At long last, Mike Leach is eligible to be inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, and not a moment too soon.
It was too late for The Pirate to see it himself after he died of long-standing health complications in 2022. But starting next year, he will be eligible for consideration after the National Football Foundation adjusted its strict criteria to allow coaches in at a .595 win mark instead of the traditional .600. He will also be three years removed from coaching, which is the minimum.
Leach was perhaps the most painful case to miss consideration. He sat at a .598 mark after 21 years as a head coach. If he had even just lived long enough to coach Mississippi State’s 19-10 win over Illinois in the ReliaQuest Bowl, he would have hit the benchmark. Keeping one of the game’s most impactful coach out over such a tiny detail would have been a tragedy.
When pressed in the past, NFF officials downplayed the idea that they would adjust their rules to get Leach into the hall.
“There hasn’t been any wriggling of that [.600 number],” NFF president Steve Hatchell told CBS Sports in 2024. “I was told by George Steinbrenner and a bunch of other guys that were on the board for a long time, ‘Hatchell, these are the rules. You stay with the rules come hell or high water.'”
On Thursday, Hatchell changed his tone.
“The NFF is committed to preserving the integrity and prestige of the NFF College Football Hall of Fame,” Hatchell said in a statement. “This adjustment reflects thoughtful dialogue with leaders across the sport and allows us to better recognize coaches whose contributions to the game extend beyond a narrow statistical threshold.”
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A loophole, but not a fix
The change in approach is admirable, but to be clear, the narrow statistical threshold still remains. The “Mike Leach Rule” just created a minor loophole to get the most egregious snub over the finish line. It does not fix the arbitrary nature of College Football Hall of Fame eligibility.
Really, this discussion comes down to the question of what makes a Hall of Famer. In the mind of college football historians, Leach is an obvious choice. The Pirate went to law school, but quickly changed his tune and followed Hal Mumme to Valdosta State, where they developed the influential Air Raid offense. After a brief stop at Oklahoma, where he was instrumental in Bob Stoops’ program turnaround, he took over at Texas Tech in 2000.
His stint with the Red Raiders transformed the sport.
Leach led one of the most successful runs in the history of Texas Tech, posting 10 straight winning seasons. He later went to Washington State and Mississippi State, where he also led moribund programs to great success. Perhaps even more notably, 16 former players and assistants have become head coaches, headlined by Lincoln Riley, Josh Heupel and Kliff Kinsgbury. Countless more coordinators and position coaches have emerged from his tutelage. Every offense system in America has at least traces of the Air Raid because of Leach’s success.
A number of Hall of Fame coaches vastly exceeded the .600 win plateau. At the same time, Leach coached at some of the worst jobs in the history of college football, all of which rank 60th or worse in all-time winning percentage. His three jobs combine for an all-time .511 winning percentage. Dragging those programs collectively to .598 for 21 years is a hell of an accomplishment.
“It’s the only sane thing to do,” Mumme, Leach’s former mentor, told ESPN. “Why is 60% the magic number? I mean, not everybody gets to coach at Notre Dame or Texas or something. Throw the rule out and vote people in on merit.”
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Other measures of success
If anything, Nick Saban and Paul “Bear” Bryant are easy to explain. The College Football Hall of Fame exists to contextualize the historical contributions of figures like Leach, and make sure their contributions to the game are not overlooked. You can’t tell the story of college football without Leach and the Air Raid.
While Leach’s case is resolved, the random nature of Hall of Fame eligibility still remains. Howard Schnellenberger, for example, helped set the stage for the Miami dynasty and shape Louisville and FAU. In 2021, he won the Paul “Bear” Bryant Lifetime Achievement Award. Still, he is not Hall of Fame eligible because building up struggling programs meant a number of early losses.
Think about it. Schnellenberger did enough that he captured a national lifetime achievement award. Because of arbitrary criteria, he is the only individual to win the award who is not a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. Like Leach, if it’s ever rectified, it will only be posthumously as he died in 2021.
What kind of message does that send for coaches? Sean Lewis led Kent State to an unbelievable run of success with three straight years of bowl eligibility. By Hall of Fame criteria, he’s nothing more than his 24-31 record at the worst legacy program in college football history.
On paper, Matt Campbell barely hits the .600 plateau after 14 seasons at Iowa State and Toledo. That kind of simplicity ignores that Campbell has the best winning percentage of any Cyclones coach since Charles Mayser in 1919. Not acknowledging that context is truly not seeing college football.
It’s even worse for players
The story gets even more complicated for players. To be eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame, a player must earn First-Team All-America honors from one of the five NCAA recognized selectors. It doesn’t matter how great the player was otherwise, if they don’t reach that criteria, they are not considered. That makes the criteria for getting in as a quarterback — where one player can monopolize All-America selections — unnecessarily difficult.
Case Keenum passed for more yards than any quarterback in the history of college football at Houston. He even won the Sammy Baugh Trophy twice as the nation’s top passer. Still, he is ineligible to be voted into the College Football Hall of Fame because he failed to make First Team All-America. Boise State’s Kellen Moore, the winningest quarterback in FBS history, only reaches eligibility because the FWAA gave him a nod over Cam Newton.
I’ve served on the FWAA All-America Committee for the last five years and we take that consideration very seriously. In 2020, the quarterback position was stacked with Alabama’s Mac Jones, Ohio State’s Justin Fields and Florida’s Kyle Trask pushing for honors. One selector brought up the fact that Trevor Lawrence would likely be ineligible for the Hall of Fame if we didn’t choose him. Certainly, historical context was not the only reason he was selected by the FWAA after a sensational season, but it’s hard to ignore it.
It’s an honor that we’re given such privilege to shape the story of the game. It’s also frustrating that we had that pressure just for Lawrence to be eligible for his rightful place in the Hall of Fame.
At its core, college football is the most diversified sport in America. Success for some coaches is stacking national championships. For others, it’s innovating the game and taking run-down programs to untold heights. The College Football Hall of Fame should honor that breadth, and not get bogged down in arbitrary benchmarks.
A wrong has now been righted as Mike Leach becomes eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame. Now, it’s a perfect time for the hall to consider all cases that may be held back by a meaningless, unnecessary threshold.
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