Richard Hamilton, guys known for running defenders through an armada of screens. “Those guys never wear down as the game goes on,” Collins says. Redick averaged 36.8 minutes per game over the past two seasons.
Chris Paul - Competitive
“He’s a great kid. He’s lovable,” Scott says. “But when the whistle blows, he wants to kill you. He’s a lot like Isiah. When the game starts he wants to beat you as bad as he can.”
History says the odds are stacked against him, yet Paul expects nothing less than success from himself. But what does the rest of the world expect?
“I’m not sure,” Paul says. “I always think some people think you can do it, and some think you can’t. But you need both of them. You need people who are gonna support you, and then you need people who make you want to go out and prove something.”
History says the odds are stacked against him, yet Paul expects nothing less than success from himself. But what does the rest of the world expect?
“I’m not sure,” Paul says. “I always think some people think you can do it, and some think you can’t. But you need both of them. You need people who are gonna support you, and then you need people who make you want to go out and prove something.”
LEBRON JAMES - CLUTCH?
Charles Barkley does not want to hear any more excuses when it comes to LeBron James and his lack of game-winning shots and a perceived deficiency in clutch play, especially during the fourth quarter of games.
James is only 21, but Barkley said three years in the NBA is enough seasoning to step up his game and become more of a threat during prime time.
"LeBron's not a rookie anymore," said Barkley, one of the 50 greatest NBA players of all time and an analyst for TNT. "He's got to have an imprint on the game in the last minute, by making a big rebound, getting a stop, taking a big shot, any way he can get it done.
"They shouldn't lose five or six games in a row unless they're playing the Spurs or the Pistons during that span. He shouldn't let that happen."
The Cavs have certainly had their fair share of losing streaks this season, and it isn't fair to put all the blame on one player just like it isn't fair to give one player all the credit.
Questions have surfaced about some of James' decisions late in games and his inability to make winning shots in the final seconds.
The ball of criticism began to roll in January when James missed a potential winning shot against the Los Angeles Lakers and then passed up open shots against the Denver Nuggets and Portland Trail Blazers.
Barkley jumped on James' play following the Cavs' loss to the Washington Wizards. In the loss, James was 0-for-8 from the field in the second half and 4-of-12 from the free-throw line, including four straight misses from the line in the final minutes.
"LeBron's got to be more selfish," Barkley said. "His team is going to expect him to finish these games. He can't have three or five points in the second half. He's got to decide and say to himself that 'we're not going to lose tonight.' He's got to find away where the outcome of the game is in his hands. If he wants to be great, he's got to make it happen."
James is only 21, but Barkley said three years in the NBA is enough seasoning to step up his game and become more of a threat during prime time.
"LeBron's not a rookie anymore," said Barkley, one of the 50 greatest NBA players of all time and an analyst for TNT. "He's got to have an imprint on the game in the last minute, by making a big rebound, getting a stop, taking a big shot, any way he can get it done.
"They shouldn't lose five or six games in a row unless they're playing the Spurs or the Pistons during that span. He shouldn't let that happen."
The Cavs have certainly had their fair share of losing streaks this season, and it isn't fair to put all the blame on one player just like it isn't fair to give one player all the credit.
Questions have surfaced about some of James' decisions late in games and his inability to make winning shots in the final seconds.
The ball of criticism began to roll in January when James missed a potential winning shot against the Los Angeles Lakers and then passed up open shots against the Denver Nuggets and Portland Trail Blazers.
Barkley jumped on James' play following the Cavs' loss to the Washington Wizards. In the loss, James was 0-for-8 from the field in the second half and 4-of-12 from the free-throw line, including four straight misses from the line in the final minutes.
"LeBron's got to be more selfish," Barkley said. "His team is going to expect him to finish these games. He can't have three or five points in the second half. He's got to decide and say to himself that 'we're not going to lose tonight.' He's got to find away where the outcome of the game is in his hands. If he wants to be great, he's got to make it happen."
NFL QUATERBACKS
QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION WITH THE TOP QUARTERBACKS IN THE NFL
PETER KING: If you're a general manager scouting passers, what is the one trait that today's NFL quarterback has to have?
BEN ROETHLISBERGER: Toughness. I don't think toughness is when a quarterback says, "I'm going to run somebody over." Toughness is playing the worst game of your life but not backing down. You don't want to sit on the sideline. You want to stay in there and win. You know, down 21 points and the defense is getting through in every single way, and you throw three interceptions. Staying in that game, keeping your head up, trying to drive your team down the field when everything's going wrong—that's the kind of toughness I want in my quarterback.
PETER KING: Is there ever a feeling of fear inside you?
CARSON PALMER: Fear of failure always drives me. I don't want to let my guys down. After we lose and I see my linemen, it's like I let them down. That's the feeling a quarterback has to have.
BEN ROETHLISBERGER: Even if I do ever feel anything like that, and I'm not saying I ever feel scared or nervous, but I'll never show it. We can't. Not at our position. Everyone's looking at us.
PETER KING: Let me put it this way—think back to big moments or big games. How does your stomach feel?
AARON RODGERS: When I was a point guard, I wanted the ball in the last two minutes. When I was a pitcher, I wanted the ball in the last inning. That's why in the big moments in games, I'm not tight. Those moments are why you play.
BEN ROETHLISBERGER: I want the ball. Our defense does some amazing things, but I want to have the ball, and that's the way I've always been playing sports.
PETER KING: Like on the last drive of the Super Bowl?
BEN ROETHLISBERGER: On that drive I ran out and thought, This is going to be really hard. Because we had kind of struggled late in that game. Not saying I definitely couldn't do it. I just knew it would be tough. When I got in the huddle, I told the guys, "I don't have any speech. Just think of all the extra work we put in, all the extra film study we did together. It'll all be for nothing if we don't do this." Then we get a holding call on the first play, and it's going bad. But here's the thing about playing quarterback in this league: Even if you don't feel confident, you have to show you feel it, so when your teammates are looking at you, they believe it.
MATT RYAN: You don't want to let the guys down. As for nerves, I always find myself more nervous before the game, before the kickoff, before the first snap. Then when you're in it and you take a couple of hits, you get into the flow of the game. Honestly, when the game's on the line, I feel calmer than on the first series because I'm into the game. I'm not thinking about how big the moment is.
PETER KING: If you're a general manager scouting passers, what is the one trait that today's NFL quarterback has to have?
BEN ROETHLISBERGER: Toughness. I don't think toughness is when a quarterback says, "I'm going to run somebody over." Toughness is playing the worst game of your life but not backing down. You don't want to sit on the sideline. You want to stay in there and win. You know, down 21 points and the defense is getting through in every single way, and you throw three interceptions. Staying in that game, keeping your head up, trying to drive your team down the field when everything's going wrong—that's the kind of toughness I want in my quarterback.
PETER KING: Is there ever a feeling of fear inside you?
CARSON PALMER: Fear of failure always drives me. I don't want to let my guys down. After we lose and I see my linemen, it's like I let them down. That's the feeling a quarterback has to have.
BEN ROETHLISBERGER: Even if I do ever feel anything like that, and I'm not saying I ever feel scared or nervous, but I'll never show it. We can't. Not at our position. Everyone's looking at us.
PETER KING: Let me put it this way—think back to big moments or big games. How does your stomach feel?
AARON RODGERS: When I was a point guard, I wanted the ball in the last two minutes. When I was a pitcher, I wanted the ball in the last inning. That's why in the big moments in games, I'm not tight. Those moments are why you play.
BEN ROETHLISBERGER: I want the ball. Our defense does some amazing things, but I want to have the ball, and that's the way I've always been playing sports.
PETER KING: Like on the last drive of the Super Bowl?
BEN ROETHLISBERGER: On that drive I ran out and thought, This is going to be really hard. Because we had kind of struggled late in that game. Not saying I definitely couldn't do it. I just knew it would be tough. When I got in the huddle, I told the guys, "I don't have any speech. Just think of all the extra work we put in, all the extra film study we did together. It'll all be for nothing if we don't do this." Then we get a holding call on the first play, and it's going bad. But here's the thing about playing quarterback in this league: Even if you don't feel confident, you have to show you feel it, so when your teammates are looking at you, they believe it.
MATT RYAN: You don't want to let the guys down. As for nerves, I always find myself more nervous before the game, before the kickoff, before the first snap. Then when you're in it and you take a couple of hits, you get into the flow of the game. Honestly, when the game's on the line, I feel calmer than on the first series because I'm into the game. I'm not thinking about how big the moment is.
9.26.2009
TONY PARKER
Parker's improved jumper could score him the Finals MVP award.
Two years ago, the San Antonio Spurs won an NBA title. But Tony Parker wasn't necessarily happy.
Then 23 years old, the point guard had been a bit player in the deciding seventh game, as Parker's inability to connect from outside against the Pistons' mighty defense limited him to a 3-for-11, eight-point performance. The Spurs periodically sat Parker and used a combo of Brent Barry and Manu Ginobili to play the point in that series, and after Game 7, writers debated whether the Spurs would even bring Parker back the next year.
The 2007 Finals couldn't be more different. The French flash is likely to be named series MVP if the Spurs close things out in Thursday's Game 4, after Parker again made a couple of big shots down the stretch to win Game 3 -- including a rare 3-pointer with a minute left to hold the Cavs at bay.
That's no accident. It's the culmination of a two-year process that saw him completely rebuild his jump shot and then torment Cleveland with the new weapon in this year's Finals.
Right after the 2005 Finals, Parker made the decision that he wanted to improve. He didn't care that he was a world champion point guard making near-max money and dating a hugely popular TV star; he was frustrated that his shaky jump shot was having such a negative impact on his game.
Enter Chip Engelland. Hired that offseason as a shooting coach by the Spurs after he'd previously plied his trade in Denver, Engelland helped rebuild Parker's jump shot piece by piece. The slingshot-like set shot that Parker entered the league with -- now gone forever -- was replaced by a smoother jumper that has repeatedly made the Cavaliers pay for going under the screen to take away his driving lanes.
For Parker, it was the right coach at the right time.
"Timing is important," Engelland said, "because when you play in the NBA, you always think you're just going to keep getting better. [But] the NBA is hard, and then you plateau, and that timing is good [for fixing a shot]."
And there was definitely some fixing to do.
"In the first few years [of Parker's career], whenever he'd shoot it, I just figured it was going to be a turnover, same as a turnover -- there's no way that's going in," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. "But in the last year and a half when he shoots it, I actually think it's going to go in, so he's changed me quite a bit. But that's due to his work and Chip Engelland, who's really worked hard on him."
"Tony, even though he won a championship that year, wanted to get better," Engelland said. "That's where I give him a ton of credit. His summer time, he wanted to work at something he's not good at. That's uncomfortable."
They had to start from the bottom up, and that required Engelland to establish trust with Parker before he could start working on his jumper. Former Spurs GM and current Cavs GM Danny Ferry said Engelland's patience with players is one of his greatest assets -- that he'd focus on developing the relationship so that players would trust his advice on fixing the shot.
"We got to know each other first," Engelland said. "We did a lot of talking with him, where he wanted to go. Tony wants to be great. So [I said] what it takes -- he has to have a consistent jump shot and his free throw has to improve.
"I think the most important thing, and this is true for every player, their shot is personal. Whether it's a 12-year-old girl or an [NBA player], it's their own shot. It's theirs, it's personal. When I talk to a player at any level ... I don't come in and disrespect their shot."
That helps him establish a rapport with his pupils, and from there he can start tweaking. One of the key examples Engelland used to help Parker come to grips with rebuilding his jumper was Tiger Woods. Parker is a huge Tiger fan, and once he learned Tiger redid his whole swing after crushing the field in the Masters for his first major victory, that made Parker far more receptive to the idea of working on his own game.
"It takes a lot of trust," Engelland said. "It's hard to want to get better at something."
Focusing on short jumpers, Engelland went to work on Parker: "We started with the basics, the very basics: balance, hand placement on the ball, follow through, what he watches, his target. He's done it great. He did a good job listening, practicing. It's not easy to do."
One of the keys was changing Parker's thumb position on the ball. Engelland said when Parker shoots a floater -- something he does as well as anyone in the league -- his thumb is in the correct position, at nearly a right angle to the rest of his hand, so that he can keep control over the ball. But on his jumper, the thumb often was close by his fingers, and as a result the ball would frequently come off the side of his hand.
Thanks to that fix and others like it, the results have been obvious, and not just in the last three games. Parker had never shot better than 33.3 percent on 3-pointers, or 75.5 percent on free throws before this season. This year those two numbers were way up -- 39.5 percent from downtown, albeit on fewer attempts, and an impressive 78.3 percent from the stripe.
Parker's newfound consistency is turning the scouting report against him upside down. Previously, teams would dare him to shoot from outside and focus on taking away his drives to the basket. But his rebuilt shooting stroke has left opponents in a quandary.
"Against Phoenix, they tried to do the same strategy," Parker said. "They put Shawn Marion on me and he was going under, and I start knocking down shots and then they have to come out. And that's when you penetrate again, and that's when you try to get back to the basket and get some stuff going for my teammates or for myself. The whole key is to make sure I shoot with confidence."
So with Parker burning the Cavs from outside -- even throwing in a rare triple in crunch time to help hold off Cleveland -- Engelland was feeling like a proud parent after Game 3. "I'm happy for him," Engelland said. "I just like his consistency. ... He's just been solid in the playoffs. ... I think that's what coach Popovich wants -- he's so talented that he just wants for him to be consistent."
Parker isn't Engelland's only client. Engelland got his start in the business working with ex-Spurs guard Steve Kerr -- "like being the Maytag repairman," Engelland joked -- and worked with Grant Hill and several Nuggets before coming to San Antonio. Since joining the Spurs, he's also helped rebuild the jumpers of two other historically wayward shooters who have had strong playoffs -- Fabricio Oberto and Jacque Vaughn.
But his most famous client at this point is Parker, because he's shining on the league's biggest stage and brimming with confidence.
"I feel a lot more comfortable," Parker said. "I think that's what one of my limits was, you know, early in my career. I always had, like, great games and then they'd adapt, and I don't think I was shooting well enough from the outside to be consistent in a series. I think the last two years, you know, all the work I put in with Chip, I feel very comfortable and I've got a lot more confidence to knock down that shot."
He'd better get comfortable being an NBA Finals MVP, too. Because despite Parker's series-long protestations that this is Tim Duncan's team, his rebuilt jumper is about to put him in the history books alongside some of the game's greatest stars.
Two years ago, the San Antonio Spurs won an NBA title. But Tony Parker wasn't necessarily happy.
Then 23 years old, the point guard had been a bit player in the deciding seventh game, as Parker's inability to connect from outside against the Pistons' mighty defense limited him to a 3-for-11, eight-point performance. The Spurs periodically sat Parker and used a combo of Brent Barry and Manu Ginobili to play the point in that series, and after Game 7, writers debated whether the Spurs would even bring Parker back the next year.
The 2007 Finals couldn't be more different. The French flash is likely to be named series MVP if the Spurs close things out in Thursday's Game 4, after Parker again made a couple of big shots down the stretch to win Game 3 -- including a rare 3-pointer with a minute left to hold the Cavs at bay.
That's no accident. It's the culmination of a two-year process that saw him completely rebuild his jump shot and then torment Cleveland with the new weapon in this year's Finals.
Right after the 2005 Finals, Parker made the decision that he wanted to improve. He didn't care that he was a world champion point guard making near-max money and dating a hugely popular TV star; he was frustrated that his shaky jump shot was having such a negative impact on his game.
Enter Chip Engelland. Hired that offseason as a shooting coach by the Spurs after he'd previously plied his trade in Denver, Engelland helped rebuild Parker's jump shot piece by piece. The slingshot-like set shot that Parker entered the league with -- now gone forever -- was replaced by a smoother jumper that has repeatedly made the Cavaliers pay for going under the screen to take away his driving lanes.
For Parker, it was the right coach at the right time.
"Timing is important," Engelland said, "because when you play in the NBA, you always think you're just going to keep getting better. [But] the NBA is hard, and then you plateau, and that timing is good [for fixing a shot]."
And there was definitely some fixing to do.
"In the first few years [of Parker's career], whenever he'd shoot it, I just figured it was going to be a turnover, same as a turnover -- there's no way that's going in," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. "But in the last year and a half when he shoots it, I actually think it's going to go in, so he's changed me quite a bit. But that's due to his work and Chip Engelland, who's really worked hard on him."
"Tony, even though he won a championship that year, wanted to get better," Engelland said. "That's where I give him a ton of credit. His summer time, he wanted to work at something he's not good at. That's uncomfortable."
They had to start from the bottom up, and that required Engelland to establish trust with Parker before he could start working on his jumper. Former Spurs GM and current Cavs GM Danny Ferry said Engelland's patience with players is one of his greatest assets -- that he'd focus on developing the relationship so that players would trust his advice on fixing the shot.
"We got to know each other first," Engelland said. "We did a lot of talking with him, where he wanted to go. Tony wants to be great. So [I said] what it takes -- he has to have a consistent jump shot and his free throw has to improve.
"I think the most important thing, and this is true for every player, their shot is personal. Whether it's a 12-year-old girl or an [NBA player], it's their own shot. It's theirs, it's personal. When I talk to a player at any level ... I don't come in and disrespect their shot."
That helps him establish a rapport with his pupils, and from there he can start tweaking. One of the key examples Engelland used to help Parker come to grips with rebuilding his jumper was Tiger Woods. Parker is a huge Tiger fan, and once he learned Tiger redid his whole swing after crushing the field in the Masters for his first major victory, that made Parker far more receptive to the idea of working on his own game.
"It takes a lot of trust," Engelland said. "It's hard to want to get better at something."
Focusing on short jumpers, Engelland went to work on Parker: "We started with the basics, the very basics: balance, hand placement on the ball, follow through, what he watches, his target. He's done it great. He did a good job listening, practicing. It's not easy to do."
One of the keys was changing Parker's thumb position on the ball. Engelland said when Parker shoots a floater -- something he does as well as anyone in the league -- his thumb is in the correct position, at nearly a right angle to the rest of his hand, so that he can keep control over the ball. But on his jumper, the thumb often was close by his fingers, and as a result the ball would frequently come off the side of his hand.
