Cal Fans May Be Curious How Mike Leach Will Do at Mississippi State

He made Washington State a title contender, so other Pac-12 coaches may not be sorry to see him go

How will Mike Leach’s act play in Starkville, Miss.?

Cal fans no doubt are anxious to find out, especially now that he has former Stanford quarterback K.J. Costello to work with..

An interview with Mississippi State’s new coach was conducted by Dennis Dodd at CBSSports.com, and the article was posted on Sunday.

At the heart of the matter were questions about whether Leach can win in the tough Southeastern Conference after experiencing success at Texas Tech and Washington State. As usual Leach takes the interview on his entertaining tangent.

Cal and other Pac-12 schools are probably glad Leach is out of the conference, partly because he made the lowly Cougars into a title contender, but also because he was not always kind to the state of California.

We particularly recall his rant last year after California legislators passed a law requiring athletes to be paid for endorsements.

The part referring to California's legislators went like this:

“The alarming thing is how these narcissistic politicians just want to try to embrace it and get their name on the front of it,” Leach said in the video before adding some sarcasm. “We got problems everywhere and that’s what we need is . . . one thing that’s working really well around here is college sports, so now we need their help to screw it up like they have pretty much everything else.

“So I think it’s brilliant to get as many politicians involved as we can, in particular state legislators from California, ‘cause with all the messes they have going on, I think everyone in California would agree that it’s in that state’s best interests for their legislators to focus on college football rather than the problems at hand that they have in that state.

“And I also think it’s a tragedy to their citizens that they’re not more focused on those things, they’re focused on themselves, because there’s a lot of people that could use their assistance there. So I think it’s a total dereliction of duty on their part.

“And do I think they can multi-task and do more things than one? I’ve been asked that, absolutely not. They’ve proven they can’t and they haven’t really proven they can do one thing at a time, so we’ll see how that unfolds.”

Cal fans can take solace in the fact that the Bears went 5-3 against Washington State in Leach's eight years as the Cougars' head coach. That includes a 37-3 rout of the Cougars in 2017 when Washington State was ranked No. 8. Justin Wilcox always had the defensive answer to Leach's passing attack.

Follow Jake Curtis of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jakecurtis53

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