SWING. YOUR. SWORDS. (HT: Doc Saturday, of course, who got them mad Rivals hookups.)

Clearly this shows the Red Rangers displaying great hands and understanding how to control the flow of a game. Shortly after this picture was taken the Oklahoma defensive line came and kicked them in the back of the thighs Switzer-style, causing the linemen to piss uncontrollably all over themselves in the process. (Consolation: it didn’t happen on national television this time.)

Mike Leach is winning this year’s Franchione award for excessive motivational hullabaloo. Fresh on the heels of making receiver Edward Britton study on the fifty yard line, Leach now has his players walking a plank in practice to show them the importance of your mindset in a field full of distractions, and also to prepare them for their final test when they actually will be asked to walk across a plank stretched between two buildings over ten stories above the hard, unforgiving earth of Lubbock.

As the Red Raiders were warming up, Leach had a 10- to 12-foot 2×4 board placed flat on the ground and called the players to huddle up around him. He then called up four players at random…and told them to walk down the length of the board without losing their balance…After they had finished without much trouble, Leach looked out as his assembled players and asked rhetorically, “Now, what if it [the board] was suspended 10 stories high?”

The article then mentions that Leach’s point “really hit home,” but we don’t think it did. At one point in the next six months or so, Mike Leach is going to ask you to walk between two buildings–perhaps in the middle of the night, maybe just after class, whenever you least expect it, young Red Raider. This is the way of the League of Shadows, and you cannot turn back now. (Who showed him Man on Wire? Who really thought this wouldn’t end in tears somewhere down the road?)

In which we hereby evaluate the stock price of the S.S. Leach, a maritime property currently owned by landlubbing investors in Lubbock, Texas, but likely on sale within the next year in an IPO or sudden hostile takeover. All investing advice is exactly that: advice. As with any investment, returns may vary, unless we’re talking about Chan Gailey, who is scientifically proven to yield an exact 7-5 record every year over a 20 year period.

Year in profile: Stock price peaked dramatically on 11/8 with a 56-20 stripping of Oklahoma State, taking the team to 10-0 in the hottest heat of the Great Big 12 South Bubble of 2008. Leach was saluted as a genius come full blossom, and found his minions pollinating press posies with prodigious praise prodigiously:

But if he had gone to say, U.S.C., 10 years ago and installed his system there, it would be comical. He would score every time – and he would have a defense by default because he would get great athletes.

Bubbl’d. The proclamations of a Leachian Annus Mirabilis proved premature: while Texas Tech ran out to their best record ever and beat number one Texas in the process, the remainder of the year fell under the shadow of as dramatic a pantsing as could be envisioned. We speak, of course, of the Nutcrush at Norman.

Losing 65-21 on national television qualified as a dramatic market correction, but especially so for the Red Raiders’ vaunted line, comprised of Mankind, The Burrito Tower, and many men with many nicknames that all evaporated into a uniform moniker of “Speed Bump.” Texas Tech looked both out-hustled and out-coached, a combination sending Texas Tech’s stock price plummeting as the bubble began to burst.

Double-bubbl’d. The full correction came in the Cotton Bowl when Tech was run roughshod by Ole Miss, the by-proxy national champion, in a 47-31 brawl following pattern for all Texas Tech losses: abundant points topped by being outmuscled by the other team at the line of scrimmage and bleeding out on defense despite new ownership, new attitude, pardon our mess, try our new flavor, blah blah blah.

Outlook: A case of things changing and remaining the same. We remain convinced that a coach puts together one kind of team and is incapable of doing much else. Though he may have the excuse of working with “scraps” of recruiting, Leach’s teams remain indifferent on defense and prone to losing games to anyone with an edge along the lines. (Football nostrums 101, yes, but what of the “it-doesn’t-matter-because-the-scheme-cures-all” argument?)

It gets worse for Leach when you consider the timing of his current contract tiff. With all the major coaching jobs full, Leach is now locked into Texas Tech for the foreseeable future. He’s a lousy interview–okay, not lousy, but he’s weird, and that scares the Muggles a bit too much for their own good–and tends to commit the cardinal sin of saying whatever he thinks. (Again, a great and unique trait disparaged by the tiny dwarf-minds of the universe.)

Current stock outlook: Bear-ish. Right, now, Leach is a financial services stock. Capable of great heights, but stuck in a deep rut created of circumstances not entirely under his control. Like any good pirate, capable of striking with flair on a hot streak, and then scuttling his own good fortune when lined up head to head with a ship of the line. Caveat emptor.

De’Shon Sanders is the snowman, and he’s gonna melt under the interrogation lamps: the reserve defensive back for the Texas Tech Red Raiders was arrested at 1:30 in the morning today in Lubbock by DEA agents. Please note the scary Federal acronym. That’s the DEA, as in “pound-you-in-the-ass federal prison” Feds. Sanders, caught with over 50 grams of cocaine, is trouble spelled with a capital DAMN.

Sanders is also a housemate of Michael Crabtree. Crabtree has not been implicated in the case in any way.

It cannot help Mike Leach’s efforts to sufficiently gain leverage to bleed some extra booty from the rules of his home port to have this happen, and it is a marginal distraction for Washington, who might be the team most serious about hiring Leach as a head coach. As for Auburn, who probably has a booster who is already literally throwing money at him and crying into the phone to him, this won’t matter OH GOD WHAT HAVE WE DONE PLEASE COME COACH OUR FOOTBALL TEAM HOLY GOD WHAT HAVE WE DONE.

LSUFreek was out with IT problems for much of the week, but all has been reconciled in the universe and is back on its proper axis.

Yes, it’s good to have you back, sir.

65-21 and Bob Stoops is riding his invisible roller coaster all the way to Bedlam. Oklahoma could have made the scorers use colors to denote what they were doing, if they had really dropped the hammer. We think a final of “Periwinkle-three to 21″ would have been fascinating.