Thanks to that fix and others like it, the results have been obvious, and not just in the last three games. Parker had never shot better than 33.3 percent on 3-pointers, or 75.5 percent on free throws before this season. This year those two numbers were way up -- 39.5 percent from downtown, albeit on fewer attempts, and an impressive 78.3 percent from the stripe.
Parker's newfound consistency is turning the scouting report against him upside down. Previously, teams would dare him to shoot from outside and focus on taking away his drives to the basket. But his rebuilt shooting stroke has left opponents in a quandary.
"Against Phoenix, they tried to do the same strategy," Parker said. "They put Shawn Marion on me and he was going under, and I start knocking down shots and then they have to come out. And that's when you penetrate again, and that's when you try to get back to the basket and get some stuff going for my teammates or for myself. The whole key is to make sure I shoot with confidence."
So with Parker burning the Cavs from outside -- even throwing in a rare triple in crunch time to help hold off Cleveland -- Engelland was feeling like a proud parent after Game 3. "I'm happy for him," Engelland said. "I just like his consistency. ... He's just been solid in the playoffs. ... I think that's what coach Popovich wants -- he's so talented that he just wants for him to be consistent."
Parker isn't Engelland's only client. Engelland got his start in the business working with ex-Spurs guard Steve Kerr -- "like being the Maytag repairman," Engelland joked -- and worked with Grant Hill and several Nuggets before coming to San Antonio. Since joining the Spurs, he's also helped rebuild the jumpers of two other historically wayward shooters who have had strong playoffs -- Fabricio Oberto and Jacque Vaughn.
But his most famous client at this point is Parker, because he's shining on the league's biggest stage and brimming with confidence.
"I feel a lot more comfortable," Parker said. "I think that's what one of my limits was, you know, early in my career. I always had, like, great games and then they'd adapt, and I don't think I was shooting well enough from the outside to be consistent in a series. I think the last two years, you know, all the work I put in with Chip, I feel very comfortable and I've got a lot more confidence to knock down that shot."
He'd better get comfortable being an NBA Finals MVP, too. Because despite Parker's series-long protestations that this is Tim Duncan's team, his rebuilt jumper is about to put him in the history books alongside some of the game's greatest stars.
CHRIS JACKSON
CHRIS JACKSON - 6’0 160lbs
FRESHMAN LSU – 30Pts 4Asst
SOPHMORE LSU – 28Pts 3Asst
• All-Time NCAA Freshman Leading Scorer
• Had 55pts in his 5th college game against Florida
• The last person to average 30Pts a game was Glen Robinson in 1994
• Make 20 3’s in a row before he could leave the gym
• Make 10 swishes in a row before he could leave the gym
FRESHMAN LSU – 30Pts 4Asst
SOPHMORE LSU – 28Pts 3Asst
• All-Time NCAA Freshman Leading Scorer
• Had 55pts in his 5th college game against Florida
• The last person to average 30Pts a game was Glen Robinson in 1994
• Make 20 3’s in a row before he could leave the gym
• Make 10 swishes in a row before he could leave the gym
9.23.2009
WHAT'S YOUR LEGACY?
The impact of your life will be determined by your dash.
When you die they'll indicate on your tomb the year of your birth and the year of your death separated by a dash (1989 — 2070). The dash is your life. What you did. How you lived. Whose life you touched. The legacy you left behind.
Aristotle said: "Excellence is not an art. It's a habit."
You can't be excellent half of the time and be in a comfort zone the other half. Your either excellent or your not.
None of us can start out inventing our legacy. Rather, we are who we are and we do what we do. The world notices and assigns to us the definition of our legacy. The best legacies are innocent by-products of a life lived well and a heart overflowing with tender love. Seek not fans, fame, or fortune.
Everybody wants it to matter that they lived. When God breathed in our nostrils and gave us life, He intended for us to use it well.
Your legacy is not something that you can wish for. Its built day, by day, by day throughout your life. It's getting up early every morning and putting in a HARD days work.
When it comes to basketball coaches will remember each and every one of their players. How are your coaches going to remember and talk about you? Will they refer to you as one of their warriors? Will they think of you as a lazy player or will they remember you as a leader and a winner? Will they think about what kind of player you could of been if you would of worked harder? These are the questions you will answer throughout your career.
When it comes to life everybody will leave a legacy, some will be good and some will be bad, but only a few will be great. Leaving a special legacy is HARD. It means going about your life in a different way than everybody else. The road you take will be less traveled. There will be those days when you don't want to work but you will dig deep and still bring it because thats the only way you do things.
Your going to leave a legacy, what kind of legacy is it going to be?
When you die they'll indicate on your tomb the year of your birth and the year of your death separated by a dash (1989 — 2070). The dash is your life. What you did. How you lived. Whose life you touched. The legacy you left behind.
Aristotle said: "Excellence is not an art. It's a habit."
You can't be excellent half of the time and be in a comfort zone the other half. Your either excellent or your not.
None of us can start out inventing our legacy. Rather, we are who we are and we do what we do. The world notices and assigns to us the definition of our legacy. The best legacies are innocent by-products of a life lived well and a heart overflowing with tender love. Seek not fans, fame, or fortune.
Everybody wants it to matter that they lived. When God breathed in our nostrils and gave us life, He intended for us to use it well.
Your legacy is not something that you can wish for. Its built day, by day, by day throughout your life. It's getting up early every morning and putting in a HARD days work.
When it comes to basketball coaches will remember each and every one of their players. How are your coaches going to remember and talk about you? Will they refer to you as one of their warriors? Will they think of you as a lazy player or will they remember you as a leader and a winner? Will they think about what kind of player you could of been if you would of worked harder? These are the questions you will answer throughout your career.
When it comes to life everybody will leave a legacy, some will be good and some will be bad, but only a few will be great. Leaving a special legacy is HARD. It means going about your life in a different way than everybody else. The road you take will be less traveled. There will be those days when you don't want to work but you will dig deep and still bring it because thats the only way you do things.
Your going to leave a legacy, what kind of legacy is it going to be?
CHRIS PAUL VIDEO
Chris Paul preparing for the 2009-2010 season...
http://www.nba.com/video/channels/nba_tv/2009/09/13/nba_20090913_cp3_workout.nba/
http://www.nba.com/video/channels/nba_tv/2009/09/13/nba_20090913_cp3_workout.nba/
"Coach always says..."
It's a simple reminder of what messages players retain and recall, sometimes years after they've left the field or the gym. Here's a selection of them.
Coach always said...
"If you are not doing it the right way, why are you doing it. Learn how to do it the right way and practice it the right way."
"You'll be remembered by your last performance."
"Toughness is a skill."
"If you do the little things right you’ll win."
"The more things you can do, the longer you'll be around here."
"What you put in is what you get out."
"You don’t improve during the playoffs. You improve at practice."
"The season is a marathon not a sprint. What matters is that our team gets better with each game."
"Offense sells tickets; defense wins championships."
"You have to go hard on every play because it could be the difference in the game."
"In every crisis lies opportunity."
"The mental is to the physical as 4 is to 1."
"Good things happen to good people who work hard."
"If you get a five-point lead, push it up to 10. If you have a 10-point lead, push it to 20."
"Turn the page. Good stuff, bad stuff, just turn the page."
"We're not playing our opponent. We're trying to beat the game. The opponent is just another hurdle."
"Forget about the last play. Think about the next play."
"Finish."
"Mismatches don't beat you, uncontested shots beat you."
"Make the easy play."
"The pain of regret is worse than the pain of disappointment."
"How do you want to be remembered?"
"Not to be afraid to win."
"The first one on the floor gets the ball."
Click on the link to Coach Musselman's story for the complete list of nearly 200:
http://emuss.blogspot.com/2009/03/coach-always-said.html
Coach always said...
"If you are not doing it the right way, why are you doing it. Learn how to do it the right way and practice it the right way."
"You'll be remembered by your last performance."
"Toughness is a skill."
"If you do the little things right you’ll win."
"The more things you can do, the longer you'll be around here."
"What you put in is what you get out."
"You don’t improve during the playoffs. You improve at practice."
"The season is a marathon not a sprint. What matters is that our team gets better with each game."
"Offense sells tickets; defense wins championships."
"You have to go hard on every play because it could be the difference in the game."
"In every crisis lies opportunity."
"The mental is to the physical as 4 is to 1."
"Good things happen to good people who work hard."
"If you get a five-point lead, push it up to 10. If you have a 10-point lead, push it to 20."
"Turn the page. Good stuff, bad stuff, just turn the page."
"We're not playing our opponent. We're trying to beat the game. The opponent is just another hurdle."
"Forget about the last play. Think about the next play."
"Finish."
"Mismatches don't beat you, uncontested shots beat you."
"Make the easy play."
"The pain of regret is worse than the pain of disappointment."
"How do you want to be remembered?"
"Not to be afraid to win."
"The first one on the floor gets the ball."
Click on the link to Coach Musselman's story for the complete list of nearly 200:
http://emuss.blogspot.com/2009/03/coach-always-said.html
9.21.2009
WES WELKER
The room was packed with football players, young ones with a million questions and veterans with no doubts. It was Texas Tech's first team meeting of 2000, and coach Mike Leach was doing a sociological study. From behind the podium Leach watched his newcomers size one another up—the walk-ons, the high school track stars and the big-name recruits who once owned the spotlight on Friday nights. Standing in the middle of them all, a head shorter than most, was a freshman receiver from Oklahoma City named Wesley Welker. Leach met his gaze and couldn't help but hold it. "If you've seen that Foghorn Leghorn cartoon, Wes was like the chicken hawk," Leach recalls. "He was shorter than everybody, one of those barrel-chested guys with thick ankles. I was thinking, This fella is pretty sure of himself. He had this steely-eyed stare, this look that said, I can whip all their asses."
This season, one NFL defensive back after another has recognized that look at the line of scrimmage, along with its aftermath: the 5'9", 185-pound Welker darting across the field, finding the soft spot in a zone and turning a short completion into a back-breaking gain, often as the hot read when quarterback Tom Brady was feeling pressure. On a Patriots offense flush with talent, Welker is its most unlikely playmaker, an undrafted, undersized player who developed into someone coach Bill Belichick just had to have.
While there were signs in training camp that Welker might thrive playing alongside wideouts Randy Moss and Donte' Stallworth, no one could have forecast his 112 catches and countless key blocks—except Belichick. Welker had tormented the coach as a receiver, a returner, a special teams tackler and even an emergency kicker for the Dolphins from 2004 through '06, when Miami went 3--3 against New England. "We couldn't defend him, we couldn't cover him," Belichick says. "And a lot of other teams had the same problem."
Welker's coaches at Heritage Hall High couldn't slow him either, no matter how hard they blew their whistles. He treated every drill as a mission statement. During sprints Welker would sometimes dive across the finish line, just to ensure that he was first. "We were always worried he was going to break a rib," says Rod Warner, who coached Welker at Heritage Hall and is now the school's athletic director. "He was like, 'Coach, I wanted to win.'"
On Friday nights Welker stayed on the field for almost every snap. He lined up at tailback, receiver and free safety, returned kicks, kicked off and booted field goals and extra points. A familiar sight was Welker sprinting into the end zone, then trying to catch his breath before attempting the point after. "Right before the snap, he'd tip up his face mask and throw up," Warner says. "It was like it was no big deal."
Says Welker, "You're nervous before games, especially at that age. You're excited to play, you hadn't eaten anything, it's hot out, and next thing you know, you're throwing up. But whenever I threw up, I knew I was going to have a good game."
Though Welker dominated in high school, scoring 90 touchdowns and kicking a 57-yard field goal—he also played soccer at Heritage Hall—most Division I scouts saw short arms, a small frame and an average 40 time. Tulsa almost gave him a scholarship, but the coaching staff chose to sign a faster receiver instead. "I told him, 'You might want to consider a smaller college,' but he wasn't having any of it," says Welker's father, Leland. "He said, 'If I can't play Division I football, I don't want to play.' He always wanted to play with the best, against the best."
Welker's prospects changed after several Texas Tech assistants persuaded Leach to watch a game tape. Leach saw the same physical shortcomings that scared away other programs, but there were signs that he couldn't ignore. "The film was very dramatic," Leach says. "I'm watching it, and I'm like, 'If only he was bigger.' Then he'd make a play. 'If only he was faster.' He'd make another play. 'If only he had longer arms.' He'd make another play. He was one of the most competitive people I've met, could focus longer than anyone I've met, and he took advantage of every moment he had."
In Leach's spread offense, Welker had little trouble finding holes. His anticipation, quick feet and peripheral vision made him a tough cover, even when everybody in the stadium knew the ball was coming his way. "As much as it is a sacrilege to say, I think a lot of that came from soccer," Leach says. "He was coordinated, and he had great vision out of the corner of his eyes because [in soccer] you're always looking for an opening or a lane to pass it to your buddy. If you're carrying a ball, it's even easier to see the holes and run through them."
Welker left Tech with school records in catches (259) and receiving yards (3,069). After making the San Diego Chargers' roster at the end of training camp in 2004, he soon alternated between elation and impatience. "Every practice was just the same, trying to get reps whenever I could," he says. "There were days I wouldn't get one. Maybe they'd throw me in on a blocking play, so I'm out there busting my butt on blocking, making sure that somehow I show up in the camera." The Chargers cut him three days after the season opener, and Miami signed him six days later.
Playing with a revolving door of quarterbacks in Miami, Welker couldn't help but wonder how things might be better in, say, New England, where the Patriots developed cohesion and welcomed versatility. (Not to mention they had won three Super Bowls.) Since arriving, the 26-year-old Welker has elevated the Pats as a receiver and return man. When Brady senses the Giants' pass rush this Sunday, he will no doubt look for Welker, who in the teams' Dec. 29 meeting had 122 yards on 11 receptions, seven of those for first downs. "I guess it's easy [for defenders] to miss him," Brady says. "He can hide in the grass."
Says Welker, "On the outside looking in, it was the type of team I always wanted to play for. When I came here, they didn't care what I ran in the 40 or what my size was. They looked at the film, and they saw what they saw. It's finally the day where I wasn't passed over."
This season, one NFL defensive back after another has recognized that look at the line of scrimmage, along with its aftermath: the 5'9", 185-pound Welker darting across the field, finding the soft spot in a zone and turning a short completion into a back-breaking gain, often as the hot read when quarterback Tom Brady was feeling pressure. On a Patriots offense flush with talent, Welker is its most unlikely playmaker, an undrafted, undersized player who developed into someone coach Bill Belichick just had to have.
While there were signs in training camp that Welker might thrive playing alongside wideouts Randy Moss and Donte' Stallworth, no one could have forecast his 112 catches and countless key blocks—except Belichick. Welker had tormented the coach as a receiver, a returner, a special teams tackler and even an emergency kicker for the Dolphins from 2004 through '06, when Miami went 3--3 against New England. "We couldn't defend him, we couldn't cover him," Belichick says. "And a lot of other teams had the same problem."
Welker's coaches at Heritage Hall High couldn't slow him either, no matter how hard they blew their whistles. He treated every drill as a mission statement. During sprints Welker would sometimes dive across the finish line, just to ensure that he was first. "We were always worried he was going to break a rib," says Rod Warner, who coached Welker at Heritage Hall and is now the school's athletic director. "He was like, 'Coach, I wanted to win.'"
On Friday nights Welker stayed on the field for almost every snap. He lined up at tailback, receiver and free safety, returned kicks, kicked off and booted field goals and extra points. A familiar sight was Welker sprinting into the end zone, then trying to catch his breath before attempting the point after. "Right before the snap, he'd tip up his face mask and throw up," Warner says. "It was like it was no big deal."
Says Welker, "You're nervous before games, especially at that age. You're excited to play, you hadn't eaten anything, it's hot out, and next thing you know, you're throwing up. But whenever I threw up, I knew I was going to have a good game."
Though Welker dominated in high school, scoring 90 touchdowns and kicking a 57-yard field goal—he also played soccer at Heritage Hall—most Division I scouts saw short arms, a small frame and an average 40 time. Tulsa almost gave him a scholarship, but the coaching staff chose to sign a faster receiver instead. "I told him, 'You might want to consider a smaller college,' but he wasn't having any of it," says Welker's father, Leland. "He said, 'If I can't play Division I football, I don't want to play.' He always wanted to play with the best, against the best."
Welker's prospects changed after several Texas Tech assistants persuaded Leach to watch a game tape. Leach saw the same physical shortcomings that scared away other programs, but there were signs that he couldn't ignore. "The film was very dramatic," Leach says. "I'm watching it, and I'm like, 'If only he was bigger.' Then he'd make a play. 'If only he was faster.' He'd make another play. 'If only he had longer arms.' He'd make another play. He was one of the most competitive people I've met, could focus longer than anyone I've met, and he took advantage of every moment he had."
In Leach's spread offense, Welker had little trouble finding holes. His anticipation, quick feet and peripheral vision made him a tough cover, even when everybody in the stadium knew the ball was coming his way. "As much as it is a sacrilege to say, I think a lot of that came from soccer," Leach says. "He was coordinated, and he had great vision out of the corner of his eyes because [in soccer] you're always looking for an opening or a lane to pass it to your buddy. If you're carrying a ball, it's even easier to see the holes and run through them."
Welker left Tech with school records in catches (259) and receiving yards (3,069). After making the San Diego Chargers' roster at the end of training camp in 2004, he soon alternated between elation and impatience. "Every practice was just the same, trying to get reps whenever I could," he says. "There were days I wouldn't get one. Maybe they'd throw me in on a blocking play, so I'm out there busting my butt on blocking, making sure that somehow I show up in the camera." The Chargers cut him three days after the season opener, and Miami signed him six days later.
Playing with a revolving door of quarterbacks in Miami, Welker couldn't help but wonder how things might be better in, say, New England, where the Patriots developed cohesion and welcomed versatility. (Not to mention they had won three Super Bowls.) Since arriving, the 26-year-old Welker has elevated the Pats as a receiver and return man. When Brady senses the Giants' pass rush this Sunday, he will no doubt look for Welker, who in the teams' Dec. 29 meeting had 122 yards on 11 receptions, seven of those for first downs. "I guess it's easy [for defenders] to miss him," Brady says. "He can hide in the grass."
