A Pirate, a Pony, and a Chancellor walk into an equipment shed…

 

Pride comes before destruction

Proverbs 16:18

This situation has been rehashed 14 different ways on TV, print, and the blogosphere.   Here is my take.  There are five characters at play in this tragedy.

The Pirate :  The Head Coach.  He has built an impressive program that competes at the highest level in one of the top conferences in college football.  He took what was once a backwater program and brought them into the national discussion.  Attributed to an interesting personality and offense to match.  This success has afforded a great following with a fan base in west Texas that was looking for a collegiate outlet for their friday-night-lights football obsession.  This following afforded him some capital in the public forum.  Capital that led people and press to overlook a snide personality with his penchant to publicly explore other jobs.

The Pony:  A former football great.  A former golden-boy running back who was deemed so worthy in high school that a University literally sold it’s soul to get him on campus.  He moved on to NFL glory and a career as a talking head on a major sports network.

The Receiver:  Son of the Pony with the attitude to match.  Largely been reported that he had an air of entitlement to his personality and practiced that way.  His attitude drove his position coach and the Pirate nuts.

The AD:  The poor soul who had to be the boss of an individual, the Pirate. who thought he had no boss.  He was fired from his old job as Basketball coach and received his previous job largely out of pity.  His predecessor leaves the school and puts him in the catbirds seat.

The Chancellor:  A spectator in this whole circus.  A guy who loved the success of his schools football team but had to have heard what it was like dealing with the Pirate.

Here is where I see the mistake was made.  Leach (The Pirate) let a lazy, entitled athlete with a reportedly overbearing, stage-dad get into his head.  If Adam James was such a bad teammate, Leach had many options to deal with him.  Sit young Adam on the bench, suspend him, or give him a signed release and leave it up to Adam to decide if he wants to stay or not.  Instead it appears he went Col. Nathan R. Jessup and tried to train Adam by locking him in various closets and sheds around the Lubbock Metropolitan area.  A big misread by the Pirate in this case.  The Receiver makes a call to the Pony and the public hype machine at the WWL gets fired up.  This unwanted hype and years of abrasiveness made the decision pretty easy to part ways.  All they asked him to do was apologize to the family and he refused (and not to diplomatically either).  Leach brought lawyers into it and filed a restraining order.  Leach’s representation said he couldn’t be suspended  because he didn’t have that clause in his contract.  So the Chancellor said exercised the termination clause.  IMO Leach has no one to blame but himself and his foolish pride.