Mississippi State players publicly took exception to the tweet.

An assistant professor at the university admonished the coach for the post.

Leach deleted the tweet Thursday morning.

STARKVILLE – Mike Leach is a regular on Twitter.

The Mississippi State football coach posts a photo with a funny caption more days than not. He said one of his favorites was a picture of a fenced field with a sign on it that said, "Do not cross this field unless you can do it in 9 seconds because the bull can do it in 10."

Wednesday night's meme was not as universally amusing.

The picture depicted an elderly woman with knitting sticks in her hands. The caption said, "After 2 weeks of quarantine with her husband, Gertrude decided to knit him a scarf.."

The lady was not knitting a scarf, but rather a noose. The hangman's knot was already tied. Multiple Mississippi State football players and a Mississippi State University professor took exception to the tweet, which has been deleted from Leach's account.

Senior linebacker Erroll Thompson, who was a captain on last year's team, retweeted the original post with a hand-on-the-chin, eyebrow-raised thinking emoji. Defensive lineman Fabien Lovett responded to the tweet with "Wtf." Senior defensive end Kobe Jones responded to Lovett with "Facts. He tripping." with a hand-on-the-face ashamed emoji.

Margaret A. Hagerman, an assistant professor of sociology at MSU who received a Ph.D from Emory University in 2014, was much more profound in her response to Leach's tweet.

She said "lynching 'jokes' are incredibly offensive anywhere" and "especially in Mississippi." She also suggested that Leach delete the tweet and visit The National Memorial for Peace and Justice to learn about "this brutal history."

Thompson retweeted Hagerman's tweet, which was sent out at 11:41 p.m. Wednesday and deleted Thursday. Leach's tweet went out at 7:44 p.m. Wednesday. On Thursday morning, he deleted the tweet, which had more than 4,000 likes.

The coach apologized for the original post with another tweet sent at 2:41 p.m. Thursday.

"I sincerely regret if my choice of images in my tweets were found offensive," Leach said in the tweet. "I had no intention of offending anyone."

Mississippi State assistant women's basketball coach Dionnah Jackson hit the like button on Hagerman's reponse to Leach's since-deleted tweet, as did more than 20 others. Her tweet also had dozens of replies.

Many of the responses insisted Hagerman was trying to create controversy over what they believed to be a simple joke about marriage. One person told her to "take a chill pill" while another said "you are the joke."

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This is the second instance in the last two months in which Leach has deleted controversial tweets. In early February, Leach posted a series of critical tweets about Mitt Romney just hours after Romney was the only Republican senator to vote against President Donald Trump in his impeachment trial.

"As an American, does ANYONE, REALLY want Mitt Romney on their side?!" asked Leach, a public supporter of Trump.

"Those that believe in the competence of Mitt Romney, what do you trust him to do?" Leach asked in another deleted tweet.

Leach responded to replies to his tweets that night, telling one person that he would "debate (him) on any subject on earth." All of this occurred well after midnight.

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Leach's history of getting into trouble on Twitter goes back at least a couple years.

He tweeted a doctored video of former President Barack Obama in 2018 that could have cost Washington State $1.6 million in donations, according to a USA TODAY report.

Contact Tyler Horka at thorka@gannett.com. Follow @tbhorka on Twitter. To read more of Tyler's work, subscribe to the Clarion Ledger today!