Says Welker, "On the outside looking in, it was the type of team I always wanted to play for. When I came here, they didn't care what I ran in the 40 or what my size was. They looked at the film, and they saw what they saw. It's finally the day where I wasn't passed over."
MIKE LEACH - ESPN ARTICLE
Hardly anyone would have expected a law school graduate who decided to go into college football coaching even though he'd never run anything other than a Little League baseball team to devise one of the most creative and prolific passing games in the nation. But that's exactly what Leach has done, with a twinkle in his eye and a sly half smile on his face.
Give him time and Leach will regale you with stories--about the semipro team he coached in Finland, where the players smoked cigarettes on the sideline; about the time he phoned Donald Trump out of the blue because he was walking past one of the Donald's buildings; about the low-paying coaching job he took in 1987, the year after he had finished in the top third of his law school class at Pepperdine. "It was at Cal Poly-- San Luis Obispo," says Leach. "I told my wife the pay was $3,000. She said $3,000 a month wasn't too bad. I said it was $3,000 a year. Remarkably, we're still married."
That job began an odyssey that included stops at Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta (Ga.) State and Kentucky, all of them as an assistant to Hal Mumme. It was with Mumme that Leach refined the philosophy that has made Tech's offense so dangerous. The Red Raiders typically send so many receivers out--usually four and sometimes five--that a pass play looks like a crowd fleeing a fire. By flooding the field, someone usually breaks open, and Leach depends on his quarterback to find him. "If you're a receiver, why would you want to go anywhere other than Tech?" says sophomore wideout Joel Filani.
Leach isn't a big believer in stretching ("I never saw a dog do stretching exercises before chasing a car," he says), the importance of time of possession, or keeping the score down. With 15 seconds left in Saturday's blowout, he had backup quarterback Graham Harrell throwing into the end zone. But Leach does believe in spreading the ball around, as his team's eye-popping statistics against Kansas State illustrate. Four Red Raiders had more than 100 yards receiving, including Filani, who had 255. Hodges threw for five touchdowns, two of them to running back Taurean Henderson, who also ran for three.
Tech's last three quarterbacks ( Kliff Kingsbury, B.J. Symons and Sonny Cumbie) led the nation in passing yards, and Hodges, a fifth-year senior who had never started a game before this season--and, amazingly, doesn't even grip the ball by the laces when he throws--is in line to do the same. Leach, however, doesn't like to hear his passers slighted by the suggestion that the system is more important than they are. "He says that if just anybody could play quarterback in this system, he'd recruit a girl from the Swedish Bikini Team," Hodges said after Saturday's win, "because she'd be a lot more fun to watch."
A few people overheard that comment and started to chuckle, which wasn't surprising. Thanks to Leach, there's always laughter in Lubbock.
Give him time and Leach will regale you with stories--about the semipro team he coached in Finland, where the players smoked cigarettes on the sideline; about the time he phoned Donald Trump out of the blue because he was walking past one of the Donald's buildings; about the low-paying coaching job he took in 1987, the year after he had finished in the top third of his law school class at Pepperdine. "It was at Cal Poly-- San Luis Obispo," says Leach. "I told my wife the pay was $3,000. She said $3,000 a month wasn't too bad. I said it was $3,000 a year. Remarkably, we're still married."
That job began an odyssey that included stops at Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta (Ga.) State and Kentucky, all of them as an assistant to Hal Mumme. It was with Mumme that Leach refined the philosophy that has made Tech's offense so dangerous. The Red Raiders typically send so many receivers out--usually four and sometimes five--that a pass play looks like a crowd fleeing a fire. By flooding the field, someone usually breaks open, and Leach depends on his quarterback to find him. "If you're a receiver, why would you want to go anywhere other than Tech?" says sophomore wideout Joel Filani.
Leach isn't a big believer in stretching ("I never saw a dog do stretching exercises before chasing a car," he says), the importance of time of possession, or keeping the score down. With 15 seconds left in Saturday's blowout, he had backup quarterback Graham Harrell throwing into the end zone. But Leach does believe in spreading the ball around, as his team's eye-popping statistics against Kansas State illustrate. Four Red Raiders had more than 100 yards receiving, including Filani, who had 255. Hodges threw for five touchdowns, two of them to running back Taurean Henderson, who also ran for three.
Tech's last three quarterbacks ( Kliff Kingsbury, B.J. Symons and Sonny Cumbie) led the nation in passing yards, and Hodges, a fifth-year senior who had never started a game before this season--and, amazingly, doesn't even grip the ball by the laces when he throws--is in line to do the same. Leach, however, doesn't like to hear his passers slighted by the suggestion that the system is more important than they are. "He says that if just anybody could play quarterback in this system, he'd recruit a girl from the Swedish Bikini Team," Hodges said after Saturday's win, "because she'd be a lot more fun to watch."
A few people overheard that comment and started to chuckle, which wasn't surprising. Thanks to Leach, there's always laughter in Lubbock.
9.20.2009
MIKE LEACH - ESPN ARTICLE
Mike Leach defied convention to turn Texas Tech into a contender-and his critics into believers
Balance isn't what they say it is, an equal mix of running and passing. No, Leach wants to tell you that balance means getting touches for everyone who isn't a lineman.
Hardened gridiron types who snarl Lombardiisms and worship the Bills (Parcells and Belichick) would cringe to hear that Leach often doesn't stroll into his office until 2 p.m. That's in-season. It's not that he doesn't take his job seriously-he might stare at film until 4 in the morning-it's just that, as Red Raiders receivers coach Sonny Dykes says, "things are different here."
Clearly, Leach is no ordinary whistle-chomping ogre. More than once, his players have approached Leach with a play they created for the Tech offense on PlayStation, and his reaction is always, "What the hell, let's see if it works." It rarely does, but who cares?
"You can smile around here," says Dykes, the son of Spike Dykes, the man Leach replaced.
"He proves you can win without making everybody miserable."
MIKE LEACH is smiling--heck, these days, all of Lubbock is. The afterglow lingers from a 45-31 Holiday Bowl throttling of No. 4-ranked California. Season ticket sales, which didn't crack 20,000 before Leach's arrival, have nearly doubled to 37,000. The team's graduation rate last year was a school-record 89%. And thanks to Leach, Tech has produced the nation's most prolific passer in each of the past five seasons (former walk-on Sonny Cumbie threw for 520 yards in the Holiday Bowl alone), even though all three QBs during that span were marginal pro prospects. It's a pretty safe bet that next fall's Heisman watch will include Tech's newest slinger-whomever that will be.
Leach isn't exactly obsessed with the choice. He'll wait until August before picking from senior Cody Hodges, sophomore Phillip Daugherty and redshirt freshman Graham Harrell. In fact, just before spring practice began, he spent a week most coaches would pass in the film room skiing with his family at Sundance. If only he'd had time to tack on some surfing and roller-blading in Venice Beach.
Leach grew up in Cody, Wyo., on the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park. But he discovered he was a beach dude in the mid-1980s, when he was a law student at Pepperdine. Back then, he never imagined he'd coach football, in west Texas of all places. Leach didn't even play college football, one of only five Division I-A head coaches who haven't. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young, he played rugby and made a name for himself there in other ways. Leach's unkempt mop regularly violated the school's honor code, which still requires that locks be "trimmed above the collar, leaving the ear uncovered."
Leach and his law degree were locked on a career path in product-liability litigation, the little guy taking on corporations, when he realized something wasn't right. He wrote a letter to famed attorney Gerry Spence, another Wyoming native, to solicit his opinion. Spence replied that if Leach's mind wasn't consumed by law, he shouldn't be a lawyer. Deep down, Leach already knew. What appealed to him about the profession, the preparation and mental sparring, soon led him in another direction.
The lawyer whose coaching résumé consisted mostly of Little League assignments talked his way into a grad assistant's gig at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. When Leach told his wife, Sharon, about the salary, she said $3,000 a month sounded like good money. "No," he told her, "it's $3,000, total."
MIKE LEACH is doing the tourist thing in New York City a couple months before last season, with his two oldest daughters, Janeen, who is 19, and Kim, who is 14. Walking past the Trump World Tower, he thinks, Cool building. Nice lines. What the heck, let's dial up The Donald. I'll tell him I liked his book. Leach had bought How to Get Rich at the airport and finished it before landing. Right there, on First Avenue, he dials information and gets the number for the Trump Organization. After being transferred three or four times, he winds up on the voice mail of Trump's co-author, Meredith McIver. "Yeah, uh, this is Mike Leach," he says. "I coach football at Texas Tech and, uh, I just read his book and found some good ideas in there, and I want to talk to him." Trump is out of town, but McIver calls back. Leach gets some restaurant tips in the exchange, but, truth be told, he just wanted to see how far he could penetrate Trump's inner sanctum.
A few weeks later, Leach's secretary fields a call from The Donald--and takes a message. (If she actually had believed it was him, she probably would've gotten Leach out of that quarterbacks meeting.) Leach eventually gets Trump on the horn. "Next time you come to Manhattan," the magnate tells him, "give me a call."
"Will do," says the coach. "And you do the same if you come to Lubbock."
MIKE LEACH is chuckling. He's not a belly laugh guy. In fact, his default expression lies somewhere between indifference and bemusement. Usually he just tips his chin to you, to acknowledge the humor. But apparently, talking about what defines sportsmanship is a hoot, especially all the criticism about Leach running up the score to tick off other coaches. "Look, I'm pissed if third-teamers go in and don't score," he says. He knows that at any time, third-teamers may have to become first-teamers.
Shoot, if it were up to Leach, there'd be no postgame handshake between coaches. "It's uncomfortable," he says. "If I've lost, I don't feel like shaking your hand, and if I've won, you're probably not feeling like shaking mine." The man has low tolerance for BS of any kind. To his mind, the votes of coaches in the polls should be public. "If you don't have some agenda, why wouldn't you stand behind it?" he asks. And don't get him started on the whole Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim business. "Is that not the dumbest idea you've ever heard?"
His goals are really quite simple. Leach wants all four of his receivers to have 1,000-yard seasons and his running back to have 1,000 yards rushing and receiving. Sound outrageous? Maybe, but the Red Raiders have already scraped that Arena Football stratosphere. Last season, two receivers eclipsed 1,000 yards and a third would have been close had an injury not cost him three games. Running back Taurean Henderson was 160 rushing yards short of a grand and added another 286 yards on 60 receptions.
Balance is the guiding principle of what Leach calls The System, a go-for-broke fireworks display he and buddy Hal Mumme cooked up to revitalize offenses at Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta (Ga.) State and Kentucky. Leach hooked up with Mumme after bouncing south from Cal Poly to the College of the Desert, where he coached the linebackers, to Finland, where he was head coach of a semipro team, most of whose players puffed cigarettes on the sideline. The Mumme-Leach scheme is an offshoot of LaVell Edwards' offense at BYU, with a much more liberal dose of the no-huddle and shotgun. "I guess not everybody tries it, because they think it's a little too radical," says Mumme, now the head coach at New Mexico State.
It didn't scare off Bob Stoops. When he took over a downtrodden Oklahoma team in 1999, he hired Leach to run the offense. That fall, unheralded former juco passer Josh Heupel set a school record with 3,850 yards through the air. The next season, Oklahoma won the national title.
But Leach had already packed his bags by then, heading to Lubbock after just one season with the Sooners. At first, the folks in west Texas didn't know what to make of Leach and his funky offense. What they knew was they loved Spike Dykes like a son, which is essentially what he was, having grown up a pooch punt from Tech's Jones Stadium. Ol' Spike was as down-home as chickenfried steak. The new guy? Lord. He didn't talk like Spike. Didn't stir the gravy like him either.
Leach wasn't a square peg in a round hole; he was an octagon. Even after Tech passed for more than 3,000 yards for the first time in school history while leading the nation with three shutouts, some boosters complained the new coach was too gimmicky. Two falls later, after Tech got squashed in its season opener by eventual national champ Ohio State, the editor emeritus of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal wrote a column that derided Leach for everything from his offense to his reclusive behavior to his hesitance in reaching out to the community. "Tech did wind up with a jerk among its head coaches," the local wag wrote. "And to the delightful surprise of many, it ain't Bobby Knight."
Rumors had Leach brooding because he felt Tech football was the poor stepchild on campus now that Knight had taken over the basketball program, and Knight's pal, the former Red Raiders hoops coach Gerald Myers, was calling the shots as AD. The swirl of controversy intensified when Leach returned from a summer vacation to find his program $400,000 over budget and his expenditures frozen. He couldn't even send letters to recruits. And just when Tech lifted the "Stampgate" embargo, word leaked that officials had investigated whispers about Leach's off-hours behavior, namely an alleged penchant for late-night boozing. Then-school president David Schmidly told reporters he "checked them out for Mike's own good," and nothing came of it. Still, whenever Leach went out around town, he was accompanied by his lawyer.
Leach shrugs off both instances. "I don't care about any of that," he says. "The facts in every situation bore out on my side of things."
Of course, winning hasn't hurt his cause.
The crackpot outsider has become a local treasure. Once one of the conference's lowest-paid coaches, he is about to tack two more seasons onto a deal that will pay him $1.275 million a year through 2009.
"Look, I'm just trying to win games," he says matter-of-factly. "People ask me who we're playing next year, and I honestly can't remember. I'm just thinking about making the most of each day."
Balance isn't what they say it is, an equal mix of running and passing. No, Leach wants to tell you that balance means getting touches for everyone who isn't a lineman.
Hardened gridiron types who snarl Lombardiisms and worship the Bills (Parcells and Belichick) would cringe to hear that Leach often doesn't stroll into his office until 2 p.m. That's in-season. It's not that he doesn't take his job seriously-he might stare at film until 4 in the morning-it's just that, as Red Raiders receivers coach Sonny Dykes says, "things are different here."
Clearly, Leach is no ordinary whistle-chomping ogre. More than once, his players have approached Leach with a play they created for the Tech offense on PlayStation, and his reaction is always, "What the hell, let's see if it works." It rarely does, but who cares?
"You can smile around here," says Dykes, the son of Spike Dykes, the man Leach replaced.
"He proves you can win without making everybody miserable."
MIKE LEACH is smiling--heck, these days, all of Lubbock is. The afterglow lingers from a 45-31 Holiday Bowl throttling of No. 4-ranked California. Season ticket sales, which didn't crack 20,000 before Leach's arrival, have nearly doubled to 37,000. The team's graduation rate last year was a school-record 89%. And thanks to Leach, Tech has produced the nation's most prolific passer in each of the past five seasons (former walk-on Sonny Cumbie threw for 520 yards in the Holiday Bowl alone), even though all three QBs during that span were marginal pro prospects. It's a pretty safe bet that next fall's Heisman watch will include Tech's newest slinger-whomever that will be.
Leach isn't exactly obsessed with the choice. He'll wait until August before picking from senior Cody Hodges, sophomore Phillip Daugherty and redshirt freshman Graham Harrell. In fact, just before spring practice began, he spent a week most coaches would pass in the film room skiing with his family at Sundance. If only he'd had time to tack on some surfing and roller-blading in Venice Beach.
Leach grew up in Cody, Wyo., on the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park. But he discovered he was a beach dude in the mid-1980s, when he was a law student at Pepperdine. Back then, he never imagined he'd coach football, in west Texas of all places. Leach didn't even play college football, one of only five Division I-A head coaches who haven't. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young, he played rugby and made a name for himself there in other ways. Leach's unkempt mop regularly violated the school's honor code, which still requires that locks be "trimmed above the collar, leaving the ear uncovered."
Leach and his law degree were locked on a career path in product-liability litigation, the little guy taking on corporations, when he realized something wasn't right. He wrote a letter to famed attorney Gerry Spence, another Wyoming native, to solicit his opinion. Spence replied that if Leach's mind wasn't consumed by law, he shouldn't be a lawyer. Deep down, Leach already knew. What appealed to him about the profession, the preparation and mental sparring, soon led him in another direction.
The lawyer whose coaching résumé consisted mostly of Little League assignments talked his way into a grad assistant's gig at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. When Leach told his wife, Sharon, about the salary, she said $3,000 a month sounded like good money. "No," he told her, "it's $3,000, total."
MIKE LEACH is doing the tourist thing in New York City a couple months before last season, with his two oldest daughters, Janeen, who is 19, and Kim, who is 14. Walking past the Trump World Tower, he thinks, Cool building. Nice lines. What the heck, let's dial up The Donald. I'll tell him I liked his book. Leach had bought How to Get Rich at the airport and finished it before landing. Right there, on First Avenue, he dials information and gets the number for the Trump Organization. After being transferred three or four times, he winds up on the voice mail of Trump's co-author, Meredith McIver. "Yeah, uh, this is Mike Leach," he says. "I coach football at Texas Tech and, uh, I just read his book and found some good ideas in there, and I want to talk to him." Trump is out of town, but McIver calls back. Leach gets some restaurant tips in the exchange, but, truth be told, he just wanted to see how far he could penetrate Trump's inner sanctum.
A few weeks later, Leach's secretary fields a call from The Donald--and takes a message. (If she actually had believed it was him, she probably would've gotten Leach out of that quarterbacks meeting.) Leach eventually gets Trump on the horn. "Next time you come to Manhattan," the magnate tells him, "give me a call."
"Will do," says the coach. "And you do the same if you come to Lubbock."
MIKE LEACH is chuckling. He's not a belly laugh guy. In fact, his default expression lies somewhere between indifference and bemusement. Usually he just tips his chin to you, to acknowledge the humor. But apparently, talking about what defines sportsmanship is a hoot, especially all the criticism about Leach running up the score to tick off other coaches. "Look, I'm pissed if third-teamers go in and don't score," he says. He knows that at any time, third-teamers may have to become first-teamers.
Shoot, if it were up to Leach, there'd be no postgame handshake between coaches. "It's uncomfortable," he says. "If I've lost, I don't feel like shaking your hand, and if I've won, you're probably not feeling like shaking mine." The man has low tolerance for BS of any kind. To his mind, the votes of coaches in the polls should be public. "If you don't have some agenda, why wouldn't you stand behind it?" he asks. And don't get him started on the whole Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim business. "Is that not the dumbest idea you've ever heard?"
