The late, great Mike Leach is up for the College Football Hall of Fame for the first time.
Leach is one of the 80 players and nine coaches up for the 2027 Hall. He died in December of 2022 at just 61 years old due to complications from a heart attack.
He became known to the general sports world in the social media era for his one-liners and zany interviews. He was a larger-than-life personality who was seemingly built in a lab for a time in which a coach could go viral for all the right reasons.
Once when discussing the officials in a game, he brought the conversation around to breakfast.
“It’s a little like breakfast; you eat ham and eggs,” Leach said. “As coaches and players, we’re like the ham. You see, the chicken’s involved but the pig’s committed. We’re like the pig, they’re like the chicken. They’re involved, but everything we have rides on this.”
This was a man who was obsessed with pirates. He was also a bit of a meteorologist.
“I know that in Ames, Iowa, they fancy themselves being experts on the wind, but in Lubbock, Texas, we’ll put our wind up against your wind in Iowa. We practice against it all the time,” he once said.
Leach is a college football Hall of Famer off the strength of his quotes alone, but because of his personality, it’s easy to forget just how good of a coach he really was.
