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.