You see this Mike Leach news about the Hall of Fame ballot and it gets me thinking about what a real coach looked like. That man could X and O you into the ground with nothing but a whiteboard and a stack of play cards, no analytics, no NIL pitch, just pure football creativity. Reminds me of the days when we had Erk Russell roaming the sideline, a guy who built defenses out of two-a-days and sheer willpower, not portal shopping sprees.
We have got a good one in Kirby Smart, do not get me wrong, the man knows how to recruit and develop. But I watch these modern coaches with their 43-man transfer classes and their $20 million revenue sharing models and I think back to the 1980s when Vince Dooley would win national championships with kids who committed on a handshake and a scholarship offer letter. That was real program building, not roster management through a database.
Leach was the last of a dying breed. A football mind, not a CEO with a headset. The game lost something when we traded the air raid geniuses for the portal merchants.