Mike Leach is trampling over the SEC

The Bulldogs have solved for a typical Air Raid weakness and are running over the SEC West.

Mike Leach was pretty successful at Washington State.

While many of the various coaches from his direct tree such as Dana Holgorsen or Sonny Cumbie have had mixed results in their endeavors, the Pirate went 55-47 at Wazzu and from 2015-2018 went 9-4, 8-5, 9-4, and 11-2 before dipping to 6-7 in 2019 and then taking the Mississippi State job.

Nothing amazing, although 11-2 is really nice, but Washington State hardly has the resources of most other schools. It was comparable to Matt Campbell’s run at Iowa State but arguably better. Like Campbell, he had one glaring flaw in the resume.

His performance in their rivalry game, the Apple Cup, against Washington.

Pete Kwiatkowski, Jimmy Lake, and the Washington Huskies absolutely dominated his Air Raid offenses. How? Nothing fancy. They ran 3-down dime defense, kept the ball in front of them, and the Cougars couldn’t sustain or finish near enough drives to contend with them. Leach failed to even once score 20 points and lost the game every year.

At Mississippi State, after an early whooping he administered to Bo Pellini and LSU, he started facing a lot of the same 3-down dime schemes he’d seen from Kwiatkowski.

The Air Raid has been solved!

That was a common refrain going around with many a defensive coach on coaching Twitter proclaiming it like an evangelion.

Despite being “solved,” Leach went 7-6 in year two and 4-4 in the SEC, now he’s 5-1 in year three and 2-1 in the SEC with a pair of blowout wins over SEC West foes Arkansas and Texas A&M.

How did they answer for this 3-down, dime solution? With just one play, they’ve found their answer.