His goals are really quite simple. Leach wants all four of his receivers to have 1,000-yard seasons and his running back to have 1,000 yards rushing and receiving. Sound outrageous? Maybe, but the Red Raiders have already scraped that Arena Football stratosphere. Last season, two receivers eclipsed 1,000 yards and a third would have been close had an injury not cost him three games. Running back Taurean Henderson was 160 rushing yards short of a grand and added another 286 yards on 60 receptions.
Balance is the guiding principle of what Leach calls The System, a go-for-broke fireworks display he and buddy Hal Mumme cooked up to revitalize offenses at Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta (Ga.) State and Kentucky. Leach hooked up with Mumme after bouncing south from Cal Poly to the College of the Desert, where he coached the linebackers, to Finland, where he was head coach of a semipro team, most of whose players puffed cigarettes on the sideline. The Mumme-Leach scheme is an offshoot of LaVell Edwards' offense at BYU, with a much more liberal dose of the no-huddle and shotgun. "I guess not everybody tries it, because they think it's a little too radical," says Mumme, now the head coach at New Mexico State.
It didn't scare off Bob Stoops. When he took over a downtrodden Oklahoma team in 1999, he hired Leach to run the offense. That fall, unheralded former juco passer Josh Heupel set a school record with 3,850 yards through the air. The next season, Oklahoma won the national title.
But Leach had already packed his bags by then, heading to Lubbock after just one season with the Sooners. At first, the folks in west Texas didn't know what to make of Leach and his funky offense. What they knew was they loved Spike Dykes like a son, which is essentially what he was, having grown up a pooch punt from Tech's Jones Stadium. Ol' Spike was as down-home as chickenfried steak. The new guy? Lord. He didn't talk like Spike. Didn't stir the gravy like him either.
Leach wasn't a square peg in a round hole; he was an octagon. Even after Tech passed for more than 3,000 yards for the first time in school history while leading the nation with three shutouts, some boosters complained the new coach was too gimmicky. Two falls later, after Tech got squashed in its season opener by eventual national champ Ohio State, the editor emeritus of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal wrote a column that derided Leach for everything from his offense to his reclusive behavior to his hesitance in reaching out to the community. "Tech did wind up with a jerk among its head coaches," the local wag wrote. "And to the delightful surprise of many, it ain't Bobby Knight."
Rumors had Leach brooding because he felt Tech football was the poor stepchild on campus now that Knight had taken over the basketball program, and Knight's pal, the former Red Raiders hoops coach Gerald Myers, was calling the shots as AD. The swirl of controversy intensified when Leach returned from a summer vacation to find his program $400,000 over budget and his expenditures frozen. He couldn't even send letters to recruits. And just when Tech lifted the "Stampgate" embargo, word leaked that officials had investigated whispers about Leach's off-hours behavior, namely an alleged penchant for late-night boozing. Then-school president David Schmidly told reporters he "checked them out for Mike's own good," and nothing came of it. Still, whenever Leach went out around town, he was accompanied by his lawyer.
Leach shrugs off both instances. "I don't care about any of that," he says. "The facts in every situation bore out on my side of things."
Of course, winning hasn't hurt his cause.
The crackpot outsider has become a local treasure. Once one of the conference's lowest-paid coaches, he is about to tack two more seasons onto a deal that will pay him $1.275 million a year through 2009.
"Look, I'm just trying to win games," he says matter-of-factly. "People ask me who we're playing next year, and I honestly can't remember. I'm just thinking about making the most of each day."
MIKE LEACH BIO
Prior to coming on board at Texas Tech, Leach, in just one season at Oklahoma, directed a Sooner offense that went from one of the worst in the Big 12 Conference to one of the best. Under Leach's tutelage, Josh Heupel was named 1999 Big 12 Offensive Newcomer of the Year. For his efforts, Leach was nominated for the 1999 Broyles Award as the top assistant coach in the country.
Leach guided an Oklahoma offense that went from 11th in the Big 12 in 1998 to first in 1999 and 101st in the nation to 11th. In just one year, OU's total offense numbers improved from 293.3 to 427.2 yards per game.
The rise in passing and scoring offense categories is just as impressive. Oklahoma went from last to first in the Big 12 in passing offense in one year, from 107th in the country to ninth. Under Leach, the Sooners improved from 109.9 yards passing per game to 321.7 yards per game.
In 1998, Oklahoma was last in the Big 12 and 101st in the country in scoring offense at 16.7 points per game. In 1999, the Sooners improved to second in the league and eighth in the country in scoring at 36.8 points per game, an increase of just over 20 points per game.
Under Leach, the Oklahoma offense set six Big 12 Conference and 17 OU records. The Sooners were one of only two schools in the nation to have six players with 20 or more receptions in 1999.
Prior to joining Bob Stoops' Oklahoma staff, Leach served as offensive coordinator for Hal Mumme at the University of Kentucky and Valdosta (Ga.) State University. For two years at Kentucky under Mumme, Leach coached the Kentucky "Air Raid" offense that was one of the most explosive in Southeastern Conference history. Under Mumme and Leach, the Kentucky offense set six NCAA records, 41 Southeastern Conference records and 116 school records in 22 games.
Leach's Kentucky offense featured the talented Tim Couch, who passed for 4,275 yards and 34 touchdowns as a senior.
Named 1996 Division II Offensive Coordinator of the Year by American Football Quarterly magazine, Leach helped Mumme lead Valdosta State to a 40-17-1 record. The 1993 Blazer offense smashed 66 school records, 22 conference records and seven national records. In 1994, Valdosta State advanced to the Division II playoffs with Leach's offense shattering 80 school records, 35 conference records and seven more national marks.
Leach and Mumme first teamed up at Iowa Wesleyan College in 1989. From 1989 to 1991 Leach served as offensive coordinator and line coach for an offense that led the NAIA in passing yardage one season and finished second the other two. Iowa Wesleyan quarterbacks passed for more than 11,000 yards in Leach's three seasons and broke 26 national records.
Leach also has made coaching stops in Pori, Finland, where he served as a head coach in the European Football League (1989), as well as one-year stints at College of the Desert (1988) and Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo (1987).
After graduating with honors from BYU in 1983, Leach earned a master's degree from the U.S. Sports Academy and his law degree from Pepperdine University, where he graduated in the top one-third of his class.
LEACH'S FILE
PERSONAL
Born: March 9, 1961, in Susanville, Calif.
Hometown: Cody, Wyoming
Family: wife, Sharon; children, Janeen, Kim, Cody and Kiersten
High School: Cody High School
College: Brigham Young University, 1983 (American Studies)
Graduate:
Juris Doctor, Pepperdine University School of Law, 1986
Master's of Sports Science/Coaching, U.S. Sports Academy, 1988
COACHING EXPERIENCE
2000-2008 Texas Tech, Head Coach/Offensive Coordinator/Quarterbacks
1999 Oklahoma, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Quarterbacks
1997-1998 Kentucky, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Quarterbacks
1994-1996 Valdosta State, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Offensive Line
1992-1993 Valdosta State, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Wide Receivers/QBs
1989-1991 Iowa Wesleyan, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Offensive Line
1989 Pori, Finland (European League), Head Coach
1988 College of the Desert, Assistant/Linebackers
1987 Cal Poly-SLO, Assistant/Offensive Line
Leach guided an Oklahoma offense that went from 11th in the Big 12 in 1998 to first in 1999 and 101st in the nation to 11th. In just one year, OU's total offense numbers improved from 293.3 to 427.2 yards per game.
The rise in passing and scoring offense categories is just as impressive. Oklahoma went from last to first in the Big 12 in passing offense in one year, from 107th in the country to ninth. Under Leach, the Sooners improved from 109.9 yards passing per game to 321.7 yards per game.
In 1998, Oklahoma was last in the Big 12 and 101st in the country in scoring offense at 16.7 points per game. In 1999, the Sooners improved to second in the league and eighth in the country in scoring at 36.8 points per game, an increase of just over 20 points per game.
Under Leach, the Oklahoma offense set six Big 12 Conference and 17 OU records. The Sooners were one of only two schools in the nation to have six players with 20 or more receptions in 1999.
Prior to joining Bob Stoops' Oklahoma staff, Leach served as offensive coordinator for Hal Mumme at the University of Kentucky and Valdosta (Ga.) State University. For two years at Kentucky under Mumme, Leach coached the Kentucky "Air Raid" offense that was one of the most explosive in Southeastern Conference history. Under Mumme and Leach, the Kentucky offense set six NCAA records, 41 Southeastern Conference records and 116 school records in 22 games.
Leach's Kentucky offense featured the talented Tim Couch, who passed for 4,275 yards and 34 touchdowns as a senior.
Named 1996 Division II Offensive Coordinator of the Year by American Football Quarterly magazine, Leach helped Mumme lead Valdosta State to a 40-17-1 record. The 1993 Blazer offense smashed 66 school records, 22 conference records and seven national records. In 1994, Valdosta State advanced to the Division II playoffs with Leach's offense shattering 80 school records, 35 conference records and seven more national marks.
Leach and Mumme first teamed up at Iowa Wesleyan College in 1989. From 1989 to 1991 Leach served as offensive coordinator and line coach for an offense that led the NAIA in passing yardage one season and finished second the other two. Iowa Wesleyan quarterbacks passed for more than 11,000 yards in Leach's three seasons and broke 26 national records.
Leach also has made coaching stops in Pori, Finland, where he served as a head coach in the European Football League (1989), as well as one-year stints at College of the Desert (1988) and Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo (1987).
After graduating with honors from BYU in 1983, Leach earned a master's degree from the U.S. Sports Academy and his law degree from Pepperdine University, where he graduated in the top one-third of his class.
LEACH'S FILE
PERSONAL
Born: March 9, 1961, in Susanville, Calif.
Hometown: Cody, Wyoming
Family: wife, Sharon; children, Janeen, Kim, Cody and Kiersten
High School: Cody High School
College: Brigham Young University, 1983 (American Studies)
Graduate:
Juris Doctor, Pepperdine University School of Law, 1986
Master's of Sports Science/Coaching, U.S. Sports Academy, 1988
COACHING EXPERIENCE
2000-2008 Texas Tech, Head Coach/Offensive Coordinator/Quarterbacks
1999 Oklahoma, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Quarterbacks
1997-1998 Kentucky, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Quarterbacks
1994-1996 Valdosta State, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Offensive Line
1992-1993 Valdosta State, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Wide Receivers/QBs
1989-1991 Iowa Wesleyan, Assistant/Offensive Coordinator/Offensive Line
1989 Pori, Finland (European League), Head Coach
1988 College of the Desert, Assistant/Linebackers
1987 Cal Poly-SLO, Assistant/Offensive Line
MIKE LEACH
A sound: of surgical tape ripping, as Texas Tech's quarterback, Cody Hodges, affixed to his wrist a piece of laminated paper listing all the plays he might run tonight. Four years ago, Hodges was a high-school senior with just one other offer to be a college quarterback, from the University of Wyoming. Now, two-thirds of the way through the 2005 N.C.A.A. football season, and with a throwing arm so dead that he required a cortisone shot to move it, Hodges was the nation's leader in yards passed, total offense and touchdowns. Three weeks earlier, against a competent Kansas State defense, he threw for 643 yards and, had Coach Leach not pulled him in the fourth quarter, might well have broken the N.C.A.A. record for passing yards in a single game (716).
A lot of the players in the locker room had similar stories of rejection and redemption. In this part of the country, the University of Texas and Oklahoma University are the old-money football schools, with Texas A&M right behind. Those schools fish first in the local-talent pool. Tonight there would be very few players on the field for Texas A&M - for Oklahoma or Texas there wouldn't be a single player - to whom Texas Tech would not have offered a football scholarship. Conversely, the Texas Tech locker room was filled with players rejected by the old-money schools. And yet - look around! Hodges led all of college football in passing. The team's tailback, Taurean Henderson, had broken the N.C.A.A. career record for most passes caught by a running back. The top four receivers on the team were the four leading pass receivers in the Big 12.
At least one N.F.L. head coach had taken a special interest in the Texas Tech offense and had been ordering its game tapes on Monday mornings. At least one N.F.L. defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz of the Tennessee Titans, had stumbled upon Texas Tech accidentally and said, Oh, my. The surprise runner-up in the search earlier this year for a new San Francisco 49ers head coach, Schwartz had scrambled to answer a question: if he got the 49ers job, whom should he hire? He was just in his mid-30's, and his football career stopped at Georgetown (where he graduated with honors in economics), so he really hadn't thought about this before.
The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz's view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart?
Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the "midlevel schools" in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech's numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation's highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach's first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior - like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie's 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.
Now Texas Tech had Cody Hodges, still another fifth-year senior - barely six feet tall, with an average arm and four college seasons on the bench. Before the 2005 football season even began, Hodges was short-listed for the Maxwell Award for the finest college football player in the land. Whoever played quarterback for the Texas Tech Red Raiders was sure to create so much offense that he couldn't be ignored.
Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from midrange schools. Sonny Cumbie hadn't even been offered a scholarship; he was just invited to show up for football practice at Texas Tech. Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."
But when Schwartz studied videotape of the Texas Tech offense, what he saw unsettled him. The offensive linemen positioned themselves between three and six feet apart - on extreme occasions, the five linemen stretched a good 15 yards across the field. At times it was difficult to tell the linemen from the receivers. Strictly speaking, they were not a line at all, just a row of dots. "The offensive line splits - you look at them, and you're just shocked," Schwartz said. "It scares people to see splits that are that wide."
The big gaps between the linemen made the quarterback seem more vulnerable - some defenders could seemingly run right between the blockers - but he wasn't. Stretching out the offensive line stretched out the defensive line too, forcing the most ferocious pass rushers several yards farther from the quarterback. It also opened up wide passing lanes through which even a short quarterback could see the whole field clearly. Leach spread out his receivers and backs too. The look was more flag than tackle football: a truly fantastic number of players racing around trying to catch passes on every play, and a quarterback surprisingly able to keep an eye on all of them.
This offense was, in effect, an argument for changing the geometry of the game. Schwartz didn't know if Leach's system would work in the N.F.L., where they had bigger staffs, better players and a lot more time to prepare for whatever confusion the offense cooked up. On the other hand, he wasn't sure it wouldn't.
Finally, a coach: Mike Leach, 44, entered the locker room with the quizzical air of a man who has successfully bushwhacked his way through a jungle but isn't quite sure what country he has emerged into. "When you first meet him," Jarrett Hicks, a junior wide receiver, told me, "you think he's an equipment manager." Leach's agent, Gary O'Hagan of I.M.G., who represents dozens of other big-time college and N.F.L. coaches, put it this way, "He's so different from every other football coach it's hard to understand how he's a coach."
Leach shouted, "All right, everybody up!" Seventy players pushed into the middle of the room and bent down on one knee.
Leach isn't really sure that there's anything a coach can say to football players minutes before a game that will inspire them to put aside their pain and their problems and play their best. He thinks that revenge is a silly motive and that waxing poetic on how history will judge you is distracting. Two weeks earlier, his team was ranked seventh in the country but then lost badly to the University of Texas, the nation's No. 2 team, which ended Texas Tech's surprising shot at a national championship. Now they were 7-1, ranked 15th and still within sniffing distance of a major bowl game. Not worth mentioning, in Leach's view.
"Everyone find someone," he yelled. Hands sought hands and clasped. "All right," he yelled, "Three things." He jumped up onto a little green stool and looked down on his players, all larger than he. "Do your job. DO - YOUR - JOB!"
He was talking to the entire team, but his mind was on the offense, which Leach coordinates, unlike most head coaches. He watches the tape, draws up the game plan, schools the quarterbacks and calls the plays.
"No. 2," he said, "play together with great tempo."
He had been harping on tempo all week: he thinks the team that wins is the team that moves fastest, and the team that moves fastest is the team that wants to. He believes that both failure and success slow players down, unless they will themselves not to slow down. "When they fail, they become frustrated," he says. "When they have success, they want to become the thinking-man's football team. They start having these quilting bees, these little bridge parties at the line of scrimmage." His 45-second pregame speech set a certain tempo, but he had one final thing to say:
"Your body is your sword. Swing your sword."
Each off-season, Leach picks something he is curious about and learns as much as he can about it: Geronimo, Daniel Boone, whales, chimpanzees, grizzly bears, Jackson Pollock. The list goes on, and if you can find the common thread, you are a step ahead of his football players. One year, he studied pirates. When he learned that a pirate ship was a functional democracy; that pirates disciplined themselves; that, loathed by others, they nevertheless found ways to work together, the pirate ship became a metaphor for his football team. Last year, after a loss to Texas A.&M. in overtime, Leach hauled the team into the conference room on Sunday morning and delivered a three-hour lecture on the history of pirates. Leach read from his favorite pirate history, "Under the Black Flag," by David Cordingly. The analogy to football held up for a few minutes, but after a bit, it was clear that Coach Leach was just . . . talking about pirates. The quarterback Cody Hodges says of his coach: "You learn not to ask questions. If you ask questions, it just goes on longer."
Wherever Mike Leach walks onto a football field, a question naturally follows. Vincent Meeks, who plays safety, puts it this way: "How does a coach who never played a down of football have the best offense in the game?" Leach actually rode the bench through his junior year in high school in Cody, Wyo. But that was it for his playing career. When he left Cody for Brigham Young University, Leach planned to become a lawyer. From B.Y.U. he went straight to Pepperdine law school, where he graduated, at the age of 25, in the top third of his class. That's when he posed the question that has sunk many a legal career: "Why do I want to be a lawyer?" One day he announced to his wife, Sharon - soon to be pregnant with their second child - that what he really wanted to be was a college football coach. To Leach, coaching football requires the same talent that he was going to waste on the law: the talent for making arguments. He wanted to make his arguments in the form of offensive plays.
