It was the first that O’Hagan had heard about WSU contemplating a change. He was immediately skeptical. Since Leach had lost his job at Tech two years earlier, O’Hagan had received at least a dozen similar inquiries. None of them had panned out. Moreover, O’Hagan didn’t like working behind the back of a currently employed coach. He never liked it when a school worked to undermine one of his clients. So as long as Paul Wulff was the head coach at WSU, O’Hagan didn’t want to say much.
Nonetheless, he wasn’t opposed to listening. He reached for a pen and paper and took notes as Giansante made his opening overture.
Giansante began by talking about Moos, saying he was a coach’s AD who had the full support of his president. At WSU there would be no interference from the president’s office, regents or boosters. There was one more thing. Giansante had researched how Maryland had almost hired Leach, only to change its mind at the last minute. “They had gone through the entire process,” Giansante said. “And then the president got cold feet and nixed it.” Giansante wanted to assure O’Hagan that a similar thing wouldn’t happen at WSU.
“WSU is not going to be afraid of some of the other things that some schools will be afraid of,” Giansante told O’Hagan.
O’Hagan was intrigued.
Giansante then stressed that Moos knew how to build championship teams. He’d done it at Oregon. He’d also overseen Oregon’s construction of the best facilities of any football program in the country. Plans were under way to expand and upgrade the stadium at Washington State, as well as to build a new state-of-the-art football operations facility. “There is an opportunity to be good here, and it absolutely can happen,” Giansante told him.
O’Hagan marked that down as another plus.
There was one more thing Giansante wanted O’Hagan to know about Moos. WSU was his last stop. There would be no more jobs after this one. Moos wanted to go out with a winning legacy.
O’Hagan has a saying: “The only good pass is a pass that can be caught.” It’s a sports euphemism for his philosophy about communication. In other words, for your message to get through to a stranger, you have to have the right pitch. It was clear to O’Hagan that Giansante had done his homework on Leach. After his experience at Texas Tech, the last thing Leach wanted was to go to another school where he’d be answering to multiple masters. Leach was looking for a situation where he could work closely with an AD who shared the same vision.
O’Hagan thanked Giansante for his call and said he would pass along the information to Leach.
By the fall of 2011, Mike and Sharon Leach had lived in Key West for nearly two years. They hadn’t owned a car that entire time. They hadn’t even bothered to get Florida driver’s licenses. Leach had a license to go lobstering instead. They fished. They swam. They biked. They lived in bathing suits and cargo shorts. Island life suited them quite well.
Nonetheless, the Leaches were restless without a coaching job. Mike had found plenty of work to occupy his time. He had a radio gig. He’d also been active on the speaking circuit and putting on coaching clinics here and there. But he wanted back into coaching in a bad way. He’d interviewed at a number of places, and in 2010 he was a finalist for the Maryland job. But the circumstances surrounding his departure from Tech weren’t helping matters.
In an attempt to clear his name and tell his story, Leach had gone as far as to write a memoir called Swing Your Sword. He was busy promoting it in the fall of 2011. O’Hagan was helping him line up appearances. Each night they’d check in. When Leach called O’Hagan one evening in early November, they went through the typical stuff: How did the event go? How many people showed up?
Then Leach asked if there was anything new on O’Hagan’s front.
“You know, I got a really interesting call from a guy named Joe Giansante,” he said.
“Who is he?”
“He’s working with Washington State University. They may make a change at head coach.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, he was really sharp. I was surprised.”
Leach wanted to know what was so surprising about him. O’Hagan shared Giansante’s comments about Bill Moos. “I really think he gets it, Mike.”
Leach said to keep him posted.
The following morning, O’Hagan heard from Giansante again. “Did you talk to Mike?”
“Yes, I spoke to Mike.”
Pleased, Giansante reiterated that Leach would enjoy working with Bill Moos.
