By Jeff Olivet
Coleman Associates

It’s 4th down and 8 yards to go for a first down. Most coaches would view this situation as hopeless and punt the ball.  They’ve tried on the three previous plays to make the ten yards needed to get a first down, and weren’t able to do it.  So you might as well concede defeat and kick the ball to the other team.

Not Mike Leach.

Mike Leach, the brilliantly unorthodox coach for the Texas Tech Red Raiders football team, sees 4th down and 8 as an opportunity.  It’s another chance to run a new play that will surprise the defense and move the ball downfield.  So he goes for it. 

You’ve got to understand: NOBODY goes for it on 4th and 8.  It’s just not done.  But Mike Leach does it.  And most of the time, it works.  His Texas Tech team routinely leads the nation in passing yards and points scored per game.

In the following New York Times article entitled “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep,” reporter Michael Lewis delves into Leach’s unorthodox coaching style—his never-before-tried formations of players on the field; his insane 3-hour pirate lectures; his zeal to try wild new things in order to win.

Coleman Associates also coaches teams to succeed in Patient Visit Redesign™ and Patient Centered Scheduling™.  Interestingly, football holds many lessons.  Even if you hate football or don’t have a clue about the myriad rules that govern this game of inches, you can learn a lot from the sport. 

More precisely, there is much to learn from how Coach Leach plays the game. One thing he does brilliantly is that he levels the playing field. He doesn’t have top-rated talent to choose from, so he devises ways to turn them into stars by intensive training. For example: he can’t attract players who catch well (and who get snatched up by the big name schools) so he has his players catch tennis balls which are fired at them at 60 miles per hour.

Leach takes average players and trains them to be formidable—a powerful strategy which can be used by any clinic, anywhere, any time. Coach Leach doesn’t have a vast supply of talent—as a matter of fact, an NFL scout said that he had no talent at all:“They weren’t scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players,” the scout said. “They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work.”

The less you have, the more creative you have to be. Moreover, the very fact that you have less frees you up to be creative. Because Leach’s players aren’t highly trained as specialists, they’re open to learning new ways. And because they’re no one else’s top pick, but have been given scholarships to play football on a winning but lower-ranked team, they have a great attitude. It’s less “let me play my specialty” and more “let’s try everything—just get me out on the field!”.

Here, then, are eleven big lessons we can take from Mike Leach’s renegade brand of football:

• Extract great performance from average players
• Use innovative formations
• Try a lot of plays to see what works
• Try things that others are afraid to try
• Keep the big picture in mind to move the ball downfield
• Only worry about this down
• Don’t over-analyze the situation or you’ll get sacked
• Don’t underestimate the importance of special teams
• Always wear the cup (be prepared for anything!)
• When in doubt, run like hell

Keep these lessons in mind as you read the following abridged New York Times article. Coach Leach’s creativity and training methods can be readily applied in healthcare. If you find yourself wondering how, read the companion piece to this article, When in Doubt, Run Like Hell in the Techniques section to see exactly how pertinent these lessons really are.
 

 
Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep

by Michael Lewis
New York Times, December 4, 2005
Reprinted with Permission & Abridged

7:02 . . . 7:01 . . . 7:00 . . .

It was still ordinary time. The seconds ticked off the digital clock on the locker-room wall. A smell: the acrid odor of vomit. They were still ordinary college football players, and a few of them had lost their pregame meals to a war of nerves. Side by side at their lockers the players sat, silently, almost penitently, stomachs churning, waiting for their coach to show up and to make the place a lot less ordinary.

A muted roar from the other side of the thick concrete walls: that would be their mascot, Texas Tech’s Masked Rider, a man on a black stallion galloping across their home field. The governor of Texas, a graduate of Texas A&M, Texas Tech’s opponent this evening in early November, was just now finding his seat, along with the biggest crowd ever to watch a football game in Lubbock. The governor would be rooting for the other team, obviously. It could be worse, and had been. Two years before, when Texas Tech played Navy in a bowl game in Houston, the president of the United States, a Texan, was rumored to be in the stands rooting against them.

“We aren’t exactly America’s team,” Texas Tech’s head coach, Mike Leach, said.

2:51 . . . 2:50 . . . 2:49 . . .