The last 20 years have been an odd journey, with coaching jobs at College of the Desert, Cal Poly, Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta State and a European league team in Pori, Finland. His first year coaching Division 1 college football was 1997, at the University of Kentucky. He arrived from Valdosta State with the head coach, Hal Mumme, and turned the Kentucky offense from joke into juggernaut. The year before he arrived, Kentucky's quarterback passed for 967 yards. In Leach's first year, his quarterback, Tim Couch, threw for 3,884 yards; the year after that, Couch, who lasted for only a few disappointing years in the N.F.L., threw for 4,275 yards. After Kentucky, Leach moved to Oklahoma for a single season, 1999. That year Oklahoma went from 101st to 8th in the country in offensive scoring. Its quarterback, Josh Heupel, passed for 3,850 yards that season, which was 1,700 more than any quarterback in Oklahoma football history had thrown for in a season. The next year, running Leach's offense, Oklahoma won the national championship - but by then Texas Tech had picked up the pattern and hired Leach to run its team. "Mike was different," says Patty Ross, who has long served as an assistant to Texas Tech head football coaches and who didn't know what to make of this new one. "We had always had West Texas guys. We always ran the ball here. The first time Mike's offense came out on the field everyone is like, Whoa. He has that play he calls the Ninja - when they all line up on one end. I'm not sure anyone had ever seen the Ninja. It was just a shock effect. Mike's personality was like that, too."
Stepping out into Jones SBC Stadium, Leach was even easier than usual to identify: he was the one guy wandering about, as Meeks has put it, "with this look on his face like he's walking around an airport, lost." True, he had shaved ("It's a good idea to shave for TV games") and shed his flip-flops, his "Hawaii Five-O" baggy shirts and his board shorts for an outfit that looked vaguely coachlike.
Leach made his way to the sideline and from his back pocket pulled a crumpled piece of paper with the notations for dozens of plays typed on it, along with a red pen. When a play doesn't work, he puts an X next to it. When a play works well, he draws a circle beside it - "to remind myself to run it again." But at the start of a game, he's unsure what's going to work. So one goal is to throw as many different things at a defense as he can, to see what it finds most disturbing. Another goal is to create as much confusion as possible for the defense while keeping things as simple as possible for the offense.
What a defense sees, when it lines up against Texas Tech, is endless variety, caused, first, by the sheer number of people racing around trying to catch a pass and then compounded by the many different routes they run. A typical football offense has three serious pass-catching threats; Texas Tech's offense has five, and it would employ more if that wasn't against the rules. Leach looks at the conventional offense - with its stocky fullback and bulky tight end seldom touching the football, used more often as blockers - and says, "You've got two positions that basically aren't doing anything." He regards receivers as raffle tickets: the more of them you have, the more likely one will hit big. Some go wide, some go deep, some come across the middle. All are fast. When Leach recruits high-school players, he is forced to compromise on most talents, but he insists on speed. All have been conditioned to run much more than a football player normally does. A typical N.F.L. receiver in training might run 1,500 yards of sprints a day; Texas Tech receivers run 2,500 yards. To prepare his receivers' ankles and knees for the unusual punishment of his nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field; slogging through the sand, he says, strengthens the receivers' joints. And when they finish sprinting, they move to Leach's tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turned many young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.
The first play Leach called against Texas A.&M. was the first play on Cody Hodges's wrist. That wrist held a mere 23 ordinary plays, 9 red-zone plays (for situations inside an opponent's 20-yard line), 6 goal-line plays, 2 2-point-conversion plays and 5 trick plays. "There's two ways to make it more complex for the defense," Leach says. "One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that's no good because then the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays and run it out of lots of different formations." Leach prefers new formations. "That way, you don't have to teach a guy a new thing to do," he says. "You just have to teach him new places to stand." Texas Tech's offense has no playbook; Cody Hodges's wrist and Mike Leach's back pocket hold the only formal written records of what is widely regarded as one of the most intricate offenses ever to take a football field. The plays change too often, in response to the defense and the talents of the players on hand, to bother recording them.
Hodges looked down and read what to anyone but a football player is incomprehensible: Ace Rip 6 Y Shallow.
The first part - Ace Rip - is the formation, the way the players line up.
Leach is unusual in giving his quarterback the authority to change every play, wherever the line of scrimmage. "He can see more than I'll ever see," Leach says. "If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me out of it. If he doesn't get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there's a ton of touchdowns to be had." All Leach is really saying to Hodges when he sends in the play is, "Line up in Ace, see how they line up against it and call a good play."
Hodges stuck with 6 Y Shallow. The four wide receivers fanned out, two on each side, and the lone back stood several steps to the right of the quarterback. 6 Y Shallow tells them where to run - sort of. The play calls for the two outside receivers, X and Z, to run deep and drag both the cornerbacks and the safeties with them. If the cornerbacks and safeties are in a zone defense and refuse to follow along, X and Z are supposed to stop and wait in empty pockets within the zone. H is also supposed to adjust his plans according to how the defense lines up: if it looks as if the defenders will blitz - that is, rush in to get the quarterback - H runs a quick slant across the middle of the field so that the quarterback can throw to him immediately. If the defenders do not blitz, H runs a more leisurely 10 yards downfield and cuts across the middle. F, the tailback, takes off sideways and waits for a pass. Y, for whom the play is named, goes shallow. He runs 3 yards down field, then tears across the middle of the field, crossing H's route but separated by 7 or 8 yards. Leach doesn't expect receivers to go entirely uncovered - though in the confusion he creates, that happens a lot - but he does assume he will get single defenders covering a couple of them. A fast receiver covered by just one player is an open target waiting to happen for the simple reason that he knows where he is going and the defender does not.
Hodges took the snap from a shotgun position a couple of yards behind the center and saw something not often seen on a football field: 10 of the 11 Texas A&M defenders running backward to cover 5 Texas Tech receivers. There was but one lone white jersey in front of Hodges, walled off by five Tech lineman. A&M's fear of the open spaces down the field had left the space right in front of Hodges empty. He ran for an effortless 11 yards and a first down.
Quickly, a pattern was established: A&M's fear of Tech's passing meant that the field just beyond the line of scrimmage was so open that a blind man with a cane could find the holes. Though the defense managed to stymie his passing attack - temporarily - the sight of big, lumbering defensive linemen dropping back to cover the receivers did not displease Leach. "The thing is," he said after the game, "defensive linemen really aren't much good at covering receivers. They aren't built to run around that much. And when they do, you have a bunch of people on the other team doing things they don't have much experience doing." For the first 16 plays of the game, Texas Tech lined up in seven different formations (one with two running backs, another with two tight ends, etc.) just to see how the defenders would respond and which way they would run after the ball was snapped. Hodges threw to four different receivers, at eight different spots on the field. Leach wanted to move the ball toward the opponent's goal line, of course, but he also wanted to see how the spaces changed, to see what the A&M defense conceded and also which parts of the inherent disorder the defenders were failing to understand. Seven of the first 11 plays were pass plays that Hodges changed into runs.
Finally, A&M brought a few more players to the line of scrimmage. Hodges looked over and noted Jarrett Hicks all alone with a cornerback and threw Tech's first touchdown pass to him. The entire Texas Tech possession lasted just 2 minutes 42 seconds. Two minutes later, Tech got the ball back, and this time it was only four plays and 47 seconds before the tailback, Taurean Henderson ran, barely touched, for 18 yards into the end zone. An idea about the use of football time was being challenged. The typical football offense seeks to eat up as much of it as it can. The Texas Tech offense, which at that point in the season had passed for more touchdowns than any team in the country, uses just a shade over two minutes on each drive. But speeding everything up has a curious effect on game time. A typical college football team runs 65 to 75 offensive plays a game. Texas Tech tries to run 90 - and sometimes does. A college team with a robust passing game might throw the football 35 times a game; at this point, 8 games into an 11-game regular season, the Red Raiders were averaging 53 passes a game. And because the clock stops after first downs, touchdowns and incompletions, Texas Tech's games are among the longest in college football. Less than six minutes into game time but nearly 30 into real time, Tech led, 14-0.
The Texas Tech offense is not just an offense; it's a mood: optimism. It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than to minimize the possibility of something bad happening. But then something bad happened. ("It always does," Leach says.) On its third series, the Tech center cut his hand and began bleeding profusely; instead of telling anyone, or wiping it off, he snapped a blood-drenched ball that slithered out of Hodges's hand as he prepared to throw, and the huge loss of yards killed the drive.
"There's no such thing as a perfect game in football," Leach says. "I don't even think there's such a thing as the perfect play. You have 11 guys between the ages of 18 and 22 trying to do something violent and fast together, usually in pain. Someone is going to blow an assignment or do something that's not quite right."
Three more times in the first half Texas Tech had the ball and each time it failed to score. But its problems weren't obviously caused by the A&M defense. One drive ended in a missed 38-yard field goal. On another, a touchdown was nullified by a holding call on the receiver Robert Johnson far away from the action. If you are the captain of a pirate ship, you cannot complain too much about lawless behavior - and Texas Tech is one of the most heavily penalized teams in college football - but still it's painful to watch a crew member drop treasure overboard. (Later, watching a videotape of the incident, Leach actually says, "Johnson's got to do a better job holding.") The final drive reached the A&M 5-yard line, where Leach called a pass play. Cody Hodges rolled out and, when he might well have simply run the ball into the end zone, threw an interception.
The Red Raiders trotted off the field at halftime with a lead, but not a large one: 14-10. A disappointing half, yet with hidden value. For 40 plays Leach's offense had groped - digressing, probing to learn something new - and it had been useful to see how the empty spaces on the field shifted. Coach and quarterback now knew what they wanted to know about the A&M defense. They had paid for the knowledge with time, but time means less to them than it does to any other offense in the land. A half to the Texas Tech offense is as good as a full game to most. The game within the game was about to begin.
From the beginning of football time, when there was no such thing as a forward pass and an offense did nothing but run, innovation has come from the passing attack. The last great shift was the so-called West Coast offense. A whisper of the old antipass bigotry can be heard in football's conventional wisdom: that a balanced offense means running as often as you pass; that you can't pass all that effectively unless you first establish a running game; that a running game is necessary to "control the clock"; that passing is inherently riskier than running because a pass might be intercepted and give the other team good field position.
Leach and his offense are approaching the natural end of a path football strategy has been taking for 50 years. They are testing a limit. Synergy, in Leach's view, doesn't come from mixing runs with passes but from throwing the ball everywhere on the field, to every possible person allowed to catch a ball. "Our notion of balance," Leach says, "is that the five guys who catch the ball all gain 1,000 yards in the season." (The Indianapolis Colts last season became only the fourth team in N.F.L. history to have three receivers gain more than 1,000 yards in a single season.) The trouble with running plays, as Leach sees it, is that they clump players together on the field - by putting two of them, during a handoff, in the same spot with the ball. "I've thought about going a whole season without calling a single running play," Leach says, only half-joking. To a team that gains as many yards as Texas Tech, the usual boring, penny-ante yard-eating tactics - punts, penalties - are trivial. Field position is simply a thing to improve. Cody Hodges, who has spent the last four years marveling at Leach's in-game refusal to accept that his offense might have to be so conservative as to punt, says, "There's been lots of times I'm on the sidelines, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, we're going for it!' We went for it on fourth and 5 on our own 23 - in the first quarter. We went for it once on fourth and 18 - and we were ahead." E. J. Whitley, an offensive lineman, says: "If you're on this offense, you expect to score. Most offenses on fourth down are coming off the field. On fourth down we expect a play to be called. Because we haven't scored yet."
One of the side effects of Leach's tinkering with the accepted rules of offensive conduct is to upset the ordinary rhythms of a football game. In the five full years Leach has coached Texas Tech, four or five times each season the team has flopped around ineffectually for the first third or so of a game before racing off to score touchdowns at a rate unheard of in organized tackle football. It's as if his opponent's defense has some deep dark secret that takes time for his offense to extract. Early this season, Texas Tech had been losing to Kansas State, 13-10, late in the second quarter - and won the game, 59-20. Last year's game against Texas Christian University was even odder: T.C.U., heavily favored, had shut out Southern Methodist University the week before, 44-0. With 8 minutes left in the second quarter, T.C.U. scored its third touchdown, for a 21-0 lead, and a T.C.U. defensive back was caught mouthing into a television camera, "They aren't going to score." In the last six minutes of the half, Texas Tech scored three quick touchdowns; after the break Leach's team came out and scored another seven and won the game, 70-35. A few games later, the Texas Tech offense scored the most points Nebraska had ever given up in its 114-year-old history. In that game, Texas Tech had been ahead, 14-3, with 2 minutes remaining in the first half. It won 70-10.
Halftime during the game against A&M was dull-minded; by now the original thrill of the game was gone. The team had slumped into the locker room, oozing self-disgust, and the players scattered into little bureaucratic meetings with their position coaches - the offensive linemen with the offensive line coaches, the receivers with the receivers coach and so on. Leach met with his quarterbacks in the coaches' locker room; he spent a few moments glancing at the first-half statistics. "The only information he ever asks for at halftime is the distribution," Hodges says. "He doesn't even care about the score. If Y has caught five passes and Z hasn't caught any, he wants to figure out how to get the ball to Z." Leach says, "You try to get the ball in everyone's hands because then it makes the whole offense harder to keep track of." If they aren't spreading the ball around, they aren't forcing the defense to cover the entire field. They are leaving empty spaces unprobed.
Leach had just a few minutes with Hodges, but he told him what he had noticed. First, the A&M cornerbacks were disguising their intentions. They were lining up as if to cover the fade routes - that is, before the play began, they stood between the receiver and the sidelines - but then, just as the ball was snapped, they were scampering back into the middle of the field. To Hodges it looked as if fade routes would be covered, so he had been sending his receivers on slants into the middle of the field. "Throw the fade," Leach said. "It doesn't look like it's there, but it is."
The other glaring opportunity, to Leach's mind, was A&M's response to Tech's formations. On the few occasions when Texas Tech lined up in a formation that suggested a running play, with two running backs, the Aggies "put their ears back to stop the run." But when Tech was, as it preferred, in its passing formation, A&M's fear of the pass caused them to leave huge empty spaces to run in. In the second half, the Tech running backs would be charging into pass coverage, and the Tech receivers would be running toward the sidelines.
There was one other thing Leach had noticed - and Hodges had noticed it, too. The A&M front line appeared tired. "The minute you see the defensive line bent over and their hands on their hips," Hodges told me, "that's when you know you have them." The A&M linemen were a lot bigger than the Texas Tech linemen. They may or may not have been fatter - Leach insists they were - but their bodies were clearly designed for a different sort of football game than this frenetic one. "That's the risk of playing 330-pound guys," Leach said later. "You get good push, but if you got to run around a lot, you get tired." Before the game, Leach had said to Hodges: "Get those fat guys up front and make them run. They're already a little slow. By play 40, they'll be immobilized." That was one reason he kept sending so many receivers on deep routes: to force the defense to run with them.
A coach cannot change the shape of the football field, but he can change its effective size. And if he can alter the environment, even slightly, he alters the environment's system of rewards and punishments. He can put 330-pound defensive linemen on the fast track to obsolescence and turn a pass-catching tailback into the holder of N.C.A.A. records. He can take a quarterback whose greatest assets are his moxie and his ability to see the field quickly and efficiently and make him the most prolific passer in the nation.
When he was finished with Hodges, Leach marched into the locker room, climbed back up on his green stool, "Coach's motivational speeches are always the same," says Daniel Loper, who played four years for Leach and is now a rookie offensive tackle with the Tennessee Titans. "He tells very long stories, and you're never sure what they mean. But he's a genius. When we leave the locker room, we all know that we'll have three receivers wide open every play."
For him, the game combines the appeal of chess with the joy of a demolition derby. Before the game, he and his coaching staff had spent a fair amount of time reminding the players, as if they needed to be reminded, that they were meant to hit people as hard as they can. "Be the hammer, never the nail." "You go out and knock the living dog snot out of people." "You get after him - get after him like he stole something from you."
On the second play of the second half, a lot of violent imagery, along with a pair of Texas Tech safeties, converged on a Texas A&M running back as he broke into the open field. One of the safeties, Vincent Meeks, was a ridiculously fast athlete who thought he came to Texas Tech to be a running back; the other, Dwayne Slay, had been hitting receivers so hard that they had started taking dives before he got to them. Slay was one hit shy of the N.C.A.A. record for forcing fumbles in a season - this was the hit. He drove right through the A&M ball carrier and took out Meeks as well, who rolled around on the ground screaming and clutching his groin. As the ball popped free and was grabbed by a Tech defender, a bent-over Meeks stumbled to the sidelines.
What happened next doesn't often happen in big-time college football, and almost never in the N.F.L. But here at Texas Tech it now passes for normal: the Tech offense scored a touchdown, then got the ball back five times more - and scored all five times. One moment the scoreboard read 14-10 and suggested a hard-fought contest; the next it showed Texas Tech winning 56-17, with the ball and, with a minute remaining in the game, driving to score again. By the time he left the game, with 5 minutes to go, Cody Hodges had thrown 44 passes for 408 yards, a lot of them to Jarrett Hicks, who had 8 catches for 147 yards and 2 touchdowns, both on fade routes. The Texas Tech rushers had gained another 218 yards, just about all of them from pass formations.
But when Leach removes his starting quarterback, he does not mean for his offense to stop scoring touchdowns. Scoring is a habit, he says; the more players do it, the better they get at it. The new quarterback, Graham Harrell, had the offense marching as fast as possible toward the end zone, and with 23 seconds left, Texas Tech had reached the Texas A&M 25-yard line.
It was then that I looked over and noticed Bennie Wylie standing uneasily next to Mike Leach. Wylie is Texas Tech's strength and conditioning coach. Leach hired him three years ago from the Dallas Cowboys to prepare football players to run more than they had ever run on a football field. Just after he moved to Lubbock, Wylie learned that this job might be less a job than a calling. The thought struck him when he was driving and spotted, in the distance, a sloppily dressed middle-aged man in-line skating down the center of the road. The guy was rocking back and forth in the middle of what in Lubbock passes for a busy street; cars were whizzing past at 30 m.p.h. in both directions. There was no skating lane; truth to tell, there wasn't a lot of in-line skating going on in Lubbock. As Wylie drew closer, he thought to himself, “that lunatic looks a little like Coach.” As he pulled alongside the lunatic, he realized, it is Coach. Later, Leach explained that he had decided to take up in-line skating, and he'd calculated that the middle of that particular road was Lubbock's flattest, smoothest surface and so the obvious place to start. "To Mike, everything he does makes sense," Wylie says. "It just takes a while to see how it all fits together."
