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.