Q1 2020 Texas CEO Magazine

the thousand other things we could be chasing.” It’s like
SpaceX. Talk about simplicity. They have one goal: “We’re
going to Mars.” It’s utter simplicity. Everybody there has
the light in their eyes. They all know why they’re there.
Besides developing the Air Raid offense, what other factors
were part of Mike and Hal’s success as coaches? One of the
things they were best at was spotting talent. I have written about
recruitment in the business world and I have to say that the
Air Raid guys are some of the best at it I have ever seen. Most
coaches want that typical quarterback, a six-foot-five, 230-pound
guy with a big strong arm. But Leach says you probably don’t
want that guy. He’s looking for two things in a quarterback right
away. One is extreme accuracy. The assumption is usually that
if you find the big strong guy you can teach him accuracy. Leach
says no: If he isn’t accurate in high school, he’s never going to
be. That’s completely against what everybody else thought. The
second thing was a great release. Have you seen the ball come
out of Pat Mahomes’ hand? That’s an Air Raid quarterback.
That’s what Leach is looking for. Extreme accuracy and a release
like that. Nobody else was looking at that. His quarterback this
year at Washington State, Anthony Gordon, was a junior college
quarterback no one wanted. He’s leading the nation in passing.
Leach has been able to spot quarterbacks like nobody’s
business. When Bob Stoops hired him as a coordinator in 1999
at Oklahoma, everyone was really skeptical. Then Leach goes
up to Snow Junior College and gets this guy who had been a
washout at Weber State and has a sore arm. Not only that,
Leach says, “We’re going to throw the ball 60 times a game”—
and we’re doing it with this guy from Snow Junior College
who was a washout at Weber State and has a sore arm.
This is Josh Heupel. Leach takes the offense from 111th to fifth
in one year. It’s so brilliant that Tech hires Leach. And the
next year, running the Air Raid with Heupel as quarterback,
Bob Stoops wins his only national championship. Leach
saw Heupel. Nobody else saw Heupel. He pulled him out of
nowhere, and he keeps doing that over and over again.
In the business world, people often look more for experience
than talent, even though it may be experience in being
mediocre. They’ll take the person who’s done the job
for 10 years and shown no exceptionalism. It’s the same
principle as hiring the six-five quarterback. You can’t be
blamed if he fails. He looked the part. One of the reasons
I love Moneyball so much is they said, “Wait, look at his
on-base percentage,” which people weren’t doing.
How much is classic Air Raid still used today? Mike
Leach is still running the Iowa Wesleyan offense.
Nobody else is doing that. They’re all mucking with
it. But you can see its influence everywhere.
But it took a long time to get there. The resistance to what
Mike and Hal were doing was just unbelievable. They fired
Hal at Iowa Wesleyan. I would argue that the only reason
anybody ever hired him was he went to work for the worst
college in America with the worst facilities and the worst
football team. There was resistance every step of the way. It
was like, “You can’t do that.” But Mike and Hal aren’t in any
box. They’re not thinking outside the box. There is no box.
TexasCEOMagazine.com
79