But on this night Wylie was a fly on Leach's shoulder, and his eyeballs were still in their sockets. The end of this football game was shaping up disturbingly like last year's game against S.M.U., which had been, by Leachean standards, a low-scoring affair. With 15 seconds left, Texas Tech was ahead, 27-13. The clock was running, but the Red Raiders had the ball on the S.M.U. 4-yard line. It was then that Wylie realized that Leach and his offensive machine lacked an off switch. With 15 seconds left, Leach leaned into the field and called a timeout.
On the last play of that game, Leach sent in a pass play, and the quarterback, Sonny Cumbie, stepped into the shotgun position. "I could hear Bennett screaming," Cumbie says, referring to the S.M.U. head coach, Phil Bennett. "He's furious. He's yelling: HIT HIM! HIT HIM! HIT HIM! HIT THE QUARTERBACK!" Cumbie threw the ball into the end zone to a wide-open receiver, who dropped it. (None of the S.M.U. defenders hit him.) "I see their coach slam his earphones, throw down his clipboard and come running across the field," Wylie says. "I'm thinking: This is gonna be bad. He's mad at Mike for trying to score. And Mike really has no idea that he's mad. Mike is sitting there upset that we didn't score." Leach was, in fact, jotting notes on his wadded-up sheet of paper with the plays on it. His head was down; he didn't see Bennett. But before the S.M.U. coach reached Leach, Wylie jumped in. "The guy starts poking me in the chest - Bam! Bam! Bam! - and screaming," Wylie says. "If I hadn't been there, I think he might have taken a swing at Mike."
Now Texas Tech had a 39-point lead over A&M and the ball and was moving forward as rapidly as ever. To minimize its humiliation, the A&M offense had been running plays meant to use up time and get the team out of Lubbock. The governor of Texas slipped away early and was on his way back to Austin. The guys dressed up as soldiers in the Aggie end zone had run out of military drills to perform. For everyone but Mike Leach, the game was over, but he jumped onto the field and called a timeout. The referees did not notice: they were too busy throwing yellow flags at the extra Texas Tech players who had tried to get into the game. Tech was penalized, and in the subsequent confusion, Leach let the clock run out. "There was 23 seconds on the clock," he told me later. "That's more than enough time. I think we all had a level of disappointment we didn't score one more touchdown."
Bad as it was for Texas A&M, its staff might wonder how much worse it could have been if Leach had the same access to talent as A&M or Texas or Alabama or, God forbid, Notre Dame. The chances of that happening can't be great, though. Leach remains on the outside; like all innovators in sports, he finds himself in an uncertain social position. He has committed a faux pas: he has suggested by his methods that there is more going on out there on the (unlevel) field of play than his competitors realize, which reflects badly on them. He steals some glory from the guy who is born with advantages and uses them to become a champion. Gary O'Hagan, Leach's agent, says that he hears a great deal more from other coaches about Mike Leach than about any of his other clients. "He makes them nervous," O'Hagan says. "They don't like coaching against him; they'd rather coach against another version of themselves. It's not that they don't like him. But privately they haven't accepted him. You know how you can tell? Because when you're talking to them Monday morning, and you say, Did you see the play Leach ran on third and 26, they dismiss it immediately. Dismissive is the word. They dismiss him out of hand. And you know why? Because he's not doing things the way they've always been done. It's like he's been given this chessboard, and all the pieces but none of the rules, and he's trying to figure out where all the chess pieces should go. From scratch!"
Leach was out in the middle of the field shaking hands with a visibly upset Dennis Franchione, the Texas A&M coach. The press had descended on him, to ask him to describe just how happy he felt. But he didn't look happy; he looked distracted, for all the world as if he would rather be left alone. And by the time the cameras left, he was. The football field was huge and green and empty. The only other people on it were the two Texas Rangers assigned to protect him. As he allowed himself to be escorted toward the locker room, there were many things Mike Leach might have been thinking about. His team was now 8-1 - the best start in nearly 30 years for a Texas Tech football team. They had just beaten Texas A&M by the largest margin in the 80-year-old history of the rivalry. He knew he was not going to sleep anytime soon - he keeps the hours of a vampire and wouldn't go to bed until 6:30 a.m. - and so he might have even been thinking about reviewing game tape, which he usually does while others sleep.
Texas college football teams seem to have a particular need for hand signals. Fans of the University of Texas Longhorns deploy the thumb-and-pinkie hook-'em-horns gesture to suggest their bovinity. The Aggies have gig 'em, a frog-murdering gesture. The Red Raiders have guns up; when they are excited, they turn their index fingers into gun barrels. Now they were excited, perhaps as excited as they have ever been, and the fingers of West Texas filled the air. Coach Leach threw two triumphant trigger fingers high over his head and jabbed the air with them, twice. Guns up!
Twenty thousand natural-born underdogs roared the winner's roar. The man who made the moment possible by refusing to do anything but what he loves to do smiled, and for just a few seconds his mind was present and accounted for. Then he ran up the concrete tunnel and back into the pleasure of thinking for himself.
A lot of the players in the locker room had similar stories of rejection and redemption. In this part of the country, the University of Texas and Oklahoma University are the old-money football schools, with Texas A&M right behind. Those schools fish first in the local-talent pool. Tonight there would be very few players on the field for Texas A&M - for Oklahoma or Texas there wouldn't be a single player - to whom Texas Tech would not have offered a football scholarship. Conversely, the Texas Tech locker room was filled with players rejected by the old-money schools. And yet - look around! Hodges led all of college football in passing. The team's tailback, Taurean Henderson, had broken the N.C.A.A. career record for most passes caught by a running back. The top four receivers on the team were the four leading pass receivers in the Big 12.
At least one N.F.L. head coach had taken a special interest in the Texas Tech offense and had been ordering its game tapes on Monday mornings. At least one N.F.L. defensive coordinator, Jim Schwartz of the Tennessee Titans, had stumbled upon Texas Tech accidentally and said, Oh, my. The surprise runner-up in the search earlier this year for a new San Francisco 49ers head coach, Schwartz had scrambled to answer a question: if he got the 49ers job, whom should he hire? He was just in his mid-30's, and his football career stopped at Georgetown (where he graduated with honors in economics), so he really hadn't thought about this before.
The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz's view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart?
Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the "midlevel schools" in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech's numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation's highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach's first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior - like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie's 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.
Now Texas Tech had Cody Hodges, still another fifth-year senior - barely six feet tall, with an average arm and four college seasons on the bench. Before the 2005 football season even began, Hodges was short-listed for the Maxwell Award for the finest college football player in the land. Whoever played quarterback for the Texas Tech Red Raiders was sure to create so much offense that he couldn't be ignored.
Schwartz had an N.F.L. coach's perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from midrange schools. Sonny Cumbie hadn't even been offered a scholarship; he was just invited to show up for football practice at Texas Tech. Either the market for quarterbacks was screwy - that is, the schools with the recruiting edge, and N.F.L. scouts, were missing big talent - or (much more likely, in Schwartz's view) Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players," Schwartz told me recently. "They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work."
But when Schwartz studied videotape of the Texas Tech offense, what he saw unsettled him. The offensive linemen positioned themselves between three and six feet apart - on extreme occasions, the five linemen stretched a good 15 yards across the field. At times it was difficult to tell the linemen from the receivers. Strictly speaking, they were not a line at all, just a row of dots. "The offensive line splits - you look at them, and you're just shocked," Schwartz said. "It scares people to see splits that are that wide."
The big gaps between the linemen made the quarterback seem more vulnerable - some defenders could seemingly run right between the blockers - but he wasn't. Stretching out the offensive line stretched out the defensive line too, forcing the most ferocious pass rushers several yards farther from the quarterback. It also opened up wide passing lanes through which even a short quarterback could see the whole field clearly. Leach spread out his receivers and backs too. The look was more flag than tackle football: a truly fantastic number of players racing around trying to catch passes on every play, and a quarterback surprisingly able to keep an eye on all of them.
This offense was, in effect, an argument for changing the geometry of the game. Schwartz didn't know if Leach's system would work in the N.F.L., where they had bigger staffs, better players and a lot more time to prepare for whatever confusion the offense cooked up. On the other hand, he wasn't sure it wouldn't.
Finally, a coach: Mike Leach, 44, entered the locker room with the quizzical air of a man who has successfully bushwhacked his way through a jungle but isn't quite sure what country he has emerged into. "When you first meet him," Jarrett Hicks, a junior wide receiver, told me, "you think he's an equipment manager." Leach's agent, Gary O'Hagan of I.M.G., who represents dozens of other big-time college and N.F.L. coaches, put it this way, "He's so different from every other football coach it's hard to understand how he's a coach."
Leach shouted, "All right, everybody up!" Seventy players pushed into the middle of the room and bent down on one knee.
Leach isn't really sure that there's anything a coach can say to football players minutes before a game that will inspire them to put aside their pain and their problems and play their best. He thinks that revenge is a silly motive and that waxing poetic on how history will judge you is distracting. Two weeks earlier, his team was ranked seventh in the country but then lost badly to the University of Texas, the nation's No. 2 team, which ended Texas Tech's surprising shot at a national championship. Now they were 7-1, ranked 15th and still within sniffing distance of a major bowl game. Not worth mentioning, in Leach's view.
"Everyone find someone," he yelled. Hands sought hands and clasped. "All right," he yelled, "Three things." He jumped up onto a little green stool and looked down on his players, all larger than he. "Do your job. DO - YOUR - JOB!"
He was talking to the entire team, but his mind was on the offense, which Leach coordinates, unlike most head coaches. He watches the tape, draws up the game plan, schools the quarterbacks and calls the plays.
"No. 2," he said, "play together with great tempo."
He had been harping on tempo all week: he thinks the team that wins is the team that moves fastest, and the team that moves fastest is the team that wants to. He believes that both failure and success slow players down, unless they will themselves not to slow down. "When they fail, they become frustrated," he says. "When they have success, they want to become the thinking-man's football team. They start having these quilting bees, these little bridge parties at the line of scrimmage." His 45-second pregame speech set a certain tempo, but he had one final thing to say:
"Your body is your sword. Swing your sword."
Each off-season, Leach picks something he is curious about and learns as much as he can about it: Geronimo, Daniel Boone, whales, chimpanzees, grizzly bears, Jackson Pollock. The list goes on, and if you can find the common thread, you are a step ahead of his football players. One year, he studied pirates. When he learned that a pirate ship was a functional democracy; that pirates disciplined themselves; that, loathed by others, they nevertheless found ways to work together, the pirate ship became a metaphor for his football team. Last year, after a loss to Texas A.&M. in overtime, Leach hauled the team into the conference room on Sunday morning and delivered a three-hour lecture on the history of pirates. Leach read from his favorite pirate history, "Under the Black Flag," by David Cordingly. The analogy to football held up for a few minutes, but after a bit, it was clear that Coach Leach was just . . . talking about pirates. The quarterback Cody Hodges says of his coach: "You learn not to ask questions. If you ask questions, it just goes on longer."
Wherever Mike Leach walks onto a football field, a question naturally follows. Vincent Meeks, who plays safety, puts it this way: "How does a coach who never played a down of football have the best offense in the game?" Leach actually rode the bench through his junior year in high school in Cody, Wyo. But that was it for his playing career. When he left Cody for Brigham Young University, Leach planned to become a lawyer. From B.Y.U. he went straight to Pepperdine law school, where he graduated, at the age of 25, in the top third of his class. That's when he posed the question that has sunk many a legal career: "Why do I want to be a lawyer?" One day he announced to his wife, Sharon - soon to be pregnant with their second child - that what he really wanted to be was a college football coach. To Leach, coaching football requires the same talent that he was going to waste on the law: the talent for making arguments. He wanted to make his arguments in the form of offensive plays.
The last 20 years have been an odd journey, with coaching jobs at College of the Desert, Cal Poly, Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta State and a European league team in Pori, Finland. His first year coaching Division 1 college football was 1997, at the University of Kentucky. He arrived from Valdosta State with the head coach, Hal Mumme, and turned the Kentucky offense from joke into juggernaut. The year before he arrived, Kentucky's quarterback passed for 967 yards. In Leach's first year, his quarterback, Tim Couch, threw for 3,884 yards; the year after that, Couch, who lasted for only a few disappointing years in the N.F.L., threw for 4,275 yards. After Kentucky, Leach moved to Oklahoma for a single season, 1999. That year Oklahoma went from 101st to 8th in the country in offensive scoring. Its quarterback, Josh Heupel, passed for 3,850 yards that season, which was 1,700 more than any quarterback in Oklahoma football history had thrown for in a season. The next year, running Leach's offense, Oklahoma won the national championship - but by then Texas Tech had picked up the pattern and hired Leach to run its team. "Mike was different," says Patty Ross, who has long served as an assistant to Texas Tech head football coaches and who didn't know what to make of this new one. "We had always had West Texas guys. We always ran the ball here. The first time Mike's offense came out on the field everyone is like, Whoa. He has that play he calls the Ninja - when they all line up on one end. I'm not sure anyone had ever seen the Ninja. It was just a shock effect. Mike's personality was like that, too."
Stepping out into Jones SBC Stadium, Leach was even easier than usual to identify: he was the one guy wandering about, as Meeks has put it, "with this look on his face like he's walking around an airport, lost." True, he had shaved ("It's a good idea to shave for TV games") and shed his flip-flops, his "Hawaii Five-O" baggy shirts and his board shorts for an outfit that looked vaguely coachlike.
Leach made his way to the sideline and from his back pocket pulled a crumpled piece of paper with the notations for dozens of plays typed on it, along with a red pen. When a play doesn't work, he puts an X next to it. When a play works well, he draws a circle beside it - "to remind myself to run it again." But at the start of a game, he's unsure what's going to work. So one goal is to throw as many different things at a defense as he can, to see what it finds most disturbing. Another goal is to create as much confusion as possible for the defense while keeping things as simple as possible for the offense.
What a defense sees, when it lines up against Texas Tech, is endless variety, caused, first, by the sheer number of people racing around trying to catch a pass and then compounded by the many different routes they run. A typical football offense has three serious pass-catching threats; Texas Tech's offense has five, and it would employ more if that wasn't against the rules. Leach looks at the conventional offense - with its stocky fullback and bulky tight end seldom touching the football, used more often as blockers - and says, "You've got two positions that basically aren't doing anything." He regards receivers as raffle tickets: the more of them you have, the more likely one will hit big. Some go wide, some go deep, some come across the middle. All are fast. When Leach recruits high-school players, he is forced to compromise on most talents, but he insists on speed. All have been conditioned to run much more than a football player normally does. A typical N.F.L. receiver in training might run 1,500 yards of sprints a day; Texas Tech receivers run 2,500 yards. To prepare his receivers' ankles and knees for the unusual punishment of his nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field; slogging through the sand, he says, strengthens the receivers' joints. And when they finish sprinting, they move to Leach's tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turned many young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.
The first play Leach called against Texas A.&M. was the first play on Cody Hodges's wrist. That wrist held a mere 23 ordinary plays, 9 red-zone plays (for situations inside an opponent's 20-yard line), 6 goal-line plays, 2 2-point-conversion plays and 5 trick plays. "There's two ways to make it more complex for the defense," Leach says. "One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that's no good because then the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays and run it out of lots of different formations." Leach prefers new formations. "That way, you don't have to teach a guy a new thing to do," he says. "You just have to teach him new places to stand." Texas Tech's offense has no playbook; Cody Hodges's wrist and Mike Leach's back pocket hold the only formal written records of what is widely regarded as one of the most intricate offenses ever to take a football field. The plays change too often, in response to the defense and the talents of the players on hand, to bother recording them.
Hodges looked down and read what to anyone but a football player is incomprehensible: Ace Rip 6 Y Shallow.
The first part - Ace Rip - is the formation, the way the players line up.
Leach is unusual in giving his quarterback the authority to change every play, wherever the line of scrimmage. "He can see more than I'll ever see," Leach says. "If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me out of it. If he doesn't get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there's a ton of touchdowns to be had." All Leach is really saying to Hodges when he sends in the play is, "Line up in Ace, see how they line up against it and call a good play."
Hodges stuck with 6 Y Shallow. The four wide receivers fanned out, two on each side, and the lone back stood several steps to the right of the quarterback. 6 Y Shallow tells them where to run - sort of. The play calls for the two outside receivers, X and Z, to run deep and drag both the cornerbacks and the safeties with them. If the cornerbacks and safeties are in a zone defense and refuse to follow along, X and Z are supposed to stop and wait in empty pockets within the zone. H is also supposed to adjust his plans according to how the defense lines up: if it looks as if the defenders will blitz - that is, rush in to get the quarterback - H runs a quick slant across the middle of the field so that the quarterback can throw to him immediately. If the defenders do not blitz, H runs a more leisurely 10 yards downfield and cuts across the middle. F, the tailback, takes off sideways and waits for a pass. Y, for whom the play is named, goes shallow. He runs 3 yards down field, then tears across the middle of the field, crossing H's route but separated by 7 or 8 yards. Leach doesn't expect receivers to go entirely uncovered - though in the confusion he creates, that happens a lot - but he does assume he will get single defenders covering a couple of them. A fast receiver covered by just one player is an open target waiting to happen for the simple reason that he knows where he is going and the defender does not.
Hodges took the snap from a shotgun position a couple of yards behind the center and saw something not often seen on a football field: 10 of the 11 Texas A&M defenders running backward to cover 5 Texas Tech receivers. There was but one lone white jersey in front of Hodges, walled off by five Tech lineman. A&M's fear of the open spaces down the field had left the space right in front of Hodges empty. He ran for an effortless 11 yards and a first down.