A sound: of surgical tape ripping, as Texas Tech’s quarterback, Cody Hodges, affixed to his wrist a piece of laminated paper listing all the plays he might run tonight. Four years ago, Hodges was a high-school senior with just one other offer to be a college quarterback, from the University of Wyoming. Now, two-thirds of the way through the 2005 N.C.A.A. football season, and with a throwing arm so dead that he required a cortisone shot to move it, Hodges was the nation’s leader in yards passed, total offense and touchdowns. Three weeks earlier, against a competent Kansas State defense, he threw for 643 yards and, had Coach Leach not pulled him in the fourth quarter, might well have broken the N.C.A.A. record for passing yards in a single game (716).

A lot of the players in the locker room had similar stories of rejection and redemption. In this part of the country, the University of Texas and Oklahoma University are the old-money football schools, with Texas A&M right behind. Those schools fish first in the local-talent pool.

Tonight there would be very few players on the field for Texas A&M—for Oklahoma or Texas there wouldn’t be a single player—to whom Texas Tech would not have offered a football scholarship. Conversely, the Texas Tech locker room was filled with players rejected by the old-money schools. And yet—look around! Hodges led all of college football in passing. The team’s tailback, Taurean Henderson, had broken the N.C.A.A. career record for most passes caught by a running back. The top four receivers on the team were the four leading pass receivers in Texas Tech’s league, the formidable Big 12.

[Jim] Schwartz (a scout from the Tennessee Titans who has taken an interest in Leach’s teams) had an N.F.L. coach’s perspective on talent, and from his point of view, the players Leach was using to rack up points and yards were no talent at all. None of them had been identified by N.F.L. scouts or even college recruiters as first-rate material. Coming out of high school, most of them had only one or two offers from midrange school.

Leach was finding new and better ways to extract value from his players. “They weren’t scoring all these touchdowns because they had the best players,” Schwartz told me recently. “They were doing it because they were smarter. Leach had found a way to make it work.”

But when Schwartz studied videotape of the Texas Tech offense, what he saw unsettled him. The offensive linemen positioned themselves between three and six feet apart—on extreme occasions, the five linemen stretched a good 15 yards across the field. At times it was difficult to tell the linemen from the receivers. Strictly speaking, they were not a line at all, just a row of dots.

“The offensive line splits–you look at them, and you’re just shocked,” Schwartz said. “It scares people to see splits that are that wide.”

The big gaps between the linemen made the quarterback seem more vulnerable—some defenders could seemingly run right between the blockers—but he wasn’t. Stretching out the offensive line stretched out the defensive line too, forcing the most ferocious pass rushers several yards farther from the quarterback. It also opened up wide passing lanes through which even a short quarterback could see the whole field clearly.

Leach spread out his receivers and backs too. The look was more flag than tackle football: a truly fantastic number of players racing around trying to catch passes on every play, and a quarterback surprisingly able to keep an eye on all of them.

This offense was, in effect, an argument for changing the geometry of the game. Schwartz didn’t know if Leach’s system would work in the N.F.L., where they had bigger staffs, better players and a lot more time to prepare for whatever confusion the offense cooked up. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t.

1:51 . . . 1:50 . . . 1:49 . . .

Finally, a coach: Mike Leach, 44, entered the locker room with the quizzical air of a man who has successfully bushwhacked his way through a jungle but isn’t quite sure what country he has emerged into. “When you first meet him,” Jarrett Hicks, a junior wide receiver, told me, “you think he’s an equipment manager.” Leach’s agent, Gary O’Hagan of I.M.G., who represents dozens of other big-time college and N.F.L. coaches, put it this way, “He’s so different from every other football coach it’s hard to understand how he’s a coach.”

Leach shouted, “All right, everybody up!” Seventy players pushed into the middle of the room and bent down on one knee. (“That’s the great thing about football,” Leach says. “All you gotta do is yell.”).

“Everyone find someone,” he yelled. Hands sought hands and clasped. The room swelled with the disturbingly deep rumble of 70 football players speaking in unison. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven….(“Basically I’m a religious person, but with some clear obedience and discipline issues,” Leach says.) “All right,” he cried, after the Lord’s Prayer. “Three things.” He jumped up onto a little green stool and looked down on his players, all larger than he. “Do your job. DO – YOUR – JOB!”.

Each off-season, Leach picks something he is curious about and learns as much as he can about it: Geronimo, Daniel Boone, whales, chimpanzees, grizzly bears, Jackson Pollock. The list goes on, and if you can find the common thread, you are a step ahead of his football players.

