I agree with a lot of your post, but I’m not sure Leach is lazy? Years ago I remember him saying he watches about 40 hours worth of film a week during the season. Then you throw in practice and meetings and travel and the actual games…that’s a lot of work by most people’s standard. I’m not upset by your statement, I just think lazy may be a strong(or maybe just the wrong) word to use.

I just think Leach’s philosophy on penalties(and probably a few other things as well), is not like most coaches. I wish he would come around, but I’m not sure he ever will.

His “fat little gfs” statement doesn’t bother me at all. But his stubborn attitude when questioned about it, is what bothers me. Because to me, he’s got a stubborn attitude toward penalties, the running game(or lack there of), punting, and scoring very late in games that are blowouts already.

But believe it or not I’ve supported Leach from the day he showed up and I’m not gonna change any time soon. We’ve just come too far since his arrival on the South Plains for that.

Penalties are going to happen, especially when paying aggressive football. Could they be cut down? Of course they could. But no matter how much the coaches teach, if the players do not have their own form of discipline, improvement will be hard earned. Many of the players that do draw penalties are the better players on the team. Again, discipline will enable them to cut down most, but not all of the penalties. The ones I have the most difficulty understanding, for any team to make, is blocking in the back. Discipline. It must be taught, but it also must be adhered to. After all, the coach is on the sidelines, not in the game when the penalties occur. Now, with all that said, penalties, though frustrating, are not the worst thing going on. Tech, this football team and those throughout Tech’s existence, has always lost, it seems to someone once or twice almost every year that should not have even been able to contend, much less win against Tech. Once Texas Tech gets beyond the losing to lesser competition, they will be able to step up to that next level of play we fans so want to see. Part of that is cutting down on all penalties. The other part is doing more than just showing up for a game, come with energy, excitement and desire to destroy the other team, regardless of who it is, and dance away with a win. They CAN do it. WILL they do it? That is the question.

I have definitely noticed the penalties as well. It’s a very valid point to bring up. How many times are we in a prime position to score, only to have consecutive penalties push us out of the red zone? This just seems like one of those things that it is a coach’s responsibility to help iron out.

with your theory is that Leach doesn’t consider penalties to be a “bad” thing. He doesn’t punish his team for penalties. Leach has said numerous times (at least 1 time this year) that penalties sometimes correlate with playing aggressively and he has no problem with that.

Thus, if Leach doesn’t consider penalties to be a bad thing (I think he qualifies it a bit), then I think that criticizing him because his teams have penalties is in accurate.

Additionally, I would love to know how exactly Leach is lazy or are you just making assumptions about his appearance? I’ve thought that when the season is on, he works as much as any staff, but was just curious as to what you were basing your opinion. It would be one thing to base it on a particular instance, but to simply base it on appearance doesn’t seem fair or accurate.

When Leach frist got to Tech he used to punish guys in practice for getting penalties in games. What happened is just what he discussed a couple of weeks ago. When you are so worried about getting penalized you do not do your job with any intensity. Because of our wide open offense and huge line splits we do a lot of one on one blocking in space. This makes us more sesceptible to holding calls. Guess what. We still have the top producing offense in the country.

Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. It might be the case (I certainly hope it is not) that one of a number of reasons why we are such an offensively prolific team is because the players are told to do their jobs with a level of intensity lending itself to penalization. I recall the quote from that Michael Lewis article where Leach was criticizing Hicks (or someone) for not holding more on a block.

In any event, incredibly it doesn’t appear to me that there’s a strong correlation between penalties and winning. I notice:

2008: TCU (118th 12-2) USC (117th 12-1) Georgia (116th 10-3) BYU (112th 10-3). You have to go to the 111th most penalized team to find a loser (Washington St.) On the flip side, Army, ranked 9th, was 3-9. 100-104 Oregon, Utah, Cincy, Boise St., and Oklahoma had a combined record of 68-9. Just a quick spot test reveals that the worst teams, actually, are bundled in the middle ranks, from around 35-95.

You can see similar trends in the other years. For example, in 2007 4 of the top 10 least penalized teams have losing records, including 1-11 Minnesota and 3-9 Army.

Something to keep in mind as well, Texas Tech runs more plays than nearly any other team in the country every single year. As penalties are organized by yards per game, our ranking is actually much better, on a per play basis, than some of the teams occupying spots near ours. We have run the 2nd most offensive plays in the entire country. It could skew the results.

Take last weeks game. We score on our first drive. atm fumbles on their first play and we get it on their 30. Then a procedure call. Then Winn goes downfield to block on a screen, gets his man down, and then gives a guy on his knees a shot in the back as the play ends with the ref standing right there.

We saw what happened when K.St. got the aggies down early. The same thing that happened when we got K.St. down early. We had the chance to do the same to atm, but we blew it and gave them momentum. That may have been the difference in the game right there.

Were those two penalties from being intense? No, they came from lack of discipline, i.e. lack of coaching. If ‘lazy’ means not addressing problems that can [and will] kill a team in crucial situations, then I’d have to agree. Granted, if we were steam-rolling everyone we played, then a coach could get away with ignoring a problem like this (or saying it didn’t matter). But by the same token, isn’t this the same thing as saying ’I’m not going to worry about something that will cost us the close ones’?

Do you know? Did he pat him on the back? Did he say or do anything? Did Matt Moore say or do anything? Was there any discussion about anything when reviewing that play in the film room? Anybody know?

What I get tired of is that there’s this assumption that these things are not addressed at all. How the heck do you know?

So then we make this projection that Leach is not disciplined. It seems to me that we have all seen and heard of real situations where Leach has exacted pretty clear and stiff disciplinary actions on his student athletes. Why don’t these known events get projected into a perception that Leach is very disciplined?

And he’s lazy. Based on what? He starts work later in the morning than somebody else? I’d really like to know what fact-based events these types of comments are based on… Because we have a lot of penalties? Well, based on above, it looks like Pete Carroll and Bob Stoops and several others are pretty lazy too.

Rant over…. for now….