Photo : Jennifer Stewart ( Getty Images )

Mike Leach talks about Washington State football the same way he shares tales of tracking raccoons, opinions on Halloween candy and tweets featuring a doctored video of President Barack Obama meant to rile up and confuse an older conservative base. That is to say he appears to do it without much thought, and based solely on the instincts his brain is producing at any particular time. Such was the case on Saturday after the Cougars lost 38-13 to Utah, when he did the typical college coach thing of calling his team soft in no uncertain terms.




We’re a very soft team, you know? We get a lot of good press, we like to read it a lot, we like to pat ourselves on the back﻿, and if we get any resistance, we fold. What’s amazing about this is most of these guys were on the same team last year that was a tough team. Last year’s team was a tough team, for us. We got nearly the same guys and now all of a sudden they’re not tough, you know? They’re fat, dumb, happy and entitled.




Leach added that he thinks this is a result of too much glowing press about his team in the preseason, causing them to bring their guard down, with his players deciding that pouting is the best way to respond to any sort of in-game adversity. As you might imagine, Leach received a good amount of pushback from people who rightfully pointed out the irony in a heavyset dude calling his players “fat,” a guy who fell for that obviously fake Obama video calling his players “dumb,” and a person who’s making $4 million a year to coach football calling his unpaid workers “entitled.”

To Leach’s credit, he did kind of, sort of, take some level of responsibility for not doing his job well enough:

Coaching-wise we failed to get through to them. I mean, I didn’t see too much pouting among coaches, but collectively, starting with me, we failed to get through to them. We let them evolve into a soft team, and they are soft.



But the animus towards his roster was still there in the end. Of course, this kind of frustration is understandable given that this limp-dicked loss came one week after Washington State blew a 32-point lead against UCLA. The Cougars have now been outscored 88-41 in their last six quarters, handing Leach his first consecutive Pac-12 losses since 2016. I’d like to think Leach brought this on himself, though, since Washington State has gone 0-2 in embarrassing fashion since he shared his belief that paying players would destroy college football.