The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football Read Free Page A

beloved.
    Despite all this, Leach said yes. At thirty-eight, a guy who never played college football was off to Lubbock to coach the Red Raiders in the Big 12.

    Six years later, a cup of coffee in one hand and a remote control in the other, Mike Leach was alone in his office going over game film.
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    It was after midnight when he stood up to stretch his legs. He parted the blinds on his office window that overlooked the Texas Tech practice facility. That’s when he spotted a shadow moving across the field. It was a human shadow. “Who in the hell is that?” he mumbled.
    The facilities were locked, the lights off. The place was deserted. Leach wondered if it was a prowler. He headed downstairs to have a look.
    Approaching the field, Leach spotted tiny orange cones. They were arranged in rows. Someone was darting in and out of them. Suddenly the figure came into focus.
    “Michael?”
    “Oh, hey, Coach.”
    It was Tech receiver Michael Crabtree, considered the top wideout in the country.
    “Michael, what are you doing?”
    “I got to thinking about the corner route,” he said in between deep breaths. “If I come out of my cut like this”—Crabtree pointed his toes and jigged hard to the right—“I’ll be open every time.”
    Impressed, Leach folded his arms and nodded.
    “So,” Crabtree continued, “I set up some cones, and I’m out here working on it.”
    Leach’s eyes went from Crabtree to the cones and back to Crabtree. The most talented wide receiver in college football was alone in the dark. There was no ball. No quarterback. No position coach to tell him what to do. It was just Crabtree in his stance, doing starts and stops, running in and out of cones.
    The truth was that Crabtree worked out alone at night a lot. He lived across the street from the practice complex and would sneak in after dark. “I always worked on my game,” Crabtree said. “Coach Leach just happened to catch me that night.”
    Determined not to disrupt hard work, Leach turned and headed back inside without saying another word.
    Leach and Crabtree had the kind of relationship that didn’t require much talk. When Leach arrived in Lubbock six years earlier, Tech didn’t land blue-chip recruits like Crabtree. A star quarterback at David W. Carter High School in Dallas, Crabtree was also one of the top high school basketballplayers in the state. Bobby Knight offered him a basketball scholarship. And Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M and LSU were all over him with scholarship offers to play football. Tech’s facilities couldn’t compete with those schools’. And Leach’s budget was a fraction of his rivals’.
    Still, Leach was winning with guys who had been passed over by the Longhorns and the Sooners and the Aggies. In Leach’s first six seasons, Tech had gone 49-28, appeared in six straight bowl games and finished in the top twenty in both 2004 and 2005. But the thing that really got Crabtree’s attention was Leach’s Air Raid offense. “They threw the ball every play,” Crabtree said. “Leach had the whole program going. I said to myself, ‘Man, if I go to Tech, it’s gonna be on.’ ”
    Tech indeed had the most explosive offense in the country when Leach started recruiting Crabtree in 2004. That year, Tech’s football scores often looked like basketball scores. The Red Raiders put up seventy points against TCU. Then they put up seventy against Nebraska, marking the most points scored against the Cornhuskers in the program’s 114-year history. Virtually every Tech game was an offensive exhibition, and Leach’s quarterbacks were leading the nation in passing year in and year out.
    But Leach told Crabtree up front that he planned to play him at receiver, not quarterback. Crabtree had been the best athlete on his high school team, and—as is often the case for superior high school athletes—he got asked to play quarterback. But Leach saw in him all the raw materials