Mississippi State football vs. Southeastern Louisiana: The Good, Bad and Ugly

THE UGLY

Mike Leach was a legendary coach in college football. He began coaching in 1987, and won 158 games in his head coaching career spanning 10 years at Texas Tech, 8 years at Washington State, and 3 years leading the Mississippi State football team.

Mississippi State took effort to memorialize Mike Leach in the game on Saturday. It was a great gesture, but I have to be honest: I hate the cowbell-ification of everything MSU does in memoriam of the legendary coach. Of his 158 head coaching wins, 139 of them came in colors other than maroon and white. To me, it seems cheap and exploitative to market his memory to just Mississippi State football.

In college football circles, the Jolly Roger or skull-and-crossbones is synonymous with The Pirate, Mike Leach. A perfect helmet sticker to honor the coach would have simply been the Jolly Roger. Instead, for the ReliaQuest Bowl, we made a decal of MIKE with a cowbell as the ‘I’. On our sideline on Saturday was a cowbell with a skull-and-crossbones on it.

In my opinion, that was the ugly moment of the game on Saturday.

I love Mike Leach, and I love him inside and outside of his time at Mississippi State. He did it his own way and he made a massive impact on the sport. He wasn’t just our coach. He was a coach beloved by the entire country.

His coaching tree is the biggest in the entire sport, college football or NFL.

We shouldn’t only claim him as our own.

Flying the flags around campus at half-staff was meaningful. Spending time to memorialize Coach Leach in our first home game without him was well done. I just wish we would honor the national influence he had on the game.