There is an alternate universe where the committee that selected the new football coach for the Key West (Fla.) High Conchs chose correctly in 1996. That year, the offensive coordinator at Valdosta State applied for the job, which would have allowed him to do his favorite thing in his favorite town. Committee members barely considered Mike Leach. They thought he was overqualified.

Had they given him the job, Leach probably never would have left. He probably would have spent the rest of his days drawing up plays while the palms swayed. He and wife Sharon would have walked to Harpoon Harry’s and dined while laughing at all the tourists running to look at a giant buoy.

Robbed of his dream job, Mike Leach instead had to settle for changing the way nearly everyone at every level of football studies offense. His impact flowed down from the collegiate ranks into high school football and up into the NFL. He brought the Air Raid to the mainstream, showing everyone in the sport that teams could overcome talent deficits (or enhance talent advantages) if they spread the field, juiced the tempo and tolerated a healthy degree of risk on fourth down.

Leach made Kentucky an offensive juggernaut. He helped jump-start Bob Stoops’ tenure at Oklahoma. Then, as a head coach, he produced winners at places where it’s supposed to be difficult to win: Texas Tech, Washington State and Mississippi State. All the while, he eschewed the usual coaching cliches. Instead, he talked about pirates, about Geronimo, about candy corn, about what happened with the ice pick after the final scene of “Basic Instinct.”

There will never be another coach like Leach, who died Monday night following complications from a heart condition at age 61. He was transported from his home in Starkville, Miss., on Sunday to a hospital in Jackson.

“Coach Mike Leach cast a tremendous shadow not just over Mississippi State University, but over the entire college football landscape,” MSU president Mark E. Keenum said in a statement. “His innovative ‘Air Raid’ offense changed the game. Mike’s keen intellect and unvarnished candor made him one of the nation’s true coaching legends. His passing brings great sadness to our university, to the Southeastern Conference, and to all who loved college football. I will miss Mike’s profound curiosity, his honesty, and his wide-open approach to pursuing excellence in all things.”

Leach, the son of a forester, spent his high school years in Cody, Wyo., before leaving home in 1979 to attend BYU. “I liked BYU,” Leach wrote in his 2011 autobiography Swing Your Sword (written with The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman). “The place is like Disneyland, only without rides and merchandising.” Though Leach was fascinated by the offense LaVell Edwards ran in Provo, the former high school football player didn’t play for the Cougars. Leach tangled multiple times with the Honor Code patrol over the length of his hair, but he did well in his classes and was admitted to Pepperdine University School of Law.

Leach enjoyed law school, but as he finished he realized he wasn’t consumed by the law. So he decided to take one stab at his dream job: coaching football. Worst case? He’d coach for a few years, nearly starve and go live the rest of his life as a lawyer. So he racked up more student loans seeking a master’s in sports science from the United States Sports Academy in Daphne, Ala. In 1988, Leach talked his way into a part-time coaching job at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo. His salary: $3,000 for the year.

While visiting Leach in Key West in 2011 — between his firing from Texas Tech and hiring by Washington State — for a story for Sports Illustrated, I asked him if he ever wished he’d gone into law. Absolutely not, he said. “It’s ridiculously fulfilling,” Leach said of coaching. “But it’s kind of a narrow existence. It changes all the time, because young people that age change. Their lives are changing. … Now, I get variety.”

Talk to Leach for any length of time, and the desire for variety made sense. He was interested in everything. This would lead to hours-long quarterback meetings in which only a few minutes of football were discussed. It also led to Leach getting featured on “60 Minutes” in 2008. But he was always more interested in football than he let on, and often the soliloquies about weddings or cargo shorts or live animal mascots were calculated moves to keep anyone from asking him to reveal actual football information that might put his team at a disadvantage.

