Why Mike Leach won’t last with the Mississippi State Bulldogs

Mississippi State head coach Mike Leach has had a relatively unimpressive start to his time with the program, and it is unlikely that its condition will improve.

When the news was announced that former Washington State Cougars head coach Mike Leach was heading to Starkville to take on the Mississippi State job, I was one of his biggest supporters.

I believed that Leach had the offensive IQ to craft a formidable squad in college football’s toughest division, the SEC West. But while I still see Leach’s promise as a coach, the ability to bank on him seeing the amount of success that I had originally expected is just about long gone.

The biggest reason for such a disappointing realization has less to do with Mississippi State’s own flaws and more to do with just how drastically the SEC has improved since Leach’s hiring (especially in the West half).

Of MSU’s 13 conference foes, seven of them have gotten better—to at least some degree—in the time between the Bulldogs bringing Leach aboard (January 2020) and now. Those seven teams are Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, and Arkansas.

The following has happened since the conclusion of the 2019-20 college football season: Georgia has won a national title, South Carolina has become a bowl team, Kentucky has hit a 10-win season, Alabama has gone 1-1 in the last two CFP National Championship games, Texas A&M has locked up the greatest recruiting class ever, and Ole Miss/Arkansas have each seen a New Year’s Day bowl.

And as for the LSU Tigers (one of Mississippi State’s biggest rivals), just because they have fallen from their dreamlike 15-0 season does not mean that they are incapable of handling the Bulldogs for the time being.

Back in November of 2021, LSU broke the news of acquiring Brian Kelly, a head coach held in even higher regard than Mike Leach.

Mike Leach won’t last at Mississippi State

And in the process of doing so, the Tigers have continued to out-recruit MSU by a monumental margin. So to make matters worse for the Bulldogs, LSU does not appear to be going anywhere, either.

All of that means that the only program in Mississippi State’s division that looks like it could realistically end up worse than the Bulldogs in coming seasons is Auburn, as it is also in a rocky place today. However, 2021 saw them finish only one game worse than MSU by record; it is also yet another SEC power with superior recruiting to that of Mississippi State.

In short, the Bulldogs are in a sticky situation right now, and it is almost solely due to the threatening nature of their league play—something that refuses to give Mike Leach a chance at building his team up to what it can truly be. As a result, he will most likely never see actual success at MSU.