‘He looked at life differently than most people’: Former Sooners assistant Mark Mangino reflects on Mike Leach and a lone season together at OU in 1999
Eli Lederman, Tulsa World, Dec 13, 2022
Mark Mangino and Mike Leach landed in Oklahoma on the same day in late 1998. That night, the pair of assistant coaches met inside a Norman restaurant in one of the first gatherings of Bob Stoops’ inaugural coaching staff.
Over the decades that followed, through to his death Monday night following complications from a heart condition, Leach would morph into a legend of college football as innovator of the Air Raid offense and a personality capable of turning the mundane into moments of dry hilarity in an instant.
But on the December evening Mangino first encountered Leach, sitting amongst early Stoops-era staffers like Cale Gundy and Jerry Schmidt, he found the Sooners’ new offensive coordinator to be something Leach seldom ever was: quiet and reserved.
“He just sat there and listened to everybody,” Mangino recalled to the Tulsa World Tuesday. “And listened and listened. He didn’t say much that night.”
That was at least until the pair hopped in the car to drive the short distance to the Residence Inn that Stoops’ assistants called home in the early weeks of his tenure. A conversation began and suddenly 45 minutes had passed.
“After a while, he did most of the talking,” Mangino said with a laugh.
The conversations he’d go on to have with Leach swirled around Mangino’s mind Tuesday morning from his home near Pittsburgh, where the one-time Kansas head coach exchanged texts with former OU staffers and tried to make sense of Leach’s passing at 61 years old.
The Sooners’ offensive coordinator for a season in 1999, Leach notched 158 wins to 107 losses and led his teams to 17 bowl game appearances over 21 seasons on a non-conforming head coaching path from Texas Tech to Washington State to Mississippi State. And it was during that span that Leach carved his place into college football history, leaving behind a legacy defined in equal parts by record-breaking offenses and press conference musings on subjects from Halloween candy to insurgent warfare.
Nearly 25 years after their lone season together at OU, it’s the latter — and Leach’s ever-curious mind — that remains imprinted on Mangino.
“He contributed so much to the game of football,” Mangino said. “But more than that, I’m gonna miss just talking with him on the phone or texting because he always had great stories. He looked at life differently than most people.”
News of Leach’s passing brought tributes from across college football and OU’s football community; OU athletic director Joe Castiglione, coach Brent Venables — another member of Stoops’ first coaching staff — Gundy, Mangino and Stoops himself were among those who took the Twitter Tuesday morning.
Back in 1999, they were some of the same people who initially struggled to understand the young offensive coordinator.
“I’ll be the first to admit many on the staff at Oklahoma, including myself, when we first met him he seemed like a really nice guy but we couldn’t we figure him out,” Mangino said.
Perhaps that’s because Leach was the coach former Sooners safety Matt McCoy remembers drinking hot coffee on the practice field in the heat of August; the one who got dip spit in his eyes, fooled Texas with a fake playsheet, motivated through shade trees and tuna fish sandwiches and girlfriends and once provoked Mangino to lunge at him from across a table in a meeting.
“It took me all the way through spring ball to figure out where he was coming from,” Mangino said. “His philosophy of football was different from anything that most of us had been exposed to.”
Leach was already at Texas Tech by the time OU raised the national championship banners in 2000. But his fingerprints were all over OU’s last national-title winning offense.
A Sooners attack that finished bottom of the Big 12 scoring 16.7 points per game in 1998 tallied 35.8 per game in Leach’s season at OU. And it was Leach who mined an eventual national champion quarterback from Snow College in Utah; “He saw something in me no one else did,” Josh Heupel wrote Tuesday.
“Mike was proud of what he did at Oklahoma,” Mangino said.
“I remember him after the season coming down to my office. He said ‘You got a minute?’. It didn’t matter if you had a minute or not with Mike. ‘I just got the final NCAA stats and we only gave up 11 sacks all season.’ He was real proud. ‘See coach, I told you. This thing will go. It’ll go.’”
As a head coach, Leach’s passing offenses lit up scoreboards, set records and helped define the offensive football of the early 21st-century from the Big 12 to the Pac-12 to the SEC.
What made his him so successful?
“Simplicity,” Mangino said. “Repetition of the same things over and over. He didn’t make it difficult for the players, especially the quarterback. He put a lot on the quarterback. But he didn’t put him in a situation where he had to overthink. He let them play.”
As prolific as his passing attacks was Leach’s enduring persona of wit and off-the-cuff ramblings. He was fascinated by pirates and war history and was as likely to break down hypothetical mascot battles and doling wedding advice as he was opposing defenses in front of a camera.
For that and the 1999 season shared on staff at OU, Mangino will remember Leach as much as an innovator of the profession as he was a guiding force of the game.
“He’s a unique person — that’s the best way to put it,” Mangino said. “He had an intellectual curiosity that could not be satisfied. He talked about a multitude of subjects. He sort of had the spirit of a young kid in him.
“He just kind of saw things differently. He did things differently.”