O’Hagan didn’t dispute that. But he preferred not to talk much further about the WSU situation until the season was over or it became clear that the job was truly available. Three years earlier, after Texas Tech knocked off No. 1–ranked Texas, Tennessee officials repeatedly called O’Hagan in an attempt to lure Leach out of Lubbock. When O’Hagan declined to have Leach fly to Tennessee for a job interview during the regular season, Tennessee came up with a creative plan to ensure that no one would know the two sides were talking. The officials offered to fly to Texas in a private plane and rendezvous in the middle of nowhere with Leach. O’Hagan said no way, and a couple weeks later Tennessee hired Lane Kiffin.
The one thing O’Hagan was willing to do with Giansante was tell him stories about his client. Giansante listened to as many as O’Hagan wanted to tell. The more he could learn about Leach, the better.
“He’s not like most coaches,” O’Hagan explained. “The people at Texas Tech took that personally. They felt snubbed at times. Mike wasn’t doing that deliberately. He’s from Cody, Wyoming. He’s a football coach. He’s not a hobnobber, and he’s not an ass kisser.”
Mike Marlow and Joe Giansante had a standing appointment to speak every weekday morning at 7:30. Giansante would be on the San Diego Freeway in his GMC Acadia. He referred to it as his mobile office. Marlow never did the call from his office, though. He always called on his cell phone from the parking lot next to the Sunset mini-mart in Pullman, a few minutes from campus. Marlow called it his “Leach spot.”
Usually, the morning call would begin with Giansante saying, “Here’s what I’m hearing,” or “Here’s something Bill needs to know.” But on the morning of November 8, Marlow was the one with some news. Two days earlier Cal had pounded WSU 30–7. It was the team’s fifth straight loss, dropping its record to 3-6. Only three games remained, against Arizona, Utah and Washington. WSU would have to win all of them for Wulff to hit the six-win mark. That was highly unlikely. But Moos was starting to look at other factors, too. He had asked one of his staff to compile a list of off-the-field problems involving the football team. The staffer came back with a list of players that was three pages long. Over the previous eighteen months, at least twenty-five WSU football players had been arrested or charged with offenses that carried possible jail time. Many of the offenses were misdemeanors—underage drinking, marijuana possession and theft. But there had been a few serious assaults, too. The point was none of this reflected well on the program or the institution.
The football players weren’t pulling their weight in the classroom either. The NCAA had already yanked eight scholarships from the program a couple years earlier after a review revealed that the program had failed to meet academic standards.
It was time, Moos decided, to make a change.
“But,” Moos had told Marlow, “I don’t want to get a divorce until I know who my new wife is going to be.”
Giansante asked Marlow what he wanted him to do.
Marlow told him that Moos wanted a face-to-face meeting with Leach as soon as possible—just the two of them. He was willing to travel to Dallas or Denver, any place where they could talk without being found out.
Over the next week, Giansante went back and forth with O’Hagan. Finally, they agreed on a meeting date: November 16. But Leach wanted to do it in Key West.
On November 12, WSU unexpectedly knocked off Arizona State 37–27 at home. It was far and away the team’s best performance of the year. Bill Moos was on record saying that he supported Paul Wulff. Yet he was
about to leave town in hopes of securing Wulff’s replacement. In his mind, the victory over Arizona State didn’t change things. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. Giansante was hearing that Kansas was preparing to make Leach an offer. If Moos waited until the end of the season, Leach might be off the market. The situation called for stealth.
Normally, all of Moos’s business-related travel was booked through the athletic department and paid for out of a travel budget. In this case, Moos booked his own trip to Key West and made sure to put the flight, hotel and rental car on his personal credit card. He even booked his flight out of Spokane to ensure he didn’t run into athletic department personnel traveling in and out of Pullman. Other than his wife, his secretary and Marlow, no one knew where he was headed.
The day before Moos was scheduled to fly, Marlow burst into his office. “You gotta read the book,” he said.
“What book?”
Marlow handed him Leach’s Swing Your Sword.
Moos flipped through the pages.
“You gotta read it before you interview him,” Marlow said.
