Posted on 12/30/2009 11:01:42 AM PST by Carbonsteel
LUBBOCK, Texas - Texas Tech fired coach Mike Leach on Wednesday, just two days after he was suspended by the school as it investigated his treatment of a player with a concussion.
Yeah, the lawyer is a back-of-yellow-pages lawyer.
He’s not exactly a legal scholar.
He needs to go to Midland and get one of the commercial guys to look at the contracts.
Leach obviously, blatantly, punished the kid for reporting a concussion. If Leach could prove the kid knew he didn't have a concussion, he should have yanked his scholarship for lying. Because is this day and age, you can't retaliate against an athlete for reporting a concussion.
Yeah, I know, the punishment was mild. But it was punishment. Leach should have given the kid (a wide receiver)a DVD of Michigan State's last two games, and told him to sit in a the media room, watch it and record every play where Michigan State tried to cover a wide receiver with a running back, or where a defensive back released a wide receiver to a safety -- only the safety wasn't there. Do that, then bench the kid for the Alamo Bowl if he thought the kid was lying, and no one off the team would ever know about this story.
It has been reported that the Tech AD told Leach that he had to apologize, and Leach flatly refused. Good enough. I can respect a "My way or the highway." kind of guy. But that kid of guy has to understand there will be times when the boss tells him that Highway 87 will get him out of Lubbock.
Nothing like hitting "Post," or handing something to the judge, to make the typos leap to your eye.
Down the crapper?
Guess I wasn’t clear enough in my post, but I was speaking of the lawyer being slow, not Leach.
I hope TT and ESPN get nailed to the wall. TT is obviously trying to cheat the coach the money they agreed to pay him.
The president of the university should also be canned for such a knee-jerk reaction. Future recruiting will be very difficult.
Texas Tech has been demoted IMO to that of Ohio State and Notre Dame. I do not care if any of the three ever win another game.I will pull for who is playing against them.
The AD had no choice but to fire Leach for his insubordination in refusing to accept the AD's administrative process. Also, see Pilsner's post #42, where he reports that the AD demanded Leach apologize to the player and Leach flatly refused.
It strikes me that, even if the report about Leach's flat refusal to apologize is false, the AD had to fire Leach for his insubordination in refusing to accept the AD's administrative process and going instead to the court. The news report said he was fired "for cause," so my guess is the cause was insubordination, which only aggravated the already negative publicity for Texas Tech.
The refusal to apologize, if true, would constitute a second count of insubordination. Leach could have saved his job and simply chose not to.
If so, Texas Tech fired Leach because they were about to lose at the TRO stage and would have owed him $800,000 as an immediate bonus.
This is likely just a temporary "win" for Tech. True, he is just one judge, but Sowder had to have concluded on the basis of the evidence before him that Leach was very likely to win on the merits in a lawsuit against Tech.
That suggests that the "administrative process" (and it was unilateral--there was no "process" to it) was as bogus as Adam James's intimations that he was treated like a Nazi concentration camp prisoner.
That process was the AD's unilateral investigation, which had hardly begun. He had every right, and indeed a responsibility, to suspend his employee while investigating--every employer does. I've done it often. When Leach refused to permit that investigative process to proceed, by his attempt to remove the matter to the courts, the AD had no choice but to fire him for his insubordination. Unless there is some explicit language in Leach's contract to the contrary, then the AD did what he had to do to retain authority over his staff.
In other words, at that point the issue no longer was whether Leach acted improperly toward the student but now was whether he acted improperly toward his boss. No employee who is not protected by a contract can, or should, win that fight.
All the “administrative” explanation in the world can still not make that AD look like anything but a dummy. The entire situation is absurd. Firing a coach because he won’t apologize to some kid?
What soft little creatures some kids are now. Our high school coaches used a thick paddle on their guys if it was needed. Nobody thought much about it then, including the parents.
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