One year, he studied pirates. When he learned that a pirate ship was a functional democracy; that pirates disciplined themselves; that, loathed by others, they nevertheless found ways to work together, the pirate ship became a metaphor for his football team. Last year, after a loss to Texas A&M in overtime, Leach hauled the team into the conference room on Sunday morning and delivered a three-hour lecture on the history of pirates. Leach read from his favorite pirate history, “Under the Black Flag,” by David Cordingly (the passages about homosexuality on pirate ships had been crossed out). The analogy to football held up for a few minutes, but after a bit, it was clear that Coach Leach was just . . . talking about pirates.

The quarterback Cody Hodges says of his coach: “You learn not to ask questions. If you ask questions, it just goes on longer.”

Hodges knows—the players all do—that their coach is a walking parenthesis, without a companion to bracket his stray thoughts. They suspect, but aren’t certain, that his wide-ranging curiosity benefits their offense. Of all the things motivating Texas Tech to beat Texas A&M this night, however, the keenest may have been the desire to avoid another lecture about pirates. Even now, their beloved coach had his left arm in the air, wielding his imaginary sword.

“SWING –YOUR – SWORD!”

With that, the players rose and crowded into the bright red double doorway leading to the tunnel.

Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu! Hu! …

0:03 . . . 0:02 . . . 0:01 . . .

They burst through the doors and into the thick concrete tunnel and then onto the field and into the hot Texas wind and the roar of the crowd that gave them the feeling that they were running straight into the mouth of a lion…

Leach made his way to the sideline and from his back pocket pulled a crumpled piece of paper with the notations for dozens of plays typed on it, along with a red pen. When a play doesn’t work, he puts an X next to it. When a play works well, he draws a circle beside it –“to remind myself to run it again.” But 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 often as blockers – and says, “You’ve got two positions that basically aren’t doing anything.” He regards receivers 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 are fast.

When Leach recruits high-school players, he is forced to compromise on most talents, but he insists on speed. All have been conditioned to run much more than a football player normally does. A typical N.F.L. receiver in training might run 1,500 yards of sprints a day; Texas Tech receivers run 2,500 yards. To prepare his receivers’ ankles and knees for the unusual punishment of his nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field; slogging through the sand, he says, strengthens the receivers’ joints. And when they finish sprinting, they move to Leach’s tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turned many young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.

The first play Leach called against Texas A&M was the first play on Cody Hodges’s wrist. That wrist held a mere 23 ordinary plays, 9 red-zone plays (for situations inside an opponent’s 20-yard line), 6 goal-line plays, 2 2-point-conversion plays and 5 trick plays.

“There’s two ways to make it more complex for the defense,” Leach says. “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,” he says. “You just have to teach him new places to stand.” Texas Tech’s offense has no playbook; Cody Hodges’s wrist and Mike Leach’s back pocket hold the only formal written records of what is widely regarded as one of the most intricate offenses ever to take a football field. The plays change too often, in response to the defense and the talents of the players on hand, to bother recording them.

Hodges took the snap from a shotgun position a couple of yards behind the center and saw something not often seen on a football field: 10 of the 11 Texas A&M defenders running backward to cover 5 Texas Tech receivers. There was but one lone white jersey in front of Hodges, walled off by five Tech linemen. A&M’s fear of the open spaces down the field had left the space right in front of Hodges empty. He ran for an effortless 11 yards and a first down.

Quickly, a pattern was established: A&M’s fear of Tech’s passing meant that the field just beyond the line of scrimmage was so open that a blind man with a cane could find the holes.

The Texas Tech offense is not just an offense; it’s a mood: optimism. It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than to minimize the possibility of something bad happening. But then something bad happened. (“It always does,” Leach says.) On its third series, the Tech center cut his hand and began bleeding profusely; instead of telling anyone, or wiping it off, he snapped a blood-drenched ball that slithered out of Hodges’s hand as he prepared to throw, and the huge loss of yards killed the drive.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect game in football,” Leach says. “I don’t even think there’s such a thing as the 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.”

The Red Raiders trotted off the field at halftime with a lead, but not a large one: 14-10. A disappointing half, yet with hidden value. For 40 plays Leach’s offense had groped—digressing, probing to learn something new—and it had been useful to see how the empty spaces on the field shifted. Coach and quarterback now knew what they wanted to know about the A&M defense. They had paid for the knowledge with time, but time means less to them than it does to any other offense in the land. A half to the Texas Tech offense is as good as a full game to most.

