But when Leach removes his starting quarterback, he does not mean for his offense to stop scoring touchdowns. Scoring is a habit, he says; the more players do it, the better they get at it. The new quarterback, Graham Harrell, had the offense marching as fast as possible toward the end zone, and with 23 seconds left, Texas Tech had reached the Texas A.&M. 25-yard line.

It was then that I looked over and noticed Bennie Wylie standing uneasily next to Mike Leach. Wylie is Texas Tech's strength and conditioning coach. Leach hired him three years ago from the Dallas Cowboys to prepare football players to run more than they had ever run on a football field. Just after he moved to Lubbock, Wylie learned that this job might be less a job than a calling. The thought struck him when he was driving and spotted, in the distance, a sloppily dressed middle-aged man in-line skating down the center of the road. The guy was rocking back and forth in the middle of what in Lubbock passes for a busy street; cars were whizzing past at 30 m.p.h. in both directions. There was no skating lane; truth to tell, there wasn't a lot of in-line skating going on in Lubbock. As Wylie drew closer, he thought to himself, That lunatic looks a little like Coach. As he pulled alongside the lunatic, he realized, It is Coach. Later, Leach explained that he had decided to take up in-line skating, and he'd calculated that the middle of that particular road was Lubbock's flattest, smoothest surface and so the obvious place to start. "To Mike, everything he does makes sense," Wylie says. "It just takes a while to see how it all fits together. But if you were a fly on his shoulder for six months, you'd laugh your eyeballs out."

But on this night Wylie was a fly on Leach's shoulder, and his eyeballs were still in their sockets. The end of this football game was shaping up disturbingly like last year's game against S.M.U., which had been, by Leachean standards, a low-scoring affair. With 15 seconds left, Texas Tech was ahead, 27-13. The clock was running, but the Red Raiders had the ball on the S.M.U. 4-yard line. It was then that Wylie realized that Leach and his offensive machine lacked an off switch. With 15 seconds left, Leach leaned into the field and called a timeout.

On the last play of that game, Leach sent in a pass play, and the quarterback, Sonny Cumbie, stepped into the shotgun position. "I could hear Bennett screaming," Cumbie says, referring to the S.M.U. head coach, Phil Bennett. "He's furious. He's yelling: HIT HIM! HIT HIM! HIT HIM! HIT THE QUARTERBACK!" Cumbie threw the ball into the end zone to a wide-open receiver, who dropped it. (None of the S.M.U. defenders hit him.) "I see their coach slam his earphones, throw down his clipboard and come running across the field," Wylie says. "I'm thinking: This is gonna be bad. He's mad at Mike for trying to score. And Mike really has no idea that he's mad. Mike is sitting there upset that we didn't score." Leach was, in fact, jotting notes on his wadded-up sheet of paper with the plays on it. His head was down; he didn't see Bennett. But before the S.M.U. coach reached Leach, Wylie jumped in. "The guy starts poking me in the chest -- Bam! Bam! Bam! -- and screaming," Wylie says. "If I hadn't been there, I think he might have taken a swing at Mike."

Now Texas Tech had a 39-point lead over A.&M. and the ball and was moving forward as rapidly as ever. To minimize its humiliation, the A.&M. offense had been running plays meant to use up time and get the team out of Lubbock. The governor of Texas slipped away early and was on his way back to Austin. The guys dressed up as soldiers in the Aggie end zone had run out of military drills to perform. Up in the sky boxes, the wife of an Aggie assistant coach insulted every female Red Raider in earshot by saying that at least she lived in College Station instead of Lubbock. ("First of all, we just beat them, 56-17," Leach says when told of the incident. "By rights she should now be a Red Raider slave.") For everyone but Mike Leach, the game was over, but he jumped onto the field and called a timeout. The referees did not notice: they were too busy throwing yellow flags at the extra Texas Tech players who had tried to get into the game. Tech was penalized, and in the subsequent confusion, Leach let the clock run out. "There was 23 seconds on the clock," he told me later. "That's more than enough time. I think we all had a level of disappointment we didn't score one more touchdown."

Bad as it was for Texas A.&M., its staff might wonder how much worse it could have been if Leach had the same access to talent as A.&M. or Texas or Alabama or, God forbid, Notre Dame. The chances of that happening can't be great, though. Leach remains on the outside; like all innovators in sports, he finds himself in an uncertain social position. He has committed a faux pas: he has suggested by his methods that there is more going on out there on the (unlevel) field of play than his competitors realize, which reflects badly on them. He steals some glory from the guy who is born with advantages and uses them to become a champion. Gary O'Hagan, Leach's agent, says that he hears a great deal more from other coaches about Mike Leach than about any of his other clients. "He makes them nervous," O'Hagan says. "They don't like coaching against him; they'd rather coach against another version of themselves. It's not that they don't like him. But privately they haven't accepted him. You know how you can tell? Because when you're talking to them Monday morning, and you say, Did you see the play Leach ran on third and 26, they dismiss it immediately. Dismissive is the word. They dismiss him out of hand. And you know why? Because he's not doing things because that's the way they've always been done. It's like he's been given this chessboard, and all the pieces but none of the rules, and he's trying to figure out where all the chess pieces should go. From scratch!"

Leach was out in the middle of the field shaking hands with a visibly upset Dennis Franchione, the Texas A.&M. coach. The press had descended on him, to ask him to describe just how happy he felt. But he didn't look happy; he looked distracted, for all the world as if he would rather be left alone. And by the time the cameras left, he was. The football field was huge and green and empty. The only other people on it were the two Texas Rangers assigned to protect him. As he allowed himself to be escorted toward the locker room, there were many things Mike Leach might have been thinking about. His team was now 8-1 -- the best start in nearly 30 years for a Texas Tech football team. They had just beaten Texas A.&M. by the largest margin in the 80-year-old history of the rivalry. He knew he was not going to sleep anytime soon -- he keeps the hours of a vampire and wouldn't go to bed until 6:30 a.m. -- and so he might have even been thinking about reviewing game tape, which he usually does while others sleep.