Mike Leach – part-time actor, weatherman, luddite, attorney and love doctor, in addition to his role as football's only full-time offensive genius/pirate aficionado – hasn't been Texas Tech's head coach for more than a year, and I think it's safe to say he's not coming back. In fact, his successor just got a big raise for guiding the Red Raiders to another winning season, and Leach can't catch a break.
Still, the combination of his highly entertaining, successful decade at Tech and his bizarre, controversial exit made Leach such a cult-like figure that something like an actual cult, "Team Leach," sprang up in his absence, first as a very active Facebook page to protest their hero's firing. Over the last year, it's evolved into a more of a free-form community devoted to the legacy of the martyred Cap'n. First, Team Leach created the Mike Leach Scholarship for a Texas Tech student studying to become a coach.
Most recently, and inevitably, the Team has pooled its collective resources to publish the "Fat Little Girlfriends Cookbook," a $20 (plus tax and shipping) collection of recipes named for Leach's eternal rant after a loss to Texas A&M in October 2009, with all proceeds going to fund the scholarship. It is not new – it began shipping last November – but it is real, and its existence is spectacular. (Presumably, so are its contents, which aim to make reader one with the title.) As Leach writes himself in the foreword, "Although the relaxed, content and complacent comfort which is provided by fat little girlfriends may not be productive to football, it is the mortar that binds family and friends together." If you've never envisioned an unemployed football coach reinventing himself as a gridiron version of L. Ron Hubbard, now might be the time to start paying closer attention.
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Hat tip: @TerpsInsider
Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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