The-Ave.US

Cougar coach swallowed aging internet hoax

WSU’s head football coach Mike Leach is an ardent Trump supporter. That made him an easy mark for a hoax video using edited footage to make it sound like President Obama said, in a 2014 Brussels speech, that Americans are “too small-minded to govern their own affairs and need to surrender their individual rights to a world order.” Read story here.

After Leach viewed the video, which has circulated on the internet for several years, he blasted out a tweet asserting “we” need to have “an open discussion about government.” No, Mike, we need to sit you down and have a conversation between adults about looking up obvious bullshit on Snopes or Politifact before swallowing it whole and looking like a credulous fool. P.S., the Seattle Times story (linked above) says you consider Trump a “friend.” If that’s true, you also could use better friends.

It’s disheartening that the head football coach of one of our state’s major universities is so gullible. Thanks to him, WSU is now a laughingstock. He just made the entire institution look like a bunch of ignorant farm boys, a reputation they already enjoyed west of the mountains in Huskyland in no small part because of him. As he well knows, the Huskies have won 8 of the last 9 Apple Cups, the majority by lopsided margins that made his school’s teams look like, well, farm boys. Mike coached the Cougs in 6 of those games.

(Full Disclosure: This article’s author is a Husky alumnus who rolls on the floor and laughs his butt off every November. I hope that doesn’t get this blog firebombed or something. I honestly can’t help it. In any case, we’re all Americans here, and our interschool rivalry is nothing more than good clean fun in the tradition of an Old West saloon brawl.)

Update: Mike Leach’s jackassery continues. Instead of admitting he was conned by a rightwing internet lie, when told the video was fake, he tweeted, “prove it.” And when shown proof, i.e. Obama’s actual speech, he criticized it, and still refused to concede the fakery and called the video “incomplete,” although he did yank it from his Twitter feed — probably not because it’s untrue, but more likely to avoid further embarrassment to himself. And he attacked a critic of his coaching. Oh, and after saying he still wants a conversation about politics, he added “I’m not particularly sorry” that he perpetuated a malicious political lie. Read this story here. Leach left WSU in January 2020 to take the head coaching job at Mississippi State at a reported salary of $5 million a year.

Photo: Mike Leach leading his lambs to slaughter on November 25, 2017, his fifth straight Apple Cup loss. 

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