From the man enthralled with pirates and who brought the phrase “fat little girlfriends” into the college football lexicon, would you expect anything less?
Mike Leach‘s hiring at Washington State earlier this year was widely hailed as a turning point for the moribund football program. Six games into a tenure that injected some much-needed new life into the fan base, the Cougars have just two wins -- one of those against an FCS school -- with an offense that, statistically, lags behind last year’s four-win squad.
At a press conference earlier in the week, Leach took the opportunity to publicly lambaste some, but not all, of the seniors he inherited from the lost Paul Wulff regime.
“Some of them have been great and some of them have been very poor,” Leach said of the seniors. “Some of them have had kind of this zombie-like, go through the motions, everything is like how it’s always been, that’s how it’ll always be. Some of them quite honestly have an empty-corpse quality. That’s not pleasant to say or pleasant to think about, but that’s a fact. That’s why it’s been necessary for us to have the youth moment that we’ve had.”
In fairness to the players in question -- true, fifth-year or otherwise -- Wazzu won just nine games and lost 40 during the four years with Wulff in charge, never winning more than four games in a single season and winning a total of four (four!!!) PAC-12 games in that miserable four-year span. Regardless of Wulff’s presence or not, the program as a whole has been in a nearly decades-long malaise; since concluding a three-year stretch of 10-win seasons in 2003, the Cougars have not finished a year with an above-.500 record.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Leach and fully understand the hand that’s been dealt and the desire to change the football culture in Pullman. Just don’t know if publicly throwing a group of beaten-down seniors under the bus is the correct tack to take.
In an electrical closet, yes. Under a bus, probably not.
(Tip O’ the Cap: EDSBS)