Mike Leach Gives No Fucks, And That's Why Washington State Is Winning

Sports media days, with few exceptions, are dumb. This year's Pac-12 football press-a-palooza was a case in point: tired coaches and reporters, dropping and picking up stale breadcrumbs.

And then Mike Leach plopped down at the podium.

He did not, as custom dictates, slather compliments on his player representatives in attendance. Nor did he seem especially thrilled that the media took time out of its busy workweek to speak to him—a sentiment no coach actually feels, but most feel compelled to feign, anyway.

Rather, the Washington State coach spent 45 minutes pontificating about dating, sturgeon fishing, public libraries, underwater treadmills, his book career, and Batman. He answered questions that attending reporters wouldn't have dared pose to any other coach. They try it with him, though, because they know what everyone knows about college football's resident buccaneer: Mike Leach doesn't give a fuck.

That is particularly relevant to the Cougars' current situation; it informs how Leach coaxed the laughingstock of the Pac-12 to what is already their highest win total since 2003. At 7-3, Washington State is one game back from the Pac-12 North lead. In terms of preseason implausibility, well, this is even more implausible than the opening week home game they lost to Portland State in patented klutzy Wazzu fashion. One week later, they tried their damndest to cough up a fourth-quarter lead to Rutgers. The eventual victory was taken less as progress than further confirmation that Leach—who won 12 games total over his first three years on The Palouse—would be fortunate to survive a fourth season in charge. Two weeks after that, they lost to Cal, marking the seventh time in ten years the Cougars dropped their conference opener. The reboot was now inevitable.

Then shit got weird. The very next week, Wazzu—the bumbling, hapless, clumsy-as-a-baby-foal Cougs—beat Oregon in Autzen Stadium. Then they hung 50 on Oregon State. They swept the Arizona schools by a combined score of 83-68, and they battled perennial bully Stanford to the wire. The coup de grace came on Saturday: a game-winning two-minute drill that felled UCLA in the Rose Bowl. It was exactly sort of moment that historically works against the school–Google "Couging It"—and yet here the Cougars are, lancing preseason playoff contenders a mere two months after being toppled by FCS pipsqueaks.

Along the way, they've recalibrated internal and external expectations. The Oregon win was initially considered something of a one-off. But three weeks later, the Stanford loss was couched in language about the Cardinal being fortunate to survive and escape Pullman, as though the best team in the conference ought to count their blessings to have withstood a den of angry … well, cougars. Some of that is sportswriter trope. Much more of it is Washington State, whose conference losses have been decided by eight total points, evolving into the most consistent team in the pockmarked Pac-12.

Which is odd, because stylistically, the Cougars are the same as they ever were. The defense is a Leach defense—a sieve wide enough to toss a milk jug through. They sit dead last in rushing offense, because there's no stop-time in his speed metal Air Raid offense. Luke Falk leads the nation in passing yards, but his performance is not all that far removed from what Connor Halliday did before him. Gabe Marks is damn good at receiver, one year removed from Vince Mayle being even better at it.

Marks believes the most plausible explanation transcends football. "This team, more than any other team, has taken on the personality of our coach," he told ESPN. "We just go on to the next thing." That reads like intangible schlock reminiscent of every silly baseball chemistry debate you've ever tuned out. But considering who and what we're dealing with, why can't it ring true just this once?

Kansas excepted, no Power Five school can definitively claim more hardship than Washington State. It's situated in a fallow recruiting ground and it can't even boast an advantage over in-state rival Washington, which features a far better location and history. Unless you are a quarterback or a wide receiver, the only draw to Washington State is the conference it plays in.

The only recourse, then, is to not give a fuck—to slough off all the baggage and damage and burden of playing in such profoundly bleak circumstances and get results anyhow. Doing so requires ignoring that, until this week, the Cougars hadn't been ranked since 2006. Not giving a fuck is what Marks, a Los Angeles native who is probably the highest-profile recruit on the roster, was doing when he snared the game-winning touchdown against UCLA, a team that once treated him like table scraps.

It means believing in Leach, the man who once worked miracles in dusty hellscape of Lubbock. And it means taking on the personality of Leach, a man who glides through college football with a sort of perma-glaze affixed to his face, who perpetually appears five minutes away from hopping a one-way flight back to Key West and setting sail for Barbados. You can get roped in by this–I have!–and that's how he gets results, by masquerading heedlessness as apathy. That's not always a good thing; no one's entirely sure how much Leach knows or cares about Falk probably getting a concussion on Saturday. But, for once, there no arguing with the on-field product at Washington State.

So when Marks argues that "if we're up by 40 or we're down by a touchdown or 10 points or whatever like that, it's still the next drive," it makes a certain kind of sense. It means he's been listening to Leach, who's never afraid to talk about fishing and women and the superheroes and sometimes even football, because why the hell not? It's all the same when you don't give a fuck.