The Mike Leach campaign

The San Diego-based Kettner Blvd. College of Turkey Surgeons and Airport Relocation Committee has two words for San Diego this Christmas: Mike Leach.

Leach is the football coach at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. He is the only football coach I know of to become the subject of a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. The story was two weeks ago and it detailed Leach’s innovations that are reshaping the geometry, both in space and time, of a football game. If you want a sample, Tech is in the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 2.

I have taken steps in the local media to get a phone and email campaign going to contact the San Diego football leaders and tell them they need to figure out how to bring Leach to our city. A vacancy already exists, at San Diego State. A vacancy could be made to exist, with the San Diego Chargers.

Members of the College favor the second option, for two basic reasons. First, the Chargers’ coaching staff too often, in our opinion, chooses a strategy of playing not to lose, whether for part of a game or sometimes a whole game. This was evident in the Chargers’ 23-21 loss last Sunday to a measurably inferior Miami Dolphin team. The head coach, Marty Schottenheimer, a distinguished coach with long tenure in the NFL, after the loss stated flatly that his team came out to play, but just didn’t play as well as they had been playing. The College begs to suggest the team always reflects the coach. It came out to play the game it had been coached to play, which was not to lose, a recurring theme in Schottenheimer’s history which more than once this season has increased the odds against his team winning.

This is in contrast to Mike Leach, who coaches his team to score on every play it runs, even late in the game with his team ahead 56-14. His intention is not to embarrass the other team. His abiding interest, as The Times discovered, is systems efficiency (his first career was lawyer), and the system happens to be football. If you run a play, Leach believes, the play should score.

They are very interesting plays, with as much as three-to-six-foot splits between the offensive linemen, four receivers spread sideline-to-sideline, and a tailback whose primary job is to catch the ball. Leach told The Times that his idea of offensive balance is to have all five receivers finish the season with 1,000 yards of receptions.

Leach said he spreads out his offense because it is counterproductive to concentrate action into tight areas, which wastes most of the 53-yard-wide field. It works for the run as well as the pass. Why ask his linemen to “open a hole” in a tightly bunched defense, when they can open holes simply by lining up far apart? Spreading the game out means his players must run and run and run, which he conditions them to do, and which the opposing team is not conditioned to do. “Make their fat guys run,” is his credo. When, in the second quarter, you see them bending over with their hands on their hips, you know you’ve got them.

In essence, Leach coaches his team to do three things: score on every play it runs, run the defense into total exhaustion, and hit the other guys as hard as you can. What the College would give to see such a coach on a Chargers sideline.

If that is not possible, then the San Diego State Aztecs are looking for a new man after a season of losing seasons and crowds of 20,000 in a 60,000-seat stadium. Why would Leach leave Texas Tech, which plays in the big-time Big 12 Conference, for San Diego State and the Western Athletic Conference? Well, for one thing, the pleasure of beating WAC teams 70-21 with regularity, unbeaten seasons, and a ticket into a BCS bowl game, prizes much harder, if not impossible, to come by at Texas Tech, which must play Texas and Oklahoma every fall. Mike Leach could put San Diego State on the map the way the University of Miami got on the map in the 1980s and sell out San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium six times a season.

He’s a free thinker and a surfer type too, apparently, and it is a geographic fact that the nearest free thinking and surf to Lubbock, Texas, is San Diego. He is also an innovator first and a football coach second, and a welcome addition to our city’s intellectual base. The College would not hesitate to invite him to speak, and ask him where he thought the airport should go.