Pac-12 notebook: WSU coach Mike Leach won’t enter quarrel

PULLMAN – The verbal mortars shot back and forth between Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury and Arkansas coach Brett Bielema have served as a proxy battle in the ongoing debate between those who favor modern offenses and those who espouse more traditional methods of moving the football toward the end zone.

Washington State coach Mike Leach, an engineer of spread offenses, weighed in on the exchange during the Pac-12 coaches media teleconference on Tuesday.

While Leach said he had no reaction to the quarrel because of his friendships with both coaches – Kingsbury was Leach’s first starting quarterback when he coached at TTU – his sentiments on the general arguments involved sided firmly with the Red Raiders coach.

The background to this brouhaha principally regards the fundamental differences between offenses that want to speed things up, and those that wish to be methodical. A couple of years ago the NCAA, spurred primarily by Alabama coach Nick Saban, tried to implement pace-of-play rules to slow the game down, under the guise of player safety.

This is a view espoused by Bielema, who has said that he has seen statistics showing that spread offenses add as many as five games per season to players’ workloads because of the extra plays in each game.

Leach believes that is just an excuse for an attack on more innovating offenses that score at a pace the slower ones fundamentally can’t match and the coaches who, in his words, “might be put out of business by those schemes.

“The notion it’s dangerous is absurd and it’s been absurd from the beginning. I’ve been quoted on it quite a lot,” Leach said, noting that he wasn’t specifically referring to Bielema. “There’s a quickness and a flow to the tempo offenses that makes everybody move fast and it’s harder to tee off. If they feel it’s dangerous, all they have to do is play their seconds and their thirds, and those guys would like to play.”

The bad blood between Bielema and Kingsbury seems to have started last summer, when the Arkansas coach apparently made the comment at the Texas High School Coaches Association’s annual convention, “If you don’t play with a fullback, we’ll kick your ass. And if you throw it 70 times a game, we’ll kick your ass.”

The Red Raiders beat the Razorbacks 35-24 last weekend and afterward Kingsbury took the opportunity to rub it in.

“(Bielema) stood up and said if you don’t throw to the fullback, we’ll kick your ass, and if you throw it 70 times a game, we’ll kick your ass,” Kingsbury said. “(Bielema) just got his ass kicked twice in a row and probably next week by (Texas) A&M, as well.”

USC’s goals unchanged

Preseason Pac-12 favorite USC is no longer in pole position after last weekend’s 41-31 loss to Stanford. Because that game was the only conference matchup so far this year, the Trojans are all by themselves at the bottom of the Pac-12 standings.

But USC coach Steve Sarkisian didn’t sound too distressed when he spoke with the media. Sarkisian said he reminded his team after the game that both teams that played in the national championship game last season, Ohio State and Oregon, lost a game early in the year.

“Our message was, one, we got beat tonight. And we got beat by a good team that played well,” Sarkisian said. “We had our chances to change the momentum of the game and unfortunately we couldn’t. They made the tough catches, they made the critical blocks and weren’t able to do so. But that doesn’t need to define us. We’ve still got a good football team and a long way to go.”