Moos called for his secretary and handed her the new iPad that Nike had given him. He asked her to download a digital version of Leach’s book.
On the morning of November 16, Mike Leach slipped on a pair of sandals, some cargo shorts, a polo shirt and a baseball cap. Then he hopped on his bicycle, pedaled four miles to the Marriott Beachside Hotel, purchased a Styrofoam cup of coffee and headed for Bill Moos’s suite.
The previous night, Moos had gotten word through Leach’s agent that Leach preferred the meeting to be casual dress. But Moos had only packed a suit and tie. He ditched the tie and undid the top button on his white shirt. Then he had a fresh pot of coffee and a bucket of cold sodas delivered to his room for the 8:00 a.m. meeting. At 8:25, Leach knocked and Moos greeted him.
“Hello, Mike.”
“Hi.”
They shook hands.
“I got the word that casual was fine,” Leach said.
“It is. You look fine. C’mon in.”
“I’m sorry for being late,” Leach said, trailing him into the room. “I rode my bike.”
“You rode your bike?”
“Yeah, I don’t own a car.”
“How do you get around?”
“If Sharon and I and the kids go to a movie or something, we just saddle up and ride.”
Moos laughed and offered him coffee. Mike held up his Styrofoam cup.
“Well, I’ve been reading your book,” Moos said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“I’m from a small town in Washington, and I grew up watching Gunsmoke. So I love the part in the book where you talk about being a student at BYU and you got to your girlfriend’s apartment. She’s watching M*A*S*H and you turn the channel to Gunsmoke.”
“Yeah, well, hell, I pretty much figured that Marshal Dillon could kick Hawkeye’s ass any day, don’t you?”
Moos cracked up. It was exactly the sort of thing Moos might say. A connection was instantly formed, and the two men spent the next thirty minutes discussing their favorite Gunsmoke episodes and swapping tales of growing up in the West. By the time they turned their attention to football, it was apparent that they spoke the same language.
Over the next two and a half hours they discussed Washington State football, Moos’s administrative style and Leach’s coaching style. At one point Moos brought up the fact that he was not happy with the number of off-the-field problems cropping up among football players. He asked Leach how he felt about a three-strikes-and-you’re-out philosophy toward players who get in trouble.
“What do you think about one strike and you’re out?” Leach said.
“Well, that’s okay. You can be stricter than my rule. Just not more lenient.”
Moos reiterated that he wanted to see a more disciplined approach overall. Leach shared his Three Queen Mothers rules—no stealing, no hitting women and no smoking pot. “It’s probably going to take cutting a few guys to get the message through,” Leach said.
They also discussed academics, and Leach said he was a stickler for performance in the classroom.
But most of the time was spent wading through all the changes under way in the Pac-12 and how those changes were enabling WSU to transform its stadium and practice facilities to be on par with the top teams in the conference. Moos pulled out renditions of the football stadium expansion. He talked about the massive football operations building that would follow—a new weight room, new locker room, new equipment room, new training rooms and tables, state-of-the-art meeting rooms and spacious coaches’ offices.
Wrapping up, Moos made it clear that he wanted Leach to be the next coach at WSU. Leach liked everything he heard and said he was genuinely interested.
“If you come to Washington State,” Moos said, “it’s going to be you and me.”
Elson Floyd had been trying to reach Bill Moos all morning. The board of regents was due to vote on the $80 million stadium expansion project in two days. He wanted to go over some last-minute details. Moos had caught a flight out of Key West. The minute he landed to catch a connecting flight, he returned Floyd’s calls.
“Where are you, Bill?”
“I’m at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, dealing with our football situation,” Moos said. “I feel confident we have the next coach.”
“Who is it?”
“I’ve had a conversation with Mike Leach, and I think we can get him.”
Floyd didn’t know many coaches. But he’d certainly heard of Leach. Before he could respond, Moos began rattling off his credentials. “He’s had ten winning seasons, ten straight bowl games,” he said.