The game within the game was about to begin.

From the beginning of football time, when there was no such thing as a forward pass and an offense did nothing but run, innovation has come from the passing attack. The last great shift was the so-called West Coast offense, developed by Bill Walsh during his time as a coach for Stanford University and then the San Francisco 49ers. Now widely imitated, it emphasizes controlling the game with lots of short passes. Still, football’s mixed feelings toward passing are ingrained.

Bob Carroll, a leading football historian, summarizes the attitude of the game’s rule makers to the forward pass: “We’re going to allow it because we know it makes the game safer. But we’re going to make it difficult for you, because we don’t approve of it.” A whisper of the old antipass bigotry can be heard in football’s conventional wisdom: that a balanced offense means running as often as you pass; that you can’t pass all that effectively unless you first establish a running game; that a running game is necessary to “control the clock”; that passing is inherently riskier than running because a pass might be intercepted and give the other team good field position.

Leach and his offense are approaching the natural end of a path football strategy has been taking for 50 years. They are testing a limit. Synergy, in Leach’s view, doesn’t come from mixing runs with passes but from throwing the ball everywhere on the field, to every possible person allowed to catch a ball.

“Our notion of balance,” Leach says, “is that the five guys who catch the ball all gain 1,000 yards in the season.” (The Indianapolis Colts last season became only the fourth team in N.F.L. history to have three receivers gain more than 1,000 yards in a single season.) The trouble with running plays, as Leach sees it, is that they clump players together on the field—by putting two of them, during a handoff, in the same spot with the ball.

“I’ve thought about going a whole season without calling a single running play,” Leach says, only half-joking. To a team that gains as many yards as Texas Tech, the usual boring, penny-ante yard-eating tactics—punts, penalties—are trivial. Field position is simply a thing to improve.

Cody Hodges, who has spent the last four years marveling at Leach’s in-game refusal to accept that his offense might have to be so conservative as to punt, says, “There’s been lots of times I’m on the sidelines, and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re going for it!’ We went for it on fourth and 5 on our own 23—in the first quarter. We went for it once on fourth and 18—and we were ahead.”

E. J. Whitley, an offensive lineman, says: “If 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.”

One of the side effects of Leach’s tinkering with the accepted rules of offensive conduct is to upset the ordinary rhythms of a football game. In the five full years Leach has coached Texas Tech, four or five times each season the team has flopped around ineffectually for the first third or so of a game before racing off to score touchdowns at a rate unheard of in organized tackle football. It’s as if his opponent’s defense has some deep dark secret that takes time for his offense to extract.

Early this season, Texas Tech had been losing to Kansas State, 13-10, late in the second quarter—and won the game, 59-20. Last year’s game against Texas Christian University was even odder: T.C.U., heavily favored, had shut out Southern Methodist University the week before, 44-0. With 8 minutes left in the second quarter, T.C.U. scored its third touchdown, for a 21-0 lead, and a T.C.U. defensive back was caught mouthing into a television camera, “They aren’t going to score.” In the last six minutes of the half, Texas Tech scored three quick touchdowns; after the break Leach’s team came out and scored another seven and won the game, 70-35. A few games later, the Texas Tech offense scored the most points Nebraska had ever given up in its 114-year-old history. In that game, Texas Tech had been ahead, 14-3, with 2 minutes remaining in the first half. It won 70-10.

A coach cannot change the shape of the football field, but he can change its effective size. And if he can alter the environment, even slightly, he alters the environment’s system of rewards and punishments. He can put 330-pound defensive linemen on the fast track to obsolescence and turn a pass-catching tailback into the holder of N.C.A.A. records. He can take a quarterback whose greatest assets are his moxie and his ability to see the field quickly and efficiently and make him the most prolific passer in the nation.

When he was finished with Hodges (during a half-time chat), Leach marched into the locker room, climbed back up on his green stool and exhibited, with the enthusiasm of a man doing it for the first time, the proper way to swing a pirate sword. “Coach’s motivational speeches are always the same,” says Daniel Loper, who played four years for Leach and is now a rookie offensive tackle with the Tennessee Titans. “He tells very long stories, and you’re never sure what they mean. But he’s a genius. When we leave the locker room, we all know that we’ll have three receivers wide open every play.”

