Mike Leach Offense Concepts

From a 2005 article in the New York Times by Michael Lewis

Jim Schwartz - "They weren't scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players.  They were doing it because they were smarter.  Leach had found a way to make it work."

Pregame, asks players to do 3 things:  Mike Leach

1.  Do Your Job

2.  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 movest fastest is the team that wants to. He believes that both failure and success slow players  down, unless they will themselves to not slow down.  "When they fail, the become frustrated," Leach says.   "When they have success, they want to become the thinking mans-football team.  They start having these quilting bees, these little bridge parties at the line of scrimmage."

3.  Your body is your sword.  Swing your sword.  (Physical)

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.

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 as blockers -and says, "You've got two positions that basically aren't doing anything."  He regards reveivers 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 go fast.

Mike Leach - "There's two ways to make it more complex for the defense.  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.  You just have to teach him a new places  to stand."

The Texas Tech offense is not just an offense; it's a mood: optimisim.  It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than to minimize the possibility of something bad happening.

Mike Leach - "There's no such thing as a perfect game in football.  I don't even think there's such a thing as a 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."

Mike Leach - "Our notion of balance is that the five guys who catch the ball all gain 1,000 yards in the season."

E.J. Whitley, an offensive lineman - "If on 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."

Craig Hodges, quarterback - "The only information he asks for at halftime is the distribution.  He doesn't even care about the score.  If Y has caught 5 passes and Z hasn't caught any, he wants to figure out how to get the ball to Z.

Mike Leach - "You try to get the ball in everyone's hands because then it makes the whole offense harder to keep track of. 

Mike Leach - "Get those fat guys up front and make them run.  They're already a little slow.  By play 40 they'll be imobolized.  That's the risk of playing 330 pound guys.  You get good push, but if you got to run around a lot, you get tired.