DTN News:

I thought about writing last night, but was still too frustrated. For right now, I plan on working on game reviews, but will do the offense and defense separately. I've got some chores around the house to tend to after church, but other than that I'll be in front of my computer.

One other thing that I should probably disclose. Yes, I am freaking pissed. I try to not to put too many expletives on the front page in case you have filters at work that would preclude you from reading DTN. You guys can let the expletives fly in the comments section, just so long as you are not hateful to one another or racist, etc. There's never any reason to be hateful here, we all want the same thing, success for our Red Raiders. There will be very few times that you'll be censored here and it's the, "I'll know it when I see it," standard.

I am going to completely ignore Northwestern State for the most part and focus on the debacle in Stillwater. It's inexcusable and perhaps debatable that this loss to OSU was the worst defensive performance I've ever seen. The NW State game will not be a measure of out team in any way shape or form, we won't be able to tell if the defense has improved, so there's no point previewing it or discussing it in my opinion.

As I woke up at 5:00 a.m. I considered not linking to any stories this morning, but Coach Leach has opened a can of worms.

Texas Tech Football:

I've always thought that a football coach gets one bite at the apple with a group. In other words, he gets one opportunity to publicly berate his team without it ripping apart a team. Last year it was TCU where Leach tore his team a new one and this year it's OSU.

All three papers have essentially the same story, you can take your pick of the DMN, the FWST, the SAEN, or the LAJ here and here.

Let's start with some quotes from Coach Leach. The quotes I'm pulling are from the DMN article:

One thing to note before we get to the quotes, there's not a single quote from Coach Setensuck and I have to wonder where he was after the game. Perhaps he was told not to talk to the media or perhaps he was too embarrassed to talk to the media. We'll see if we can locate any quotes this week.

Let's take these one at a time.

This is Leach's only shot at the offense. There is going to be a lot of blame to go around, but I'm not going to put blame on the offense. An offense shouldn't be expected to 52 or 60 points in a game. Granted, I understand that Leach may expect that, but it's not realistic. Leach sees his offense as an unstoppable machine, but sometimes I don't think he accounts for human error and that these are kids running the show. They are going to make mistakes, but because there was 45 points on the board, I can't hardly blame the offense for their inability to score in the 2nd half.

Notice that there's only one shot at the offense so I get the feeling that Leach's comments were certainly premeditated and he doesn't want this to turn into an offense v. defense situation, but it's obvious that it is. Not to mention, I think that Leach by nature is a very introspective person, in that he's constantly looking for flaws in what he produces, which is the offense. He seems like the kind of guy who is never satisfied, which I think is a great quality for a coach.

That being said, I think Leach is at the boiling point for the defense.

Next from Coach Leach:

How embarrassed do you think he is that he's got a defense that's just not tough enough? I think he's incredibly embarrassed. The defense was absolutely man-handled by OSU and their guys were just tougher than ours. So here we have Leach identifying the problem. He doesn't think it's talent, but he doesn't think that these guys are being grown-ass-men and they're being pushed around as if they didn't have any pride whatsoever.

The solution . . . is a little cryptic. What exactly is he talking about "candy-coating". Is he talking about the fact that he tends to gloss over the defense, and not put as much preparation into their performance as he does the offense? (I'm not even sure if that's an accurate question to ask because I've never watched a practice). I've never heard Coach Leach completely call out his coaching staff, but he sure as hell is here. I know that Leach will go to great lengths to improve whatever deficiencies there are in the offense, but if Setensuck is in charge of the defense then is he laying that blame squarely at the feet of Lyle? It sounds like he is to me.

It sounds like to me that Setensuck and the entire defensive staff better get their act together, real quick.

I'm not even going to speculate who he's talking about here, but it sounds like Leach is ready to cut bait with whoever isn't on board and not being a member of that staff or that locker room, it's hard to say who he's talking about.

It's going to be interesting as hell to see what happens in the next two weeks.