Mike Leach tweet sends wrong message, brings consequences

Mississippi State head football coach Mike Leach has never been one to care what others thought about what he has to say, but a tweet he sent recently is drawing some unwanted attention.

If you’ve followed Mike Leach for even a day, you know that the Mississippi State football coach has a very odd sense of humor and seems to take glee in making people cock their heads at things he says.

He’s always come up with off-topic comments at press conferences and has even blasted his own team as he did last season, calling them “fat, dumb, happy and entitled” in a 2019 public interview.

On Twitter, Leach is just as bizarre. If you didn’t know he was a Division 1 college football coach you might think you were looking at the Twitter page of a local fraternity boy. His sense of humor seems to know no bounds.

But on April 2, Leach sent out a tweet (which he has since deleted) that was an attempt at a little dark humor aimed at the current coronavirus pandemic and its resulting social distancing and quarantine measures.

The tweet had a picture with an elderly woman knitting, and a caption that read, “After 2 weeks of quarantine with her husband, Gertrude decided to knit him a scarf”. Only it wasn’t a scarf, it was a hangman’s noose.

When you conjure up images reminiscent of lynchings, particularly in Mississippi, it’s going to upset some folks.

Like most of Leach’s attempts at humor, it drew both positive and negative responses, but one in particular — from Mississippi State defensive lineman Fabien LoVett — was especially noticed. LoVett responded with a simple “WTF” and then a day later announced his decision to enter the transfer portal, per ESPN.

The response to LoVett’s response has been even more polarizing, as these things often go in the laugh-in-the-face-of-death world of social media.

Did Mike Leach Go Too Far?

Leach not only deleted the offending tweet, but has since followed up with a brief apology on Twitter.

The responses have taken the familiar battle lines of right vs left, keyboard warriors vs social snowflakes, and so on.

But now the question must be asked, how much damage did Mike Leach do? With things now in an unprecedented state of flux and the 2020 season possibly in jeopardy, did Leach tweet himself right out of a job?

If things were going as scheduled and we weren’t in the midst of global chaos, the answer to that question would more than likely be a resounding no. But now? Before he’s even had a chance to run any spring drills or showoff his Air Raid offense in the spring football game? You never know.

It’s a situation worth keeping an eye on, especially if more players unexpectedly enter the transfer portal, particularly if any of them name the now-deleted tweet as their reason for leaving.