Mike Leach has been at the front of the passing revolution in football circles for three decades.  He worked with Hal Mumme at Iowa Wesleyan in 1989, and that’s where the two began creating the Air Raid offense. Together they moved on to Valdosta State in Georgia, and then up to major college football when they moved to Kentucky in 1997.   There, Leach mentored a future number one overall draft pick; two years later, he moved to Oklahoma and helped the Sooners win a national title before embarking on a decade-long stint in Lubbock as head coach of the Texas Tech Red Raiders.  And since 2012, Leach has been the head coach at Washington State.

The table below shows all of Leach’s starting quarterbacks during his time in major college football:

These quarterbacks amassed amazing numbers under Leach, but have never made much of an impact in the NFL. Tim Couch was the first of many quarterbacks drafted by the new Browns, and while he flashed some talent, injuries and a weak supporting cast ruined his career. Couch finished with a 22-37 record and had the worst passing numbers of the 30 quarterbacks to throw 1,000 pass attempts during his time in the NFL.

Josh Heupel was drafted by Miami with the 177th pick in the 2001 draft, but by that time, 6th round quarterbacks drafted by AFC East teams had sold their souls to the devil. He never played in an NFL regular season game.

Kliff Kingsbury, who produced video game numbers under Leach at Texas Tech, was a 6th round pick to the Patriots in 2003, and he suffered a simialr fate, completing 1 of 2 passes in his career.

B.J. Symons was the 248th pick to Houston in the 2004 Draft, but he never played in an NFL game.

Cumbie and Hodges both went undrafted, and while they made it to NFL teams in the preseason, neither ever made it to a regular season roster.

The last big star in Lubbock, Graham Harrell, went undrafted, too: he wound up throwing 4 pass attempts with the Packers in his entire NFL career.  Leach’s last two Texas Tech quarterbacks, Sheffield and Potts, didn’t make it to the NFL.

Leach’s Cougars quarterbacks haven’t been any better.  Jeff Tuel did start a game in the NFL after going undrafted, but it wasn’t pretty.  Halliday didn’t make it to the NFL.  With the 199th pick in the 2018 Draft, the Titans drafted Luke Falk, and while he just started his first NFL game, it didn’t go very well.  ^[1]Tyler Hilinksi, who replaced Falk in 2017, tragically died in 2018, and an autopsy revealed that he suffered from CTE.

Gardner Minshew II was Washington State’s starter in 2018, and like most Leach quarterbacks, he put up eye-popping numbers. He led the NCAA last season in pass attempts, pass completions, ranked 2nd in passing yards nationally to Dwayne Haskins, and ranked 4th in passing touchdowns to Haskins, Tua Tagovailoa, and Kyler Murray. He set a single-season Pac-12 record for passing yards, but it didn’t come close to cracking the Leach top-4 seasons in passing yards. He was drafted by Jacksonville with the 178th pick in the 2019 Draft, one pick later than Heupel went 18 years earlier.

You can understand the hesitation teams had in drafting a Leach quarterback with great stats: with the exception of Couch, none of them had ever come close to showing the ability to be an NFL starter.  And Couch, at least statistically, was a terrible one.  Even non-Leach “Air Raid” quarterbacks who were 1st or 2nd round picks like Geno Smith, Johnny Manziel, Brandon Weeden, and Kevin Kolb had flamed out in the NFL.  As recently as two years ago, the question was whether Patrick Mahomes could make it in the NFL as an Air Raid quarterback, although Jared Goff wound up answering that question before Mahomes ever started an NFL game (and that same year, Nick Foles won the Super Bowl and Case Keenum had his breakout season: 2017 was really the year of the Air Raid in the NFL).

Of course, eventually the best college teams hired the Air Raid coaches, because well, those were the best coaches.   And so you have a national powerhouse like Oklahoma bringing in Lincoln Riley as head coach, a longtime Leach disciple at Texas Tech.  Riley’s Sooners have run the Air Raid offense and produced the last two number one picks in Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray, so we are past the days of the offense being treated as gimmicky.

That said, when it comes to pure Leach quarterbacks, there is a good chance that Minshew will be the best one the NFL has ever had.  He’s already got a stranglehold on the #2 spot, and passing Couch’s legacy in the NFL won’t be a tall order.  Minshew is averaging 7.6 ANY/A through 88 passes and has helped revitalize a Jaguars offense. Minshew’s success is going to be fascinating to watch, but it also makes me wonder if Tim Couch’s biggest weakness was that he entered the NFL twenty years too soon.