The most important person vs. Idaho: Mike Leach

There are plenty of old sayings that relate to the momentum of heavy objects rolling down a steep slope and your inability to stop them once they pick up too much steam. Not only are there metaphors, an old-time sciencey guy that invented gravity even had a law of motion about it (I was excellent in my science classes).

Momentum, as it applies to your life and its seemingly unending ability to pile on at the most inopportune time, seems to be, in my experience, a very real thing. Weeks where one big thing goes wrong seem to be filed by more and more and more things, making the stone careening down hill so heavy and fast, it flicks you away with the ease that my horse did to me when I was 10 and learned all about another all too literal metaphor of “getting back on the horse.” Screw you, Ginger. That hurt a lot and I got made fun of at school for the gash on my lip.

This week, momentum made absolute mince meat of Washington State football. A charge against Shalom Luani was recommended to the prosecutors office, Logan Tago was arrested for assault and robbery, Robert Barber was expelled from school.

In the middle of it all, their head coach slams the police force investigating them, wondering aloud for the first time by a WSU administrator if there’s a double standard inside the Pullman Police Department when it comes to investigating athletes.

What a dang week.

What’s worse, the football team causing all the trouble is up to an old trick again: falling short of expectations. A loss to an FCS team ... again ... and a close game that went in the wrong column against a regional rival has put this team way behind the 8-ball to appear in another bowl game.

What would make a lot of this all better? Pounding the school that’s just a few miles to the east. Who is the person responsible for doing it? Mike Leach.

Look, I’m not like Mike Leach in a lot of ways. But one way in which we are very much alike is that we don’t care what other people think about the head football coach at Washington State University. The reaction to Leach’s rant and the subsequent issues this week has been, well, Facebook commenty (second time I’ve added a gratuitous “y” to a word, what an article). Leach seems to care about as much of what other people think of him as I do when it comes to whether I’m getting enough garlic in my diet. Which is good!

One thing I do care about though is whether my football team wins or not. And although that’s something Leach surely cares about as well, it’s something that effects my life to greater degree than I wish it would (something I’ve talked about before).

This team isn’t winning. If they were 2-0, would what has happened this week be as big of a problem? If we’re being honest ... probably not. Right or wrong, winning cures an awful lot. Even though these things would surely be bad, I don’t know that the doom and gloom would be quite as prevalent had WSU managed to actually stop EWU on an offensive drive and score on at least half of their red zone chances against BSU.

What WSU needs right now, desperately, is a big, blowout, break the scoreboard kind of win. Something that, at least for the rest of the weekend, can make everyone, Mike Leach included, forget about their problems. The Idaho Vandals come into Pullman fresh off a beating from the Huskies and, although they have bowl aspirations in their second-to-last FBS season, look to be a team that is undoubtedly worse than Eastern Washington.

Y’all need to come out and pound this team into the ground, Mike. Because that rock is still barreling down the hill and I feel like it’s coming right for the house.

Mike Leach, your most important person versus the Idaho Vandals.