“The thing that was wild was … part of the reason that a lot of people when we were younger wanted to be coaches was because of people like coach Switzer. Coach was at the top. That was the pinnacle. That’s what we all aspired for. That’s what we wanted to be.

So both Stoops and Riley had either long or longlasting football relationships with Leach. But Leach might have grown closest with Barry Switzer, who was gone from OU coaching 11 years before Leach’s arrival. Switzer and Leach grew close with late-night dinners at Othello’s in Norman during the year Leach was OU’s offensive coordinator, and it was Switzer who called Leach and asked him to take part in the Sooners Helping Sooners benefit.

Riley: “Especially want to say hi to my great friend Mike Leach. Awesome having you back. Everybody there, if you don’t know Mike, you’re definitely in for a treat. You’re going to hear things you never heard before and you’re going to laugh a lot.”

“And so I go to Othello’s, and I say, I’ve got to meet this guy. This guy personifies what I’m hoping to achieve, what I’m hoping to do. He was curious about our offense, even though some thought it was quite different, which it really wasn’t particularly different. The Air Raid drew a lot from the wishbone. The wishbone always had distribution between all the skill positions. All the skill positions contributed to the offensive effort, then they created spacing by kind of playing now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t with the various ballcarriers as they’re moving on a horizontal plane. And to be perfectly honest, the plays we packaged up area wise, we aspired to accomplish the same things. To create space, to make everybody touch the ball so that the defense has to defend everybody and all those things.

“And as we started talking about offensive football, early in the conversation, Coach started out with salt shakers and little tabs of like sugar and stuff. ‘This guy blocks here, he goes here and this guy goes around here.’ And then as the night went on, it would involve chairs and human bodies. So stand up, sit up chairs. ‘All right, you’re in the wishbone, this guy comes down here’, and of course he’d grab me by my shirt. Didn’t matter if I was wearing my school clothes or what. Grabbed me by my shirt. ‘And this guy’s pulling here, boom! And this guy’s going here. Boom. OK, come back over here. Boom!’

“So he’s knocking me all over Othello’s just for sport. And I’m learning as we go. Those are some of the greatest moments of my life, some of the most educational.

“Then he’d go, ‘all right, let’s call (Larry) Lacewell. Then Lacewell’s on the phone. And it would all start all over again.” Lacewell, of course, is Switzer’s lifelong friend and former defensive coordinator at OU and former colleague with the Dallas Cowboys.