Christilaw: Leach’s recipe for success: Be exception at the routine
When the Washington State football coach spoke to Monday’s Cougar Club Luncheon, he talked about Saturday’s game with Idaho, the Mel Gibson movie “The Patriot,” his student loan debt during the early years of his coaching career, his aptitude for the Jackson Pollock school of painting and what he would do if he became dictator of Cuba. All in about 40 minutes.
You had to be there.
Leach is nothing if not entertaining, so anytime he headlines a luncheon you make sure you get through the buffet line and chow down quickly, because nothing is as unbecoming as having milk shooting out your nose because the speaker snuck up on you with a particularly funny anecdote or one-liner.
But all that is a distraction from the fact that Mike Leach has a very simple formula for success.
His Air Raid offense? You can almost put his whole package on a handful of 3x5 notecards. It’s not at all complicated: The beauty of its design lies in its execution.
In fact, that sums up his whole approach to the game.
“How do you think guys like Joe Montana and Jerry Rice got to be so good?” he asked. “It’s not that they were exceptional. They just got very good at making routine plays. They got better at making those plays than everybody else.”
To Mike Leach, the game of football is all about routine plays. Want to win games? Make routine play after routine play. Want to get better? Get better at making those routine plays.
There’s a mystique about the game of football, a cult of the fantastic play. There’s a whole industry built up around the fantastic play – the one-handed catch, the 99-yard run, the incredible, thread-the-needle pass. The highlight reel stuff. The stuff that gets on ESPN SportsCenter.
But you can’t set out to make the exceptional play. In the Leach philosophy, you become exceptional at making the routine play.
To be successful, the routine play cannot be a sometime thing. Becoming occasionally routine isn’t good enough.
In fact, Leach blamed the exceptional play for the Cougars loss in Boise.
It wasn’t about the blue turf at Boise State. It wasn’t about Rypien-family magic.
It was about players losing sight of making the routine play right in front of them and trying to make exceptional plays.
“In my experience, there is, maybe, one exception that happens in a game and you just accept that and concentrate on doing your job,” he said. “We had too many guys out there, running around thinking they had to play for the exception.”
Keep making the routine play, he insists. He’ll live with the consequences of one exceptional play per game. If all 11 players make the routine play down after down, an exceptional play once in a while won’t matter. The game will have already been decided.
And really, when it comes right down to it, most of those exceptional plays are simply routine plays executed with the game on the line.
The Catch? The play that made the Legend of Joe Montana real? The pass to Dwight Clark at the back of the end zone to win the NFC Championship game? It was a routine pass play the San Francisco 49ers had run hundreds of times executed perfectly with the game on the line.
How about the most iconic play in NFL history – Bart Starr’s quarterback sneak to beat the Cowboys in the 1967 NFL Championship game, the game that will forever be known as “The Ice Bowl”?
Once again, timing is everything. Sandpoint’s Jerry Kramer makes a routine block on Jethro Pugh on a minus-20-degree day and his quarterback scores the game-winning touchdown.
For whatever reason, we equate routine with mundane, boring and monotonous. In other words, routine has a bad rap.
So the first step on the road to success is to rethink, embrace and master the routine.
Do that and the exceptional takes care of itself.
Steve Christilaw can be reached at steve. christilaw@gmail.com.