Leach embarrassed himself with video retweet
Under the guise of “creating discussion,” the second-highest-paid public employee in the state of Washington, who works for a university with 30,000 students, retweeted a doctored video of an old President Barack Obama speech that helps spread a toxic conspiracy theory, argued with followers who pointed out the hoax and refused to back down after several hours.
When people ask why Washington State football coach Mike Leach hasn’t been hired by a big-time program despite his undeniable success at two schools where it’s difficult to win, well, here it is in plain sight.
Over many years of being quirky and accessible in a largely humorless profession, Leach has managed to develop a cult of personality that enjoys his random musings on dinosaurs and pirates. But within the college athletics industry, he is widely regarded as a ticking time bomb of embarrassment whose usefulness as a coach is largely outweighed by the risk that he will say or do something inflammatory and unnecessary with little regard for whose reputations he’s dragging down with him. And now here we are.
Leach’s Sunday night behavior on Twitter was utterly disgraceful for anyone, much less the employee of an educational institution. It served no purpose other than to put a false, malicious piece of propaganda into the world that is meant to inflame hatred against a former president. And when informed in very specific ways about how and why the video was false, Leach kept firing back at people, telling them to “Prove it!”
That’s not debate or discussion. It’s gas lighting. And Washington State shouldn’t put up with it from its most high-profile employee.
“As a private citizen, Mike Leach is entitled to his opinions,” said Phil Weiler, a spokesman for Washington State. “Coach Leach’s political views do not necessarily reflect the views of Washington State University students, faculty and staff.”
Weiler’s statement misses the entire point. Leach wasn’t expressing a political viewpoint, which would be perfectly acceptable. He was promoting a lie intended to harm and divide, which is how we got here in the first place.
The video Leach tweeted — he deleted his original tweet — links to a YouTube video, which has been circulating for about four years among extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists and splices elements of a speech Obama gave in Belgium in 2014. The words are edited to make it seem as if Obama told a European audience that “Ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an allpowerful sovereign.”
In fact, as the unedited video and transcript of the speech shows, Obama was saying the exact opposite, discussing two visions of power in the world and arguing that authoritarianism was a threat to the international order.
If Leach, whose support for President Donald Trump has been well-documented, was hoping to make a point about how dangerous misinformation can be and how easily weaponized political propaganda can seep into the public discourse in the social media age, that might have been commendable.
Instead, he came off like a crank who traffics in disinformation and showed no real interest at all in acknowledging the fact that the video was doctored.
“No one has proven that. The question was what were your thoughts on the ideas,” Leach tweeted to one person who pointed out the video was a hoax.
“Please help me. These are quotes. What are lies?” he responded to another.
And when yet another person pointed out that Leach wouldn’t want this kind of propaganda to happen with Trump’s quotes, he wrote, “I’m not sure that it happened. What do you disagree with? It happens to me all of the time, so I’m not sympathetic to any of them.”
So again, what we have here is a wellknown football coach posting fake news, asking for proof that it’s fake, then doubling down when presented proof on the idea that he wants people to discuss the merits of a video that purposely misrepresents Obama’s views.
And if you don’t understand why that kind of thing is reckless and harmful in our hyperpolarized society, you probably shouldn’t be responsible for the well-being of 100 young men in a university setting.
At his best, Leach is a brilliant football coach whose offense puts up a ton of points and makes people laugh with his soliloquies on everything from dating to the existence of Bigfoot. There may not be five other people in the profession who could win 60% of their games across 17 seasons at Texas Tech and Washington State.
At his worst, he can come off like a bully who once erupted over his players’ “fat little girlfriends,” was fired from Texas Tech over allegations that he mistreated a player and was accused of doing the same his first year at Washington State, though he and his staff were cleared of any wrongdoing after an internal investigation.
Ironically, one of the issues that came up related to that investigation was Leach banning his players from using Twitter. When asked about it in a radio interview with KJR in Seattle, Leach said, “As representatives of the university, it can elevate into a distraction. And the thing is, I think we just need to be smarter with it.”
Apparently, Leach own advice very well.
But the thing is, Twitter showed exactly who he’s always been: bizarre, unfiltered, unrepentant and unhireable by any high-profile athletics program.
It’s unclear what Washington State will do about Leach in the wake of Sunday’s Twitter meltdown. With a relatively small fan base that likes winning and at a program that receives very little national scrutiny, Leach can probably get away with just about anything.
So when hiring season comes around again in December, there’s no need to speculate whether Leach might fit somewhere that would give a bigger platform to his considerable coaching talents. He showed us again on Sunday night his act wouldn’t play well anywhere else.