Unconventional coach’s ego led to his undoing

Mike Leach is one part of the cycle. He is an eccentric part, mind you. He isn't going to win any awards for conventional methods, and that was true long before he banished a player with a concussion to an electrical closet or garage or media room or whatever secluded place Adam James supposedly spent several hours.

Let's be honest: Leach has come off as a loon for years.

Which doesn't necessarily make his firing on Wednesday just.

Leach is without a job coaching Texas Tech football today more for the ego he and others created and a university that long wanted to squash it than any alleged act of negligence toward the son of a former NFL player and current TV analyst.

It's a tough cycle to break.

College football has become a massive, lucrative business that pays its top coaches millions upon millions to win games and produce bowl trips. Heads get swollen as wallets fatten. Coaches begin to believe they are bigger than the program.

At some places, they are.

(See Paterno, Joe.)

There was enough tense history between Leach and his administration, enough haggling over a contract extension in February, enough of Leach seemingly expressing interest in every job from the NFL to college, that his dismissal proved more expected than not.

The electrical closet craziness was just the final nail school officials needed.

Here's where the cycle gets a coach in trouble: Leach did what many over decades couldn't. He built a Texas-based program not in Austin into one that contended in the Big 12, a Sasquatch of a conference.

He won more bowl games in 10 seasons than the rest of the coaches in school history combined. When it came to his Texas Tech offense, Leach was like the Doc Brown character in the "Back to the Future" films, highly innovative and yet just enough of a mad scientist to get himself into trouble against elite opponents.

But he generated the kind of success Texas Tech thought it had guaranteed when hiring Bob Knight as basketball coach. Knight had nothing on Leach when it came to winning for the Red Raiders.

It's a truth that could go to your head.

Football coaches and big egos are like New Year's Eve and parties. They're inseparable. But every now and then, thinking your practice field instead is 100 yards worth of water and that you can stride across it without getting wet catches up with a guy.

It did so with Leach.

Which, again, doesn't completely make his firing fair.

This we know: James is a sophomore wide receiver who, on a team that has completed 410 passes this season, has just 17 catches for 154 yards and a touchdown. He also has been labeled the past few days as lazy and entitled and a jerk by some former teammates and coaches.

He sustained a mild concussion Dec. 16 and was diagnosed with an elevated heart rate, after which he was sent by Leach on two occasions to stand for a period of time, which was somewhere between 90 minutes and three hours, depending on which side you believe.

James and his family insist the player was directed first to an equipment room where he was not allowed to sit or lean and two days later to a small, tight, dark electrical closet with trainers posing as guards outside. Which makes sense, because you always should know where the kid with 17 receptions is in case you need an 11th receiver.

Leach's attorney walked a Lubbock-based TV reporter through the two areas he said James was placed. One was a large, garage-type structure with ice and air conditioning; the other previously was used as a media room for interviews. Both were far bigger than any closet.

You can see the lawyers lining up for this one. Leach signed a five-year extension worth $12.7 million last year and was due an $800,000 bonus if he was employed today, meaning he probably should have been fired for stupidity, having not instructed counsel to avoid being served his termination papers Wednesday like Tiger Woods might divorce documents.

The story about James gets hazier by the day, and his famous father, Craig, looks more and more like someone with an agenda we might not know about unless depositions commence. But if there is one word in sports today that sounds an alarm louder than any signal school is out, it is concussion. No coach can take it lightly and expect to keep his whistle long.

I don't know if Mike Leach should have been fired because few know what went on with Adam James. But I know the cycle -- winning football program at a Bowl Championship Series school, egomaniac coach with a huge contract, administration that gave it to him and yet resents his past peculiar and outspoken ways, played a big part in the decision.

It usually does.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He also can be heard weeknights from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. on "The Sports Scribes" on KDWN-AM (720) and www.kdwn.com.