College Football: 5 biggest storylines to follow during summer 2020
3. Has Mike Leach already lost Starkville?
Mike Gundy and Dabo Swinney aren’t the only coaches that have gotten themselves in hot water. Mike Leach, the new head man at Mississippi State, has already seen multiple Bulldogs enter the transfer portal, reportedly due to his Twitter activity.
If you missed Leach’s deleted tweet, he posted a meme with the caption, “After two weeks of quarantine with her husband, Gertrude decided to knit him a scarf.”
Instead of a scarf, however, the woman in the photo is holding a noose.
It bears mentioning that there is no place in America where the scars of slavery and Jim Crow are deeper or more prominent, and no place where the the noose and imagery of lynching is more visceral. There were even pro-confederate groups marching at Ole Miss just over a year ago. Considering Leach’s status as the head coach of a large group of African-American players in the state of Mississippi, the tweet did not go over well at all.
Many have argued that there was no racist intent behind the tweet. There may not have been, but it didn’t matter. The damage was already done.
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Even without racist intent, it still takes a unique level of ignorance to be in Mississippi and not understand what the noose represents. Not only has Leach entered dangerous social media waters, he’s also admitted to his constituents in the state that he hasn’t made the slightest effort to understand the community he now represents.
Additionally, Leach’s history doesn’t show many examples of him endearing himself to his players. Several times, in fact, it’s been the opposite. He’s regularly run into trouble throughout his career, with his own players and on social media.
In 2012, Washington State receiver Marquess Wilson accused Leach and his staff of “physical, emotional, and verbal abuse” and that wasn’t the first time Leach was accused of mistreating his players. He was let go from Texas Tech in 2009 for similar allegations.
In 2018, Leach tweeted out a doctored video of Barack Obama to push a political conspiracy.
There’s also the time he called his players “frauds” and the other time that he spent a press conference deriding their “fat little girlfriends”.
Black or white, Leach’s relationships with his players have always been volatile.
That’s why the intent of Leach’s tweet is no longer the biggest question in Starkville.
Instead, with players leaving and Leach’s support already undercut, it’s now whether or not he has lost this program before the first game was even played.