“Thinking man’s football” is a bit like “classy stripper”: if the adjective modifies the noun too energetically, it undermines the nature of the thing. “Football’s the most violent sport,” Leach says. “And because of that, the most intense and emotional.” Truth is, he loves the violence. …

For him, the game combines the appeal of chess with the joy of a demolition derby. Before the game, he and his coaching staff had spent a fair amount of time reminding the players, as if they needed to be reminded, that they were meant to hit people as hard as they can. “Be the hammer, never the nail.” “You go out and knock the living dog snot out of people.” “You get after him – get after him like he stole something from you.” Et cetera.

On the second play of the second half, a lot of violent imagery, along with a pair of Texas Tech safeties, converged on a Texas A&M running back as he broke into the open field. One of the safeties, Vincent Meeks, was a ridiculously fast athlete who thought he came to Texas Tech to be a running back; the other, Dwayne Slay, had been hitting receivers so hard that they had started taking dives before he got to them. Slay was one hit shy of the N.C.A.A. record for forcing fumbles in a season—this was the hit. He drove right through the A&M ball carrier and took out Meeks as well, who rolled around on the ground screaming and clutching his groin. As the ball popped free and was grabbed by a Tech defender, a bent-over Meeks stumbled to the sidelines, where a coach asked a trainer, “Now who gonna touch that and make it well?”

What happened next doesn’t often happen in big-time college football, and almost never in the N.F.L. But here at Texas Tech it now passes for normal: the Tech offense scored a touchdown, then got the ball back five times more—and scored all five times. One moment the scoreboard read 14-10 and suggested a hard-fought contest; the next it showed Texas Tech winning 56-17.

Bad as it was for Texas A&M, its staff might wonder how much worse it could have been if Leach had the same access to talent as A&M or Texas or Alabama or, God forbid, Notre Dame.

The chances of that happening can’t be great, though. Leach remains on the outside; like all innovators in sports, he finds himself in an uncertain social position. He has committed a faux pas: he has suggested by his methods that there is more going on out there on the (unlevel) field of play than his competitors realize, which reflects badly on them. He steals some glory from the guy who is born with advantages and uses them to become a champion.

Gary O’Hagan, Leach’s agent, says that he hears a great deal more from other coaches about Mike Leach than about any of his other clients. “He makes them nervous,” O’Hagan says. “They don’t like coaching against him; they’d rather coach against another version of themselves. It’s not that they don’t like him. But privately they haven’t accepted him. You know how you can tell? Because when you’re talking to them Monday morning, and you say, Did you see the play Leach ran on third and 26, they dismiss it immediately. Dismissive is the word. They dismiss him out of hand. And you know why? Because he’s not doing things because that’s the way they’ve always been done. It’s like he’s been given this chessboard, and all the pieces but none of the rules, and he’s trying to figure out where all the chess pieces should go. From scratch!”

Leach was out in the middle of the field shaking hands with a visibly upset Dennis Franchione, the Texas A&M coach. The press had descended on him, to ask him to describe just how happy he felt. But he didn’t look happy; he looked distracted, for all the world as if he would rather be left alone. And by the time the cameras left, he was.

The football field was huge and green and empty. The only other people on it were the two Texas Rangers assigned to protect him. As he allowed himself to be escorted toward the locker room, there were many things Mike Leach might have been thinking about. His team was now 8-1—the best start in nearly 30 years for a Texas Tech football team. They had just beaten Texas A&M by the largest margin in the 80-year-old history of the rivalry. He knew he was not going to sleep anytime soon—he keeps the hours of a vampire and wouldn’t go to bed until 6:30 a.m.—and so he might have even been thinking about reviewing game tape, which he usually does while others sleep.

Then he spotted a giant grasshopper on the turf. It twitched on the very spot where, two days earlier, he picked up his third-string halfback’s tooth after it had been knocked out by his second-string defensive tackle. He gazed upon the grasshopper in wonder. He wondered, specifically, how far a giant grasshopper could hop, were he to put his foot to its rear. It was on the 20-yard line; he thought maybe it might make it to the 30.

Finally he looked up from the grasshopper. And, as if for the first time, he noticed that he wasn’t exactly alone. The stands were thick with fans. Twenty thousand Red Raiders were chanting his name.

Coach! Leach! Coach! Leach!

Twenty thousand natural-born underdogs roared the winner’s roar. The man who made the moment possible by refusing to do anything but what he loves to do smiled, and for just a few seconds his mind was present and accounted for. Then he ran up the concrete tunnel and back into the pleasure of thinking for himself.