Quickly, a pattern was established: A&M's fear of Tech's passing meant that the field just beyond the line of scrimmage was so open that a blind man with a cane could find the holes. Though the defense managed to stymie his passing attack - temporarily - the sight of big, lumbering defensive linemen dropping back to cover the receivers did not displease Leach. "The thing is," he said after the game, "defensive linemen really aren't much good at covering receivers. They aren't built to run around that much. And when they do, you have a bunch of people on the other team doing things they don't have much experience doing." For the first 16 plays of the game, Texas Tech lined up in seven different formations (one with two running backs, another with two tight ends, etc.) just to see how the defenders would respond and which way they would run after the ball was snapped. Hodges threw to four different receivers, at eight different spots on the field. Leach wanted to move the ball toward the opponent's goal line, of course, but he also wanted to see how the spaces changed, to see what the A&M defense conceded and also which parts of the inherent disorder the defenders were failing to understand. Seven of the first 11 plays were pass plays that Hodges changed into runs.
Finally, A&M brought a few more players to the line of scrimmage. Hodges looked over and noted Jarrett Hicks all alone with a cornerback and threw Tech's first touchdown pass to him. The entire Texas Tech possession lasted just 2 minutes 42 seconds. Two minutes later, Tech got the ball back, and this time it was only four plays and 47 seconds before the tailback, Taurean Henderson ran, barely touched, for 18 yards into the end zone. An idea about the use of football time was being challenged. The typical football offense seeks to eat up as much of it as it can. The Texas Tech offense, which at that point in the season had passed for more touchdowns than any team in the country, uses just a shade over two minutes on each drive. But speeding everything up has a curious effect on game time. A typical college football team runs 65 to 75 offensive plays a game. Texas Tech tries to run 90 - and sometimes does. A college team with a robust passing game might throw the football 35 times a game; at this point, 8 games into an 11-game regular season, the Red Raiders were averaging 53 passes a game. And because the clock stops after first downs, touchdowns and incompletions, Texas Tech's games are among the longest in college football. Less than six minutes into game time but nearly 30 into real time, Tech led, 14-0.
The Texas Tech offense is not just an offense; it's a mood: optimism. It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than to minimize the possibility of something bad happening. But then something bad happened. ("It always does," Leach says.) On its third series, the Tech center cut his hand and began bleeding profusely; instead of telling anyone, or wiping it off, he snapped a blood-drenched ball that slithered out of Hodges's hand as he prepared to throw, and the huge loss of yards killed the drive.
"There's no such thing as a perfect game in football," Leach says. "I don't even think there's such a thing as the perfect play. You have 11 guys between the ages of 18 and 22 trying to do something violent and fast together, usually in pain. Someone is going to blow an assignment or do something that's not quite right."
Three more times in the first half Texas Tech had the ball and each time it failed to score. But its problems weren't obviously caused by the A&M defense. One drive ended in a missed 38-yard field goal. On another, a touchdown was nullified by a holding call on the receiver Robert Johnson far away from the action. If you are the captain of a pirate ship, you cannot complain too much about lawless behavior - and Texas Tech is one of the most heavily penalized teams in college football - but still it's painful to watch a crew member drop treasure overboard. (Later, watching a videotape of the incident, Leach actually says, "Johnson's got to do a better job holding.") The final drive reached the A&M 5-yard line, where Leach called a pass play. Cody Hodges rolled out and, when he might well have simply run the ball into the end zone, threw an interception.
The Red Raiders trotted off the field at halftime with a lead, but not a large one: 14-10. A disappointing half, yet with hidden value. For 40 plays Leach's offense had groped - digressing, probing to learn something new - and it had been useful to see how the empty spaces on the field shifted. Coach and quarterback now knew what they wanted to know about the A&M defense. They had paid for the knowledge with time, but time means less to them than it does to any other offense in the land. A half to the Texas Tech offense is as good as a full game to most. The game within the game was about to begin.
From the beginning of football time, when there was no such thing as a forward pass and an offense did nothing but run, innovation has come from the passing attack. The last great shift was the so-called West Coast offense. A whisper of the old antipass bigotry can be heard in football's conventional wisdom: that a balanced offense means running as often as you pass; that you can't pass all that effectively unless you first establish a running game; that a running game is necessary to "control the clock"; that passing is inherently riskier than running because a pass might be intercepted and give the other team good field position.
Leach and his offense are approaching the natural end of a path football strategy has been taking for 50 years. They are testing a limit. Synergy, in Leach's view, doesn't come from mixing runs with passes but from throwing the ball everywhere on the field, to every possible person allowed to catch a ball. "Our notion of balance," Leach says, "is that the five guys who catch the ball all gain 1,000 yards in the season." (The Indianapolis Colts last season became only the fourth team in N.F.L. history to have three receivers gain more than 1,000 yards in a single season.) The trouble with running plays, as Leach sees it, is that they clump players together on the field - by putting two of them, during a handoff, in the same spot with the ball. "I've thought about going a whole season without calling a single running play," Leach says, only half-joking. To a team that gains as many yards as Texas Tech, the usual boring, penny-ante yard-eating tactics - punts, penalties - are trivial. Field position is simply a thing to improve. Cody Hodges, who has spent the last four years marveling at Leach's in-game refusal to accept that his offense might have to be so conservative as to punt, says, "There's been lots of times I'm on the sidelines, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, we're going for it!' We went for it on fourth and 5 on our own 23 - in the first quarter. We went for it once on fourth and 18 - and we were ahead." E. J. Whitley, an offensive lineman, says: "If you're on this offense, you expect to score. Most offenses on fourth down are coming off the field. On fourth down we expect a play to be called. Because we haven't scored yet."
One of the side effects of Leach's tinkering with the accepted rules of offensive conduct is to upset the ordinary rhythms of a football game. In the five full years Leach has coached Texas Tech, four or five times each season the team has flopped around ineffectually for the first third or so of a game before racing off to score touchdowns at a rate unheard of in organized tackle football. It's as if his opponent's defense has some deep dark secret that takes time for his offense to extract. Early this season, Texas Tech had been losing to Kansas State, 13-10, late in the second quarter - and won the game, 59-20. Last year's game against Texas Christian University was even odder: T.C.U., heavily favored, had shut out Southern Methodist University the week before, 44-0. With 8 minutes left in the second quarter, T.C.U. scored its third touchdown, for a 21-0 lead, and a T.C.U. defensive back was caught mouthing into a television camera, "They aren't going to score." In the last six minutes of the half, Texas Tech scored three quick touchdowns; after the break Leach's team came out and scored another seven and won the game, 70-35. A few games later, the Texas Tech offense scored the most points Nebraska had ever given up in its 114-year-old history. In that game, Texas Tech had been ahead, 14-3, with 2 minutes remaining in the first half. It won 70-10.
Halftime during the game against A&M was dull-minded; by now the original thrill of the game was gone. The team had slumped into the locker room, oozing self-disgust, and the players scattered into little bureaucratic meetings with their position coaches - the offensive linemen with the offensive line coaches, the receivers with the receivers coach and so on. Leach met with his quarterbacks in the coaches' locker room; he spent a few moments glancing at the first-half statistics. "The only information he ever asks for at halftime is the distribution," Hodges says. "He doesn't even care about the score. If Y has caught five passes and Z hasn't caught any, he wants to figure out how to get the ball to Z." Leach says, "You try to get the ball in everyone's hands because then it makes the whole offense harder to keep track of." If they aren't spreading the ball around, they aren't forcing the defense to cover the entire field. They are leaving empty spaces unprobed.
Leach had just a few minutes with Hodges, but he told him what he had noticed. First, the A&M cornerbacks were disguising their intentions. They were lining up as if to cover the fade routes - that is, before the play began, they stood between the receiver and the sidelines - but then, just as the ball was snapped, they were scampering back into the middle of the field. To Hodges it looked as if fade routes would be covered, so he had been sending his receivers on slants into the middle of the field. "Throw the fade," Leach said. "It doesn't look like it's there, but it is."
The other glaring opportunity, to Leach's mind, was A&M's response to Tech's formations. On the few occasions when Texas Tech lined up in a formation that suggested a running play, with two running backs, the Aggies "put their ears back to stop the run." But when Tech was, as it preferred, in its passing formation, A&M's fear of the pass caused them to leave huge empty spaces to run in. In the second half, the Tech running backs would be charging into pass coverage, and the Tech receivers would be running toward the sidelines.
There was one other thing Leach had noticed - and Hodges had noticed it, too. The A&M front line appeared tired. "The minute you see the defensive line bent over and their hands on their hips," Hodges told me, "that's when you know you have them." The A&M linemen were a lot bigger than the Texas Tech linemen. They may or may not have been fatter - Leach insists they were - but their bodies were clearly designed for a different sort of football game than this frenetic one. "That's the risk of playing 330-pound guys," Leach said later. "You get good push, but if you got to run around a lot, you get tired." Before the game, Leach had said to Hodges: "Get those fat guys up front and make them run. They're already a little slow. By play 40, they'll be immobilized." That was one reason he kept sending so many receivers on deep routes: to force the defense to run with them.
A coach cannot change the shape of the football field, but he can change its effective size. And if he can alter the environment, even slightly, he alters the environment's system of rewards and punishments. He can put 330-pound defensive linemen on the fast track to obsolescence and turn a pass-catching tailback into the holder of N.C.A.A. records. He can take a quarterback whose greatest assets are his moxie and his ability to see the field quickly and efficiently and make him the most prolific passer in the nation.
When he was finished with Hodges, Leach marched into the locker room, climbed back up on his green stool, "Coach's motivational speeches are always the same," says Daniel Loper, who played four years for Leach and is now a rookie offensive tackle with the Tennessee Titans. "He tells very long stories, and you're never sure what they mean. But he's a genius. When we leave the locker room, we all know that we'll have three receivers wide open every play."
For him, the game combines the appeal of chess with the joy of a demolition derby. Before the game, he and his coaching staff had spent a fair amount of time reminding the players, as if they needed to be reminded, that they were meant to hit people as hard as they can. "Be the hammer, never the nail." "You go out and knock the living dog snot out of people." "You get after him - get after him like he stole something from you."
On the second play of the second half, a lot of violent imagery, along with a pair of Texas Tech safeties, converged on a Texas A&M running back as he broke into the open field. One of the safeties, Vincent Meeks, was a ridiculously fast athlete who thought he came to Texas Tech to be a running back; the other, Dwayne Slay, had been hitting receivers so hard that they had started taking dives before he got to them. Slay was one hit shy of the N.C.A.A. record for forcing fumbles in a season - this was the hit. He drove right through the A&M ball carrier and took out Meeks as well, who rolled around on the ground screaming and clutching his groin. As the ball popped free and was grabbed by a Tech defender, a bent-over Meeks stumbled to the sidelines.
What happened next doesn't often happen in big-time college football, and almost never in the N.F.L. But here at Texas Tech it now passes for normal: the Tech offense scored a touchdown, then got the ball back five times more - and scored all five times. One moment the scoreboard read 14-10 and suggested a hard-fought contest; the next it showed Texas Tech winning 56-17, with the ball and, with a minute remaining in the game, driving to score again. By the time he left the game, with 5 minutes to go, Cody Hodges had thrown 44 passes for 408 yards, a lot of them to Jarrett Hicks, who had 8 catches for 147 yards and 2 touchdowns, both on fade routes. The Texas Tech rushers had gained another 218 yards, just about all of them from pass formations.
But when Leach removes his starting quarterback, he does not mean for his offense to stop scoring touchdowns. Scoring is a habit, he says; the more players do it, the better they get at it. The new quarterback, Graham Harrell, had the offense marching as fast as possible toward the end zone, and with 23 seconds left, Texas Tech had reached the Texas A&M 25-yard line.
It was then that I looked over and noticed Bennie Wylie standing uneasily next to Mike Leach. Wylie is Texas Tech's strength and conditioning coach. Leach hired him three years ago from the Dallas Cowboys to prepare football players to run more than they had ever run on a football field. Just after he moved to Lubbock, Wylie learned that this job might be less a job than a calling. The thought struck him when he was driving and spotted, in the distance, a sloppily dressed middle-aged man in-line skating down the center of the road. The guy was rocking back and forth in the middle of what in Lubbock passes for a busy street; cars were whizzing past at 30 m.p.h. in both directions. There was no skating lane; truth to tell, there wasn't a lot of in-line skating going on in Lubbock. As Wylie drew closer, he thought to himself, “that lunatic looks a little like Coach.” As he pulled alongside the lunatic, he realized, it is Coach. Later, Leach explained that he had decided to take up in-line skating, and he'd calculated that the middle of that particular road was Lubbock's flattest, smoothest surface and so the obvious place to start. "To Mike, everything he does makes sense," Wylie says. "It just takes a while to see how it all fits together."
But on this night Wylie was a fly on Leach's shoulder, and his eyeballs were still in their sockets. The end of this football game was shaping up disturbingly like last year's game against S.M.U., which had been, by Leachean standards, a low-scoring affair. With 15 seconds left, Texas Tech was ahead, 27-13. The clock was running, but the Red Raiders had the ball on the S.M.U. 4-yard line. It was then that Wylie realized that Leach and his offensive machine lacked an off switch. With 15 seconds left, Leach leaned into the field and called a timeout.
On the last play of that game, Leach sent in a pass play, and the quarterback, Sonny Cumbie, stepped into the shotgun position. "I could hear Bennett screaming," Cumbie says, referring to the S.M.U. head coach, Phil Bennett. "He's furious. He's yelling: HIT HIM! HIT HIM! HIT HIM! HIT THE QUARTERBACK!" Cumbie threw the ball into the end zone to a wide-open receiver, who dropped it. (None of the S.M.U. defenders hit him.) "I see their coach slam his earphones, throw down his clipboard and come running across the field," Wylie says. "I'm thinking: This is gonna be bad. He's mad at Mike for trying to score. And Mike really has no idea that he's mad. Mike is sitting there upset that we didn't score." Leach was, in fact, jotting notes on his wadded-up sheet of paper with the plays on it. His head was down; he didn't see Bennett. But before the S.M.U. coach reached Leach, Wylie jumped in. "The guy starts poking me in the chest - Bam! Bam! Bam! - and screaming," Wylie says. "If I hadn't been there, I think he might have taken a swing at Mike."
Now Texas Tech had a 39-point lead over A&M and the ball and was moving forward as rapidly as ever. To minimize its humiliation, the A&M offense had been running plays meant to use up time and get the team out of Lubbock. The governor of Texas slipped away early and was on his way back to Austin. The guys dressed up as soldiers in the Aggie end zone had run out of military drills to perform. For everyone but Mike Leach, the game was over, but he jumped onto the field and called a timeout. The referees did not notice: they were too busy throwing yellow flags at the extra Texas Tech players who had tried to get into the game. Tech was penalized, and in the subsequent confusion, Leach let the clock run out. "There was 23 seconds on the clock," he told me later. "That's more than enough time. I think we all had a level of disappointment we didn't score one more touchdown."
Bad as it was for Texas A&M, its staff might wonder how much worse it could have been if Leach had the same access to talent as A&M or Texas or Alabama or, God forbid, Notre Dame. The chances of that happening can't be great, though. Leach remains on the outside; like all innovators in sports, he finds himself in an uncertain social position. He has committed a faux pas: he has suggested by his methods that there is more going on out there on the (unlevel) field of play than his competitors realize, which reflects badly on them. He steals some glory from the guy who is born with advantages and uses them to become a champion. Gary O'Hagan, Leach's agent, says that he hears a great deal more from other coaches about Mike Leach than about any of his other clients. "He makes them nervous," O'Hagan says. "They don't like coaching against him; they'd rather coach against another version of themselves. It's not that they don't like him. But privately they haven't accepted him. You know how you can tell? Because when you're talking to them Monday morning, and you say, Did you see the play Leach ran on third and 26, they dismiss it immediately. Dismissive is the word. They dismiss him out of hand. And you know why? Because he's not doing things the way they've always been done. It's like he's been given this chessboard, and all the pieces but none of the rules, and he's trying to figure out where all the chess pieces should go. From scratch!"
Leach was out in the middle of the field shaking hands with a visibly upset Dennis Franchione, the Texas A&M coach. The press had descended on him, to ask him to describe just how happy he felt. But he didn't look happy; he looked distracted, for all the world as if he would rather be left alone. And by the time the cameras left, he was. The football field was huge and green and empty. The only other people on it were the two Texas Rangers assigned to protect him. As he allowed himself to be escorted toward the locker room, there were many things Mike Leach might have been thinking about. His team was now 8-1 - the best start in nearly 30 years for a Texas Tech football team. They had just beaten Texas A&M by the largest margin in the 80-year-old history of the rivalry. He knew he was not going to sleep anytime soon - he keeps the hours of a vampire and wouldn't go to bed until 6:30 a.m. - and so he might have even been thinking about reviewing game tape, which he usually does while others sleep.
Texas college football teams seem to have a particular need for hand signals. Fans of the University of Texas Longhorns deploy the thumb-and-pinkie hook-'em-horns gesture to suggest their bovinity. The Aggies have gig 'em, a frog-murdering gesture. The Red Raiders have guns up; when they are excited, they turn their index fingers into gun barrels. Now they were excited, perhaps as excited as they have ever been, and the fingers of West Texas filled the air. Coach Leach threw two triumphant trigger fingers high over his head and jabbed the air with them, twice. Guns up!
Twenty thousand natural-born underdogs roared the winner's roar. The man who made the moment possible by refusing to do anything but what he loves to do smiled, and for just a few seconds his mind was present and accounted for. Then he ran up the concrete tunnel and back into the pleasure of thinking for himself.
9.16.2009
HOW TO SPOT A WINNER
Right out of the gate I'm always looking for THREE signs that indicate whether I'm dealing with someone who has a winner mentality. It doesn't mean they've accomplished all their desires or goals but I can tell rather quickly if they are on their way.
1. Winners are willing to accept responsibility for their life and behavior.
Winners admit their mistakes and are willing to learn from them. Losers blame other people or circumstances for whatever happens to them.
2. Winners are willing to pay the price to get the job done.
Winners get on with whatever needs to be done to accomplish the job at hand or to reach the goals they've set for themselves. Losers talk a great deal about what they are going to do but never get around to doing it.
3. Winners make a personal commitment to themselves and others.
Winners mean it when they say, "You can count on me." They do what they say they'll do when they say they'll do it. Losers make idle promises and offer excuses for failing to deliver.