Stints at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo and College of the Desert led to a coaching job in Pori, Finland, where “half my players puffed cigarettes on the sidelines,” Leach wrote in “Swing Your Sword.” After that, Leach sent his resume to a football outpost only slightly less remote: Iowa Wesleyan, a school of about 550 students in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. Hal Mumme was a former UTEP coordinator who had created a wacky, wide-open offense to get more students to come out for football at Copperas Cove (Texas) High.

Mumme had just taken over a team that had gone 0-10 the previous season. Mumme liked Leach because Leach knew BYU. He also liked him because he wouldn’t have the same preconceived notions more established coaches had about offensive line play. The two meshed immediately, and at Iowa Wesleyan they planted the seeds for an offense that eventually would take over the Big 12 and get cherry-picked by coaches across college football and in the NFL.

The Air Raid as conceived by Mumme and Leach is not a complicated offense. For most of his head coaching career, Leach held a play sheet the size of a napkin. The Air Raid has a few core concepts — the Stick, the Mesh, the Corner, the Shallow Cross and Four Verticals — that quarterbacks and receivers drill relentlessly. Receivers don’t run a traditional route tree; they are taught to find open space within the defense. The more quarterbacks and receivers repeat the plays, the better they get at wordless communication that allows the quarterback to know what the receiver will do long before the defense does.

Ideally, a veteran quarterback could either change Leach’s called play or call the plays himself. “By the end of my junior year and all through my senior year, I was probably calling 70 percent of the plays,” former Washington State quarterback Connor Halliday told The Athletic in 2019. “He would give me a formation and then I would call the play. His coaching philosophy is, ‘You’re out there on the field, you can see the way the defense is lined up better than I can. So it’s my job to get you to the best point of believing in yourself and believing in your ability to call the plays.’ That’s the way he coaches. He does it in a roundabout way sometimes, but it’s his philosophy to get the quarterback to run the entire show.”

Leach stayed with Mumme; they moved to Valdosta State and then Kentucky. It was at Kentucky where Leach’s offense so vexed Florida defensive coordinator Bob Stoops that when Stoops was hired in December 1998 to be Oklahoma’s head coach, he hired Leach to run the offense. Leach immediately went in search of a junior college quarterback to run his offense. Though several other coaches were less than impressed, Leach convinced Stoops to allow him to sign Josh Heupel from Snow College. Heupel led Oklahoma to a national title in 2000; in 2022, he went 10-2 in his second season as Tennessee’s head coach.

That 1999 season planted the seeds for an offensive revolution in Norman, and it also included Leach planting something else. At the Texas game in the Cotton Bowl, Leach masterminded a plot to leave a fake play sheet on the field during pregame warmups. A Texas assistant found the sheet and brought it to Longhorns defensive coordinator Carl Reese, who proceeded to call plays thinking it was real. The Longhorns fell behind 17-0 before Reese realized he’d been duped. Texas went on to win 38-28, but Leach had served notice that he’d be a massive pain for Big 12 defensive coordinators.

Leach wasn’t in Norman for the national title. That first year at Oklahoma impressed Texas Tech brass, and Leach was hired to replace longtime coach Spike Dykes. There, Leach would meet another quarterback destined to become a coach. Leach inherited Kliff Kingsbury, who threw for a modest 3,418 yards and 21 touchdowns in their first season together. In their third season together in 2002, Kingsbury threw for 5,017 yards and 45 touchdowns. Near the end of that season, the Red Raiders upset then-No. 4 Texas and put the rest of the Big 12 on notice. The funky offense run by the weird coach with the law degree could beat anyone.

Leach reached the height of his success at Texas Tech in 2008 when the Red Raiders went 11-1 and found themselves locked in a three-way tie with Texas — which Texas Tech beat — and Oklahoma — which beat Texas Tech — atop the Big 12 South. Oklahoma was chosen to play in the Big 12 title game by virtue of its higher Bowl Championship Series ranking, but Leach had become a household name in the world of college football, and teams across the country were either borrowing his concepts or hiring former assistants such as Dana Holgorsen.

