This reminds me of an excellent piece by the great writer Michael Lewis (Moneyball, Liars Poker, the Big Short etc) that he did years back on the eccentric Leach.
Well worth the read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/coach-leach-goes-deep-very-deep.html
Stepping out into Jones SBC Stadium, surrounded by people wearing self-conscious looks of grim determination, Leach was even easier than usual to identify: he was the one guy wandering about, as Meeks has put it, "with this look on his face like he's walking around an airport, lost." True, he had shaved ("It's a good idea to shave for TV games") and shed his flip-flops, his "Hawaii Five-O" baggy shirts and his board shorts for an outfit that looked vaguely coachlike. As his team raced onto the field, he gazed into the stands filled with screaming fans and wondered about the several thousand "cadets" from Texas A.&M. clustered in one end zone. They wear military uniforms and buzz cuts, holler in unison and stand at attention the entire game. "How come they get to pretend they are soldiers?" he asked. "The thing is, they aren't actually in the military. I ought to have Mike's Pirate School. The freshmen, all they get is the bandanna. When you're a senior, you get the sword and skull and crossbones. For homework, we'll work pirate maneuvers and stuff like that."
Leach made his way to the sideline and from his back pocket pulled a crumpled piece of paper with the notations for dozens of plays typed on it, along with a red pen. When a play doesn't work, he puts an X next to it. When a play works well, he draws a circle beside it -- "to remind myself to run it again." But at the start of a game, he's unsure what's going to work. So one goal is to throw as many different things at a defense as he can, to see what it finds most disturbing. Another goal is to create as much confusion as possible for the defense while keeping things as simple as possible for the offense.
What a defense sees, when it lines up against Texas Tech, is endless variety, caused, first, by the sheer number of people racing around trying to catch a pass and then compounded by the many different routes they run. A typical football offense has three serious pass-catching threats; Texas Tech's offense has five, and it would employ more if that wasn't against the rules. Leach looks at the conventional offense -- with its stocky fullback and bulky tight end seldom touching the football, used more often as blockers -- and says, "You've got two positions that basically aren't doing anything." He regards receivers as raffle tickets: the more of them you have, the more likely one will hit big. Some go wide, some go deep, some come across the middle. All are fast. (When Leach recruits high-school players, he is forced to compromise on most talents, but he insists on speed.) All have been conditioned to run much more than a football player normally does. A typical N.F.L. receiver in training might run 1,500 yards of sprints a day; Texas Tech receivers run 2,500 yards. To prepare his receivers' ankles and knees for the unusual punishment of his nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field; slogging through the sand, he says, strengthens the receivers' joints. And when they finish sprinting, they move to Leach's tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turned many young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.
The first play Leach called against Texas A.&M. was the first play on Cody Hodges's wrist. That wrist held a mere 23 ordinary plays, 9 red-zone plays (for situations inside an opponent's 20-yard line), 6 goal-line plays, 2 2-point-conversion plays and 5 trick plays. "There's two ways to make it more complex for the defense," Leach says. "One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that's no good because then the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays and run it out of lots of different formations." Leach prefers new formations. "That way, you don't have to teach a guy a new thing to do," he says. "You just have to teach him new places to stand." Texas Tech's offense has no playbook; Cody Hodges's wrist and Mike Leach's back pocket hold the only formal written records of what is widely regarded as one of the most intricate offenses ever to take a football field. The plays change too often, in response to the defense and the talents of the players on hand, to bother recording them.