What separates a winner from a loser?
I have often said, "When you run into a problem, you're going to have to find who is in charge of your life and get them to help you change."
My tongue in cheek point is this: The one in charge of your life is YOU!
The two things that control your life are your ATTITUDES and your BEHAVIORS and YOU get to choose both of them. While you may have some negative attitudes and behaviors at the moment, it is YOU who decides whether to keep them or to start the process of change.
When you master both your attitudes and your behaviors, you can pretty much control the destiny of your life. Winners choose to take the necessary steps to re-program themselves to have a positive mindset and to do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals. Winners are willing to PAY THE PRICE!
Losers are lazy and choose to keep their negative attitudes and behaviors, accepting anything that happens as fate rather than the result of their own choices while using all their energy to complain about being victimized by other people and circumstances.
Why you may not be winning.
If you believe your attitudes and behaviors are generally positive but you are not winning in life, you might want to consider the following:
· You may have not set high enough goals. When people are not challenging themselves to be the best they can be, they become bored, disappointed, and negative. Winners have a written plan that is broken down into daily goal-setting activities that can be measured and monitored, words that losers hate.
· You may be allowing obstacles on the way to your goals to derail and defeat you. There will always be obstacles no matter what you are trying to accomplish! I've learned to view obstacles as opportunities for growth and learning; as part of the process of honing my strengths and minimizing my weaknesses; as stepping stones to the next level.
· You may be concentrating on your problems and not your power. Winners know they have weaknesses, but they appreciate their abilities far more. They keep doing whatever is necessary to learn, grow, and improve their skills. Remember the old adage based on physics: "A body in motion tends to stay in motion."
· You may be selling out your principles and values in order to win. If so, STOP! Never, ever do this. Whatever you "win" in the short haul will be useless. You'll pay a high price for abdicating your principles. Winners never sacrifice their values! Any time I've ever "lost" in life because I refused to compromise my principles, I found that God rewarded me with a much greater blessing down the road.
Winners have an electric, enthusiastic vibration about them. They refuse negative mindsets, concentrate on their strengths; are committed to grow and improve, and never compromise their principles. You can count on them; they keep their word. They take personal responsibility for their choices. They are willing to pay the price. The bottom line is you just can't fake being a winner, because a winner is easy to spot!
1. Winners are willing to accept responsibility for their life and behavior.
Winners admit their mistakes and are willing to learn from them. Losers blame other people or circumstances for whatever happens to them.
2. Winners are willing to pay the price to get the job done.
Winners get on with whatever needs to be done to accomplish the job at hand or to reach the goals they've set for themselves. Losers talk a great deal about what they are going to do but never get around to doing it.
3. Winners make a personal commitment to themselves and others.
Winners mean it when they say, "You can count on me." They do what they say they'll do when they say they'll do it. Losers make idle promises and offer excuses for failing to deliver.
What separates a winner from a loser?
I have often said, "When you run into a problem, you're going to have to find who is in charge of your life and get them to help you change."
My tongue in cheek point is this: The one in charge of your life is YOU!
The two things that control your life are your ATTITUDES and your BEHAVIORS and YOU get to choose both of them. While you may have some negative attitudes and behaviors at the moment, it is YOU who decides whether to keep them or to start the process of change.
When you master both your attitudes and your behaviors, you can pretty much control the destiny of your life. Winners choose to take the necessary steps to re-program themselves to have a positive mindset and to do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals. Winners are willing to PAY THE PRICE!
Losers are lazy and choose to keep their negative attitudes and behaviors, accepting anything that happens as fate rather than the result of their own choices while using all their energy to complain about being victimized by other people and circumstances.
Why you may not be winning.
If you believe your attitudes and behaviors are generally positive but you are not winning in life, you might want to consider the following:
· You may have not set high enough goals. When people are not challenging themselves to be the best they can be, they become bored, disappointed, and negative. Winners have a written plan that is broken down into daily goal-setting activities that can be measured and monitored, words that losers hate.
· You may be allowing obstacles on the way to your goals to derail and defeat you. There will always be obstacles no matter what you are trying to accomplish! I've learned to view obstacles as opportunities for growth and learning; as part of the process of honing my strengths and minimizing my weaknesses; as stepping stones to the next level.
· You may be concentrating on your problems and not your power. Winners know they have weaknesses, but they appreciate their abilities far more. They keep doing whatever is necessary to learn, grow, and improve their skills. Remember the old adage based on physics: "A body in motion tends to stay in motion."
· You may be selling out your principles and values in order to win. If so, STOP! Never, ever do this. Whatever you "win" in the short haul will be useless. You'll pay a high price for abdicating your principles. Winners never sacrifice their values! Any time I've ever "lost" in life because I refused to compromise my principles, I found that God rewarded me with a much greater blessing down the road.
Winners have an electric, enthusiastic vibration about them. They refuse negative mindsets, concentrate on their strengths; are committed to grow and improve, and never compromise their principles. You can count on them; they keep their word. They take personal responsibility for their choices. They are willing to pay the price. The bottom line is you just can't fake being a winner, because a winner is easy to spot!
QUOTES
"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."
-Abraham Lincoln-
"What we think or what we know or what we believe is, in the end of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do."
-John Ruskin-
-Abraham Lincoln-
"What we think or what we know or what we believe is, in the end of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do."
-John Ruskin-
PEYTON MANNING
A reason for greatness in the great -- they love to prepare:
"For me, it's not just about the game, I mean I love practice. A lot of guys don't. I like going to practice. I love going to work on a Wednesday, getting a game plan, and then preparing Thursday, Friday and Saturday, then taking the game plan and putting it to work on Sunday."
-Peyton Manning
"For me, it's not just about the game, I mean I love practice. A lot of guys don't. I like going to practice. I love going to work on a Wednesday, getting a game plan, and then preparing Thursday, Friday and Saturday, then taking the game plan and putting it to work on Sunday."
-Peyton Manning
NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS
According to three-time Pro Bowl running back Corey Dillon, who joined the Patriots in 2004:
“I understand why this organization wins. They work extremely hard. Hard. I mean hard! My first couple of days here, I [would] call my agent and be like, ‘Man, what’d you get me into?’ It’s unbelievable. After that first day, I understood why they’re Super Bowl champions. I understand. It’s only going to make me better. I know one thing, I’m going to be stronger and faster this year. Guaranteed.”
“I understand why this organization wins. They work extremely hard. Hard. I mean hard! My first couple of days here, I [would] call my agent and be like, ‘Man, what’d you get me into?’ It’s unbelievable. After that first day, I understood why they’re Super Bowl champions. I understand. It’s only going to make me better. I know one thing, I’m going to be stronger and faster this year. Guaranteed.”
TIM TEBOW - THE PLEDGE
THE PLEDGE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sGv2Zw-WQw
The Florida Gators' championship season in 2008 didn't start out as a promising one. They struggled in early wins and then lost, 31-30, to unranked conference rival Mississippi; but the team turned a corner after Tim Tebow made what is now known simply as "The Podium Speech" in which he made a promise that changed their season.
It wasn't Joe Namath predicting an upset. It wasn't Tim Tebow guaranteeing a National Championship. It was a leader apologizing to fans and teammates for his poor play, then stating: "A lot of good will come out of this. You will never see any player in the entire country who will play as hard as I will play the rest of the season. You will never see someone push the rest of the team as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the season." (View full video)
At that moment, Tebow wasn't just the reigning Heisman Trophy winner. He was a junior quarterback who was 6-5 as a starter in SEC games and bowl play. It is hard to remember now that before Tebow stood at that podium and laid himself on the line, there were rumblings that he was an overrated collegiate star who had great individual statistics, but couldn't lead his team.
What changed from that moment at the podium was the Greatness of a leader taking responsibility. The key to what makes Tebow so highly respected now is that when the team failed, he publicly and promptly invited additional attention to himself for the failure and set expectations for change. Because he understood his role as a team leader, he made himself accountable on behalf of his team...and then, as he promised, he brought the team along with him. All the way to the National Championship.
While I selfishly hope Tebow gets the chance to make another Podium Speech after Florida State's visit to Gainesville this November, his work on and off the field make him a true study in Greatness.
Tips from the Great Ones
The 2008 season ended with several teams claiming they should play for the National Championship. Several one-loss teams that lost to opponents on the road claimed that they should have gotten a chance before Florida, who lost to Mississippi at home. But Tebow's Podium Speech resonated with pollsters, who watched Florida run the table the rest of the season and rewarded the Gators with a shot at a second national championship in three years.
Who knows if Mark Sanchez at USC had done the same thing after the Trojans' lone loss to Oregon State or if Colt McCoy of Texas had done the same thing after their only loss if their teams would have been in the BCS game at the end of the season instead of the Gators. But they didn't ... and Tebow did, offering a post-game promise unlike anything most college sports reporters had ever seen. As a result, his team was part of the discussion every week until the end of the season. The great ones understand that personal accountability commands respect and inspires confidence.
If your performance has been lacking, don't be afraid to say so. By accepting responsibility, you can create a culture of accountability within your organization and put yourself in a place to lead your team to its peak. It's what Tebow did, and it inspired his team to a National Championship. What can you do in pursuit of Greatness?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sGv2Zw-WQw
The Florida Gators' championship season in 2008 didn't start out as a promising one. They struggled in early wins and then lost, 31-30, to unranked conference rival Mississippi; but the team turned a corner after Tim Tebow made what is now known simply as "The Podium Speech" in which he made a promise that changed their season.
It wasn't Joe Namath predicting an upset. It wasn't Tim Tebow guaranteeing a National Championship. It was a leader apologizing to fans and teammates for his poor play, then stating: "A lot of good will come out of this. You will never see any player in the entire country who will play as hard as I will play the rest of the season. You will never see someone push the rest of the team as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the season." (View full video)
At that moment, Tebow wasn't just the reigning Heisman Trophy winner. He was a junior quarterback who was 6-5 as a starter in SEC games and bowl play. It is hard to remember now that before Tebow stood at that podium and laid himself on the line, there were rumblings that he was an overrated collegiate star who had great individual statistics, but couldn't lead his team.
What changed from that moment at the podium was the Greatness of a leader taking responsibility. The key to what makes Tebow so highly respected now is that when the team failed, he publicly and promptly invited additional attention to himself for the failure and set expectations for change. Because he understood his role as a team leader, he made himself accountable on behalf of his team...and then, as he promised, he brought the team along with him. All the way to the National Championship.
While I selfishly hope Tebow gets the chance to make another Podium Speech after Florida State's visit to Gainesville this November, his work on and off the field make him a true study in Greatness.
Tips from the Great Ones
The 2008 season ended with several teams claiming they should play for the National Championship. Several one-loss teams that lost to opponents on the road claimed that they should have gotten a chance before Florida, who lost to Mississippi at home. But Tebow's Podium Speech resonated with pollsters, who watched Florida run the table the rest of the season and rewarded the Gators with a shot at a second national championship in three years.
Who knows if Mark Sanchez at USC had done the same thing after the Trojans' lone loss to Oregon State or if Colt McCoy of Texas had done the same thing after their only loss if their teams would have been in the BCS game at the end of the season instead of the Gators. But they didn't ... and Tebow did, offering a post-game promise unlike anything most college sports reporters had ever seen. As a result, his team was part of the discussion every week until the end of the season. The great ones understand that personal accountability commands respect and inspires confidence.
If your performance has been lacking, don't be afraid to say so. By accepting responsibility, you can create a culture of accountability within your organization and put yourself in a place to lead your team to its peak. It's what Tebow did, and it inspired his team to a National Championship. What can you do in pursuit of Greatness?
9.15.2009
Stockton’s Legacy: Small in Stature, Big in Heart
If Michael Jordan was Pegasus, the winged stallion galloping across the sky, then John Stockton was the sturdy plow horse who relished putting on the yoke each morning for another trip through the fields.
If Jordan’s brilliance was impulsive and rule-breaking, then Stockton’s was as relentless and single-minded as the stone masons who constructed the great pyramids.
For nearly two decades they were the yin and the yang of the NBA, each one the counterweight to the other. While Jordan soared over the game, Stockton bored right through it like a diamond-tipped drill bit.
It is then quite fitting that the pair should be inducted into the Hall of Fame together, Class of 2009. But with so much attention focused on the highlight-reel career of Jordan, it is easy to overlook the down-to-earth exploits of Stockton.
The sheer numbers are mind-bending. Stockton is on top of the NBA career list for assists with 15,806, and that’s more than 5,000 ahead of the No. 2 man, Mark Jackson. He’s also the league’s all-time leader in steals with 3,265, and that is ahead of the runner-up – Jordan – by more than 700.
Stockton owns five of the top six assist seasons in NBA history, holds the record for most seasons and most consecutive games played for one team and he’s third behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Robert Parish in total games played.
In 19 grueling NBA regular-season marathons, he missed only 22 of 1,526 games, 18 of those in a single year when doctors told him he needed knee surgery, but Stockton chose merely to sit out a few weeks and returned to finish out the schedule.
“He worked harder than you,” said Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan. “That was his secret.
“He’s one of the most unique players you’ll ever run across. You can talk about all the things he tried to do. But first of all, you’ve got to look at his stature. He’s not a very big guy. And yet he played as strong and tough as anybody could.”
While Jordan changed even the style of the game, ushering in the era of the long and baggy shorts, Stockton’s sartorial simplicity showed off his legs at mid-thigh from his rookie year to his final season. As Jordan progressed from curly-haired youngster to shining bald marketing icon, the guy-next-door Stockton wore the same hairstyle from junior high.
In the hip-hop world of the 21st-century NBA, he was a throwback.
All the while and all the games and all the seasons, he and Karl Malone lived and thrived on the most basic play in the game, the pick-and-roll, and they did it again and again and again because it worked. Nothing fancy. No need to change.
While Jordan seemed to always challenge the rules of physics each time he stepped onto – and floated above – the court, Stockton was all about the geometry. He saw every angle for every pass and every play that constantly unfolded in his mind’s eye ahead of everyone else.
“I try to take what the defense gives me and never think ahead that I’m going to try to get this or that,” he said. “I just do what I have to do. I try to keep it simple.”
When somebody once asked him why he never dunked the basketball, even in an open-court, breakaway situation, Stockton merely looked back with those piercing eyes, shook his head and grinned. If you had to ask, you couldn’t understand.
“There absolutely, positively will never be another John Stockton,” said Malone.
Black and white. Short and tall. Poetry and prose. For all of their differences, what Stockton brought to the game was as singular as Jordan’s bag of tricks. The raw talent was never as important as the raw determination.
Sloan’s favorite memory of Stockton is in practice.
“He was beaten one time in 19 years running laterals, suicide drills, across the floor,” Sloan recalled. “That’s after he was 40-some years old. It wasn’t about him proving that he was still the best. He just wanted to do everything the best he could to try to help the team, try to win.”
If Michael Jordan was as spectacular and jaw-dropping as a Maui sunset, John Stockton was as relentless as the tides, no less a force of nature.
If Jordan’s brilliance was impulsive and rule-breaking, then Stockton’s was as relentless and single-minded as the stone masons who constructed the great pyramids.
For nearly two decades they were the yin and the yang of the NBA, each one the counterweight to the other. While Jordan soared over the game, Stockton bored right through it like a diamond-tipped drill bit.
It is then quite fitting that the pair should be inducted into the Hall of Fame together, Class of 2009. But with so much attention focused on the highlight-reel career of Jordan, it is easy to overlook the down-to-earth exploits of Stockton.
The sheer numbers are mind-bending. Stockton is on top of the NBA career list for assists with 15,806, and that’s more than 5,000 ahead of the No. 2 man, Mark Jackson. He’s also the league’s all-time leader in steals with 3,265, and that is ahead of the runner-up – Jordan – by more than 700.
Stockton owns five of the top six assist seasons in NBA history, holds the record for most seasons and most consecutive games played for one team and he’s third behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Robert Parish in total games played.
In 19 grueling NBA regular-season marathons, he missed only 22 of 1,526 games, 18 of those in a single year when doctors told him he needed knee surgery, but Stockton chose merely to sit out a few weeks and returned to finish out the schedule.
“He worked harder than you,” said Utah Jazz coach Jerry Sloan. “That was his secret.
“He’s one of the most unique players you’ll ever run across. You can talk about all the things he tried to do. But first of all, you’ve got to look at his stature. He’s not a very big guy. And yet he played as strong and tough as anybody could.”
While Jordan changed even the style of the game, ushering in the era of the long and baggy shorts, Stockton’s sartorial simplicity showed off his legs at mid-thigh from his rookie year to his final season. As Jordan progressed from curly-haired youngster to shining bald marketing icon, the guy-next-door Stockton wore the same hairstyle from junior high.
In the hip-hop world of the 21st-century NBA, he was a throwback.
All the while and all the games and all the seasons, he and Karl Malone lived and thrived on the most basic play in the game, the pick-and-roll, and they did it again and again and again because it worked. Nothing fancy. No need to change.
While Jordan seemed to always challenge the rules of physics each time he stepped onto – and floated above – the court, Stockton was all about the geometry. He saw every angle for every pass and every play that constantly unfolded in his mind’s eye ahead of everyone else.
“I try to take what the defense gives me and never think ahead that I’m going to try to get this or that,” he said. “I just do what I have to do. I try to keep it simple.”
When somebody once asked him why he never dunked the basketball, even in an open-court, breakaway situation, Stockton merely looked back with those piercing eyes, shook his head and grinned. If you had to ask, you couldn’t understand.
“There absolutely, positively will never be another John Stockton,” said Malone.
Black and white. Short and tall. Poetry and prose. For all of their differences, what Stockton brought to the game was as singular as Jordan’s bag of tricks. The raw talent was never as important as the raw determination.
Sloan’s favorite memory of Stockton is in practice.
“He was beaten one time in 19 years running laterals, suicide drills, across the floor,” Sloan recalled. “That’s after he was 40-some years old. It wasn’t about him proving that he was still the best. He just wanted to do everything the best he could to try to help the team, try to win.”
If Michael Jordan was as spectacular and jaw-dropping as a Maui sunset, John Stockton was as relentless as the tides, no less a force of nature.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)