Curt McKeever: Leach reminds us he thinks a bit differently
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LUBBOCK, Texas — Mike Leach was in a postgame ramble, making about as much sense as his seventh-ranked Texas Tech football team had before it came up with two difference-making plays Saturday against Nebraska.
Without the first — a 47-yard completion on fourth-and-5 from the Red Raider 36-yard line that helped them to a 31-24 lead, they don’t have the opportunity to make the second — cornerback Jamar Wall’s game-ending interception of Joe Ganz.
Any way, the affable and extremely sharp-minded Leach, who’s never, at least to my knowledge, been accused of being a conformist, had just been asked about how frustrated he was with his defense to, essentially, make a decision that risked handing the game to the Huskers.
North Carolina 29, Notre Dame 24: The last time the Tar Heels played a home game as a ranked team, in 1997, Mack Brown was their coach. On Saturday, they got an interception return for a touchdown by Quan Sturdivant on Jimmy Clausen’s first pass of the second half. It was the first of four second-half turnovers by the Irish, who also lost a last-minute fumble at the North Carolina 7-yard line.
Kansas 30, Colorado 14: Have the Jayhawks rediscovered their running game with Jake Sharp? Two weeks ago, the 5-foot-10 junior was demoted to third-team. Last week he led a second-half comeback against Iowa State, and on Saturday he carried a career-high 31 times for 118 yards and three TDs. Sharp got two scores in the fourth quarter to help KU pull away from a two-point lead.
Remember, it was 24-24 late in the fourth quarter.
Leach began talking about how the game was most likely the strangest he’s been a part of in nine seasons at Tech, how each team provided some spectacular highlights and yet he never felt that neither got into a rhythm.
From there, he credited the Nebraska offensive linemen and surmised that Tech’s defense “tried to make a little too much happen, tried to be too good, too fast.” He acknowledged how awkward it must have felt for the Red Raider offensive players to sit for more than two-thirds of the game, and cracked about how somebody must have been telling them jokes or giving them a video game to play between series.
Then, he started to talk about special teams when, all of a sudden, he made a request.
“Raise your hand if you’re left-handed,” asked Leach, who’d obviously noticed something odd about the way his audience was scribbling down his long-winded explanation.
Turns out 10 of the 24 media members were lefties.
And what, you ask, does that have to do with Saturday’s game?
First off, I don’t know many people, if any, who would have noticed such a thing, which tells me the kind of attention Leach pays to small details.
In turn, that fact could lead him to believe that going for it on fourth-and-5 on Tech’s half of the field was not as big a risk as the Average Joe might think.
The Red Raiders had failed miserably to assert themselves defensively. And on the other side of that coin, before the pivotal play, Tech was 7-for-12 this season on fourth downs.
“I don’t know. I hate to punt,” Leach said when asked what it would have taken in that situation for him to choose to give up the ball. “There’s always an internal debate. The devil guy (on one shoulder) here, the angel guy here (on the other).
“The devil guy went over and popped the angel guy, and so we went from there.”
Actually, the Red Raiders were trying to draw Nebraska offside on the play, and thinking he had, center Stephen Hamby snapped the ball to Graham Harrell.
“At that point, I know I can’t just throw this around, I better find someone open,” Harrell said. “My first thought’s Crab’s probably going to be open and I look over there and I threw him the ball and he made a play. That’s what it’s all about.”
Michael Crabtree ran past cornerback Armando Murillo, who’d been cheating toward the line a bit, and made an easy grab to put Tech in business.
But if the nation’s best receiver and 2007 Biletnikoff Award winner somehow bungles the play, there’s a much different reaction in Jones Stadium — Leach is the mad scientist gone off the deep end and the Red Raiders probably leave their field no longer unbeaten.
The play, called “Purple,” could have left the Red Raider coach feeling extremely blue.
You probably know by now how much Leach is concerned about his image.
“I’ve gotten so used to it, if he calls the punt team out there I’m getting mad,” Tech receiver Edward Britton said. “I can speak for everybody at Texas Tech, we feel like nobody can stop us on offense. I live for that moment.”
OK, but what if it backfires?
“I don’t deal with that kind of thought process,” Britton added. “Maybe if I was on the sidelines I might’ve got a little nervous.”
If Leach was, he hid it well.
“I thought that was the case,” he said of Nebraska possibly being offside on the play, “but (Harrell) and Crabtree stuck with it and made it work.”
Leach then heaped praise on a Nebraska team that “played harder than any team we’ve played this year,” before crediting his squad for “rallying together and overcoming them and finding a way to win. That’s the way it has to go sometimes.”
Sometimes, games dictate that the head coach makes a decision that puts his team under extreme risk.
Unless that team is led by someone who thinks a bit differently.
Like a left-hander, perhaps.
“I don’t have a lot of misgivings, and if we’d lost it I don’t have a ton,” Leach said,” because I thought we played really, really hard.”
Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.
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