“You don’t need to convince me,” Floyd said. “If he’s your guy, I support it.”
“Well, it’s going to be expensive.”
“How much?”
Moos cleared his throat. “Elson, it’s going to be $2 million.”
Floyd paused. He was the highest-paid employee at the university, and his annual salary was $750,000. Moos was talking about paying more than twice that much to Leach. But four coaches in the Pac-12 earned $2.25 million or more per year. That was the going rate for a top coach.
“We’ll make that work,” Floyd said. “Let’s go ahead.”
Moos said he’d be back in touch as soon as he reached Pullman.
At a time when universities throughout the country were cutting jobs, reducing course offerings and raising tuition to keep pace with the rising costs of education, coaching salaries continued to skyrocket. At that time—November 2011—the average compensation for a Division I head football coach was $1.47 million annually, a jump of nearly 55 percent from six seasons earlier. The highest-paid coaches all earned well over $3 million annually.
1. Mack Brown, Texas: $5,193,500
2. Nick Saban, Alabama: $4,833,333
3. Bob Stoops, Oklahoma: $4,075,000
4. Urban Meyer, Ohio State: $4,000,000
5. Les Miles, LSU: $3,856,417
6. Kirk Ferentz, Iowa: $3,785,000
7. Bobby Petrino, Arkansas: $3,638,000
8. Gene Chizik, Auburn: $3,500,000
9. Brady Hoke, Michigan: $3,254,000
10. Will Muschamp, Florida: $3,221,000
“This market is crazy,” Floyd explained. “I’m not sitting here justifying this stuff. I’m just saying that this is the world we have to play in.”
Floyd knew the numbers. And he knew that in order for Washington State to compete in the Pac-12, it was going to have to put up the kind of money that other Pac-12 schools were shelling out for football coaches.
Nonetheless, the timing could not have been more awkward. Floyd and University of Washington president Michael Young had been pressing state lawmakers not to make further budget cuts to the state’s two universities. Over the previous four years the state had reduced funding to WSU by 60 percent. At UW the cuts were even deeper—from $400 million to $200 million. To compensate, both schools were making painful dec
isions. WSU reduced its workforce by 12 percent, eliminating more than five hundred jobs. Some entire fields of study had been shuttered.
Against this backdrop, the highest-paid state employee in Washington the previous year was UW’s head football coach, Steve Sarkisian. His gross annual pay was $1.98 million. If Leach ended up at WSU, he’d be the highest-paid employee in the state. Worse, WSU would still be on the hook for $600,000 to Paul Wulff for the remaining year on his contract.
Floyd was in a situation that many of his colleagues at other institutions had faced. “We all think this is absolutely absurd,” Floyd explained. “We sign the checks because we have no other alternative. There is not a university president who said, ‘Oh yes, that’s the right thing to do.’ ”
As president, Floyd didn’t need approval from the university’s board of regents before authorizing Bill Moos to offer Leach a multimillion-dollar contract. But regents are the ones who hire and fire the president. Given the dire fiscal problems in the state, Floyd felt it was prudent not to surprise his board. He didn’t want them reading about a deal this size in the newspaper. One by one he started calling his regents to give them a heads-up.
On November 19, WSU played its final home game of the season. It lost to Utah in overtime 30–27. Two days later demolition crews began tearing down one side of Martin Stadium to make way for the $80 million expansion that had been approved by the regents seventy-two hours earlier. The 2012 season was due to kick off nine months later. That left very little time to construct twenty-one luxury suites, forty-two loge boxes, twelve hundred club seats, a ten-thousand-square-foot club room for premium-seat patrons and a new press box.
Much of the construction costs would be paid for by the revenue coming from ESPN and Fox under the new Pac-12 television deal. But it fell to Moos to sell the suites and premium seating.
Outdoor club seats between the 0- and the 20-yard line—$1,700 annually
Outdoor club seats between the two 20-yard lines—$2,000 annually
The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football Page 31