LUBBOCK LAB
Early Leach years served as incubator for Riley
Mike Leach coached from the sidelines back in the day at Texas Tech, even in practice. Leach would signal his quarterbacks the play, to mimic game conditions. One time, quarterback Kliff Kingsbury got the signal and informed his coach that the Red Raiders didn’t have a play for that sign.
John Harris, the Tech radio analyst then and now, still marvels at Leach’s response. “Just make it up.”
Such was the intellectual energy in Lubbock in those early 2000 days. Leach had taken Hal Mumme’s Air Raid offense to Oklahoma in 1999, then on to Tech in 2000, and in Lubbock Leach had assembled players and staff that would evangelize the spread offense all across the country.
In 2002, Leach’s inside receivers coach was Dana Holgorsen, who later installed the Air Raid at Houston and OSU and now is head coach at West Virginia. The outside receivers coach was Sonny Dykes, who took the Air Raid to Cal-Berkeley. The running backs coach was Art Briles, who had his own offense in mind and ran it to great acclaim at Baylor.
That year, the quarterback was Kingsbury, now Tech’s head coach. The third-team QB was Sonny Cumbie, now the offensive coordinator at TCU. The second-team quarterback was B.J. Symons, who would set NCAA passing records in 2003, a year before Cumbie took over the job. The fourth-team quarterback was Cody Hodges, who in 2005 would become Tech’s fourth straight senior starter.
As Leach wrote in his book, “Swinging Your Sword,” the Air Raid was “changing the geometry of the game.” The offense was spreading defenses like the old wishbone once did while also stretching defenses like the Brigham Young pass game had done, and the results were stunning.
OU’s 2000 national championship. Tech’s stunning explosion, which led in 2002 to victories of 42-38 over Texas, 48-47 over Texas A&M, 42-28 over Ole Miss, 49-24 over OSU and 55-15 over Clemson.
And into that offensive think tank stepped Lincoln Riley in spring 2003. The slight quarterback from Muleshoe, Texas, decided to try out for the Tech football team.
Riley actually was a decent quarterback candidate for the Red Raiders, because Leach liked smart quarterbacks. “Kliff was always a smart guy,” Leach said. “Both Kliff and B.J. were double-major guys.” And Riley’s intellect has been well-documented, especially by the homefolks of Muleshoe, who were convinced he was headed for medical school or a science lab.
Holgorsen remembers Leach telling Riley, “You know, you’re not a very good quarterback, but you’re asking a lot of really really smart questions, so you might ought to try coaching.”
Riley spent four years as a student-coach, then was hired onto the full-time staff. What a bonanza for a fledgling coach, to join an environment that was so evolutionary and inquisitive.
“I just think it was the genius of Leach with really really good assistant coaches and a lot of players who turned out to be good players, too,” said Harris, the radio analyst. “They were just a remarkably confident bunch of guys who hadn’t been at it at that level very long. They made up a lot of it as they went along.”
And they were young. In 2002, Leach was 41, Dykes was 32, Holgorsen was 31. Briles, the nonAir Raid disciple, was the veteran at 46. Plus those quarterbacks who were virtual coaches on the field. It was not a culture of tried-and-true. It was a culture of let’s-trythis.
“An incredibly strong staff,” Leach, now the head coach at Washington State, said this week.
Not that it was egalitarian. Leach might tell his quarterbacks to make it up as they went along, but he also knew what he wanted.
“The only opinion that mattered was Leach,” said Holgorsen, who played for Leach at Iowa Wesleyan and coached for him at Valdosta State before reuniting in Lubbock. “We understood what Mike was saying and we knew how to relay it to the players. Mike was the guy. That’s why five years later I left, because Mike was the guy and was always going to be the guy.”
Leach was calling the shots. But those coaches and quarterbacks were absorbing the Air Raid.
“There was something really unique about what we were doing at the time, because nobody else was doing it,” Holgorsen said. “And if you look now, a lot of us have branched out running our own programs or our own offenses. Back then, there was very few people doing what we were doing ... now everybody’s doing it.”
Not everyone has embraced the Air Raid, but most football teams have embraced its spread principles. And schools like OU and OSU are running variations — upon retirement, Bob Stoops had on his offensive staff Leach disciples Riley, Bill Bedenbaugh (who coached at Tech 200006, the first three years as a graduate assistant) and Dennis Simmons (Tech 2005-09, Washington State 2012-14).
Lubbock in those early Leach years served as an incubator for young football minds.
“Perfect storm of a genius head coach and some assistant coaches who weren’t far behind and some really smart and good players,” said Harris.
Into that perfect storm stepped Lincoln Riley. Fourteen years later, he’s the Oklahoma head coach.