I was sitting at a bar — this is how all my stories start, really — on a Saturday afternoon at the beginning of the college football season, and there were a disproportionate amount of Texas Tech fans hooting and hollering during a Red Raiders game.

These were the first Texas Tech fans I’ve ever seen in Chicago. And they’d all congregated at this bar. I’ve come to find, as Texas Tech’s offense has completely worked the competition this season, that these people had plenty of reasons to cheer that day.

But it was famed writer Michael Lewis who profiled Mike Leach and the program three years ago and saw this coming to an extent. (Though, Leach always had the offensive prowess. He just hadn’t worked it to great success at Tech yet.) An excerpt from a follow-up interview on that piece via the New York Times‘ Play Magazine (via Shanoff):

Could Leach take this system to another big-time football factory and make it work?

If he was at big-time factory and they let him do what he does, and not get in the way, it would be unfair. I mean, is it moral to score 100 points every game? Of course, people will catch up. They already are catching up. But if he had gone to say, U.S.C., 10 years ago and installed his system there, it would be comical. He would score every time - and he would have a defense by default because he would get great athletes.

That’s some praise there, eh? I don’t know though. Every time I think of Mike Leach I think of this video and his dating advice and then I just start to laugh. But, dude can coach too.