Mike Leach is a Hall of Fame head football coach.
WSU announced this week that the late coach has been selected for induction into the Athletic Hall of Fame Class of 2024, along with Alyssa Brooks Johnson (women's track and field), Michaela Kastain (soccer), Don Collins (men's basketball) and DeWayne Patterson (football).
Leach won 55 games in eight seasons in Pullman, turning a struggling program that had lost enough talent and attention into something flashy, exciting, dramatic and successful. His 11 wins in 2018 were a school record.
However, Leach is one win shy of the minimum winning percentage of .600 and is therefore not yet eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame. Here are the full criteria for coaches:
Coaches are eligible three seasons after retirement or immediately following retirement if they are at least 70 years old. Active coaches are eligible at age 75. They must have served as a head football coach for at least 10 years and have coached at least 100 games with a winning percentage of .600 or better.
Yes, that's the criteria. Nothing is said about the impact on the game. Nothing is said about anything other than wins and losses and longevity.
The debate about whether someone deserves to be inducted into a sport's (or any sport, really) Hall of Fame is endless and often exhausting. The College Football Hall of Fame sets a minimum bar that coaches must overcome, which is not a bad thing in itself. This is a Hall of Fame, not a Hall of Outstanding Players.
But if you judge Hall of Fame eligibility solely on wins and losses, regardless of era or place, this is the situation you end up in. Traditionally, a winning percentage above .600 at schools like USC, Miami, Ohio State, Michigan, Alabama and Texas is objectively more achievable than schools like Lubbock, Pullman and Starkville.
This is simply a win-lose game. There's no disputing that Leach helped make the Air Raid a staple of modern football. The Air Raid has proven to be effective no matter the location or level. You can see it in high school, college and on multiple Super Bowl winning teams. Leach literally revolutionized the game of football. Not just college football, but football itself.
While Leach wasn't the first to run Air Raids, he did bring it to the mainstream, plus check out his coaching tree to see which coaches have coached or played under Leach and count how many of them run a version of Air Raids.
As John Wilner recently wrote, an exception may one day be made for Leach, and many fans would no doubt support a movement to have him inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.
His sad and untimely death – he could have easily topped 60% if he'd continued coaching – is just one more reason to consider making an exception for the Hall of Fame.
Looking back, it's easy to see one loss they should have won (and it had absolutely nothing to do with poor officiating, as some have said): the New Mexico Bowl, UC in 2013, UCLA in 2018, etc.
None of this should stop Leach from being inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame — his impact on the game is too great to go unrecognized.
