Mike Leach’s quarterbacks are thriving in the NFL — will he join them?
The stigma attached to his offense and the quarterbacks who run it is gone, so would Mike Leach ever make the jump to the NFL?
As the league has adopted college offensive concepts, Air Raid is not a pair of dirty words in the NFL anymore. Look around. Patrick Mahomes, Baker Mayfield, Jared Goff and Kyler Murray are notable quarterbacks that ran the Air Raid in college under one of Mike Leach’s disciples. Three were No. 1 overall picks, and the fourth (Mahomes) probably would be if the 2017 draft were redone.
Last weekend Leach’s last two starting quarterbacks at Washington State, Gardner Minshew and Luke Falk, started NFL games. As Brent Schrotenboer of USA TODAY cited, that means seven of the 32 starting quarterbacks (add Case Keenum to make the seven; 22 percent) in the league from Week 3 was coached by Leach or someone in his coaching tree during college.
Leach’s quarterbacks, and those that have run the Air Raid system in general, have suffered in the NFL’s eyes due to a lack of physical size as much as the stigma that their numbers are artificially inflated. Of the 50 most prolific passing seasons in the history of major college football, 10 have come from quarterbacks coached by Leach since he became head coach at Texas Tech in 1999.
Legendary former Dallas Cowboys personnel man Gil Brandt put it succinctly when talking to USA TODAY, explaining, “what they thought was the system made the player, and not so much the player helped make the system successful.”
Hal Mumme, who Leach worked under in the 1990s and had a No. 1 overall pick quarterback when was head coach at Kentucky (Tim Couch), spoke of the changing perception of Air Raid quarterbacks by the NFL.
"It’s been kind of amazing the last year or so…We spent 20 years trying to convince those (NFL) guys to stop squeezing a square peg into a round hole."
One of the core concepts of the Air Raid is the shotgun. NFL teams used the shotgun 64 percent of time on average in 2018, according to Football Outsiders, which is double the rate of shotgun league-wide from back in 2008.
When asked about some sort of vindication now that the NFL has embraced the Air Raid and the quarterbacks who run it, Leach was typically dismissive and a little defiant:
"I don’t care about impressing the NFL, because I’m selfishly working on behalf of our team trying to get first downs with what we have here…I don’t care if that helps somebody in the NFL. That’s the NFL’s problem, not mine. I just do my day job."
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It may not be too much longer before the NFL goes right to source and shows interest in Leach as a head coach. That jump doesn’t seem to be on his radar at all though, based on the “I don’t care about impressing the NFL” comment. But he would be incredibly refreshing among a bunch of stilted head coaches who typically won’t tell anyone what time it is, so let’s still dream of the idea that Leach will eventually coach in the NFL.