First-year coach Sonny Dykes and four-year starting quarterback Max Duggan are deservedly getting the credit for putting Texas Christian one win away from its first college football title since the 1930s. Yet no one person has molded this Horned Frogs team quite as much as one man who never coached there: the late Mike Leach.
Leach, the innovative coach credited with introducing the pass-heavy "Air Raid" scheme to football, died last month of a heart attack at age 61. Long before he arrived at Mississippi State, his final team, he influenced a generation of coaches who went on to change all levels of the game.
The branches of his coaching tree spread far and wide at TCU, which faces Georgia on Monday night in the College Football Playoff title game in Los Angeles.
Dykes got his first opportunity to coordinate an offense as an assistant on Leach's staff at Texas Tech in the early 2000s. TCU's offensive coordinator Garrett Riley played quarterback for Leach on those Red Raider teams, following in the footsteps of his older brother Lincoln, now coach at Southern California.
[He] obviously had a huge impact on me and the way that I've tried to build a program and develop a style and methodology for teaching," Dykes said earlier this week.
And even though the Air Raid is fundamentally an offensive scheme, its underlying principles, and the way Leach ran his practices, strongly influenced TCU defensive coordinator Joe Gillespie. He got into coaching for a small Texas high school then led by a spread-offense guru who Leach hired to coach Texas Tech's running backsformer Baylor coach Art Briles.
Leach later coached at Washington State and Mississippi State. The assistants he groomed went on to become head coaches at North Texas, Houston, Baylor, West Virginia, California, Oklahoma, Nevada and USC. Others worked with offenses farther afield at Arizona and Oregon. His ideas ultimately reshaped the NFL as well.
"The biggest imprint that you'll see across all Mike Leach guys is once they branch off, they all had to fit it to their own personalities," said Seth Littrell, an assistant to Leach at Texas Tech. "He taught us that you have to make it your own."
Dykes has done just that at TCU. He and Riley, his offensive coordinator since 2020, have developed a more balanced version of the spread offense in which Duggan runs, or hands the ball off, as often as he throws. The playbook is also relatively simple, another Leach quality.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tcu-college-football-playoff-mike-leach-sonny-dykes-11672976764
Leach, the innovative coach credited with introducing the pass-heavy "Air Raid" scheme to football, died last month of a heart attack at age 61. Long before he arrived at Mississippi State, his final team, he influenced a generation of coaches who went on to change all levels of the game.
The branches of his coaching tree spread far and wide at TCU, which faces Georgia on Monday night in the College Football Playoff title game in Los Angeles.
Dykes got his first opportunity to coordinate an offense as an assistant on Leach's staff at Texas Tech in the early 2000s. TCU's offensive coordinator Garrett Riley played quarterback for Leach on those Red Raider teams, following in the footsteps of his older brother Lincoln, now coach at Southern California.
[He] obviously had a huge impact on me and the way that I've tried to build a program and develop a style and methodology for teaching," Dykes said earlier this week.
And even though the Air Raid is fundamentally an offensive scheme, its underlying principles, and the way Leach ran his practices, strongly influenced TCU defensive coordinator Joe Gillespie. He got into coaching for a small Texas high school then led by a spread-offense guru who Leach hired to coach Texas Tech's running backsformer Baylor coach Art Briles.
Leach later coached at Washington State and Mississippi State. The assistants he groomed went on to become head coaches at North Texas, Houston, Baylor, West Virginia, California, Oklahoma, Nevada and USC. Others worked with offenses farther afield at Arizona and Oregon. His ideas ultimately reshaped the NFL as well.
"The biggest imprint that you'll see across all Mike Leach guys is once they branch off, they all had to fit it to their own personalities," said Seth Littrell, an assistant to Leach at Texas Tech. "He taught us that you have to make it your own."
Dykes has done just that at TCU. He and Riley, his offensive coordinator since 2020, have developed a more balanced version of the spread offense in which Duggan runs, or hands the ball off, as often as he throws. The playbook is also relatively simple, another Leach quality.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tcu-college-football-playoff-mike-leach-sonny-dykes-11672976764