Leach’s time at Texas Tech wouldn’t last much longer. In 2009, Leach was accused of mistreating receiver Adam James. James, the son of former SMU star and then-ESPN commentator Craig James, accused Leach of ordering him to be placed in a closet for several hours while sitting out practice recovering from a concussion. Texas Tech’s trainer later contradicted James’ story, saying that James was told to stay in a large room typically used for visiting team media interviews at Jones AT&T Stadium.

Texas Tech fired Leach days before the Red Raiders were to play Michigan State in the Alamo Bowl. Leach later filed suit against Texas Tech and ESPN. Those suits were dismissed, though Leach said repeatedly that he intended to keep fighting Texas Tech for the money he believed the school was contractually bound to pay him.

While documents and interviews surrounding those lawsuits vindicated Leach with regard to the James incident, he did not always have the best relationship with some players. Last week, Mississippi State tailback Dillon Johnson announced his intention to enter the transfer portal. The graphic Johnson tweeted out began like many similar announcements. He thanked his family and teammates and Mississippi State fans. Then the announcement took a turn.

“With that being said, since I am not very tough and Leach is glad I am leaving, I will be entering my name into the transfer portal with the hopes of finding a more fit playing environment for me,” Johnson wrote. The following morning, someone posted a video on Twitter containing audio of Leach saying “I don’t think (Johnson) is very tough.”

Leach had a habit of questioning the toughness of his players when dissatisfied with their performances. “Instead of playing hard you want to sit behind a shade tree, eat a fish sandwich and drink a lemonade with your fat little girlfriend,” Leach said of his Mississippi State team this season after the Bulldogs allowed Auburn to come back and force overtime in a game Mississippi State ultimately won.

After a loss to Oklahoma State in 2007, Leach said of his defense: “The entire first half we got hit in the mouth and acted like somebody took our lunch money. All we wanted to do was have pouty expressions on our face until somebody dabbed our little tears off and made us (expletive) feel better. And then we’d go out there and try harder once our mommies told us we were OK.”

Don’t remember that last one? There’s a good reason. In the other head coach’s news conference after that same game, Cowboys coach Mike Gundy emphatically announced his gender and age while criticizing a column written about one of his quarterbacks.

Leach was the first to admit that he wasn’t for everyone. He could be blunt and profane in meetings and practices. He didn’t apologize for that, either.

But those were qualities that many of his former players admired. Some of those players — Holgorsen at Iowa Wesleyan, Kingsbury and Graham Harrell at Texas Tech — became coaches. Leach quickly recognized Texas Tech walk-on quarterback Lincoln Riley’s limitations as a thrower. At the same time, Leach sensed Riley’s offensive mind might be limitless. So he offered the kid a spot as a student assistant. Riley rose quickly to receivers coach, and at 23 Riley wound up calling the plays in the Alamo Bowl days after Leach was fired. Riley won four Big 12 titles at Oklahoma, and he just finished his first regular season as head coach at USC with a loss in the Pac-12 title game. When Caleb Williams held the Heisman Trophy aloft on Saturday in New York, he became the third of Riley’s quarterbacks to win the award.

On Sunday, Riley asked for prayers for Leach.

Leach’s final game was a 24-22 Egg Bowl win at Ole Miss. It was Leach’s first in three seasons in the series, but he had no plans for it to be the last. “The better we get, the more we’ll be able to hoist trophies,” Leach told reporters after the game. “If that’s all it takes, I’m going to invent a trophy for every game so they can try to hoist something up.”

Leach won’t get the chance to invent more trophies, but he will play a role in the hoisting of plenty. Every time a team that runs a version of Stick or Mesh — and that’s almost every non-triple option team at every level of football — wins a championship, Leach will have had a hand in it.

If those people at Key West High had known how badly Leach wanted their head coaching job back in 1996, all that offensive magic might have remained confined to one little island. Instead, it spread all across the football world.

(Top photo: Justin Ford / Getty)