This is the biggest football hire MSU has made since Jackie as far as National recognition goes. It's huge for our program and I can't really believe that Mike Leach is OUR coach. I don't think I understood and I certainly didn't anticipate how big it would be until I saw the media hoopla. The difference is Jackie was always seen as an outlaw who was able to skirt the NCAA and had a bad guy image. And Joe Paterno bashed him as well. That led to the media nationally not liking Jackie and as a result they didn't like us. And it was kind of sad in a way because the media ran down teams like our 1998 and 1999 teams that were really good basically because of Jackie. They called our schedule soft and called us lucky. But with Leach the media loves him. It's really going to help our branding a lot because there are people that are just fans of Leach and those people will now be MSU fans casually and follow us. He has a good relationship with Finebaum- which will prevent embarrassment like Finebaum basically hounding Joe Moorhead about the Rutgers job.

I think his tenure could be similar to Jackie's but maybe without the losses to people like La Tech, ULM, Tulane, and etc. just because the talent gap we have now is much bigger between us and the G5 schools than it was in Jackie's time. But I think we'll pull off more upsets than we did under Dan.

I'm not as worried about throwing the ball a lot. The difference between Leach and Croom and Moorhead is that Leach has shown that he can make his system work with 2-3 star recruits. Leach also has a very simple offense so I don't think it's going to be as complicated for our players like it was with Croom and I think Leach is going to demand more discipline than Moorhead and the offense will reap the benefits of that. Leach is not going to start a guy like Guidry and let him drop 2-3 balls a game. He's either going to coach him up or sit him.

Defensively I think as long as we have an elite SEC coordinator like a Charlie Strong that puts pressure on an offense and creates sacks and turnovers we'll be fine. I don't think Leach was ever really able to find his defensive equal at Texas Tech or Wazzu until he found Grich and then things worked out fine. Leach has never had SEC athletes to work with since he last at Kentucky. That should help on both sides of the ball. Improved S&C will help our team out a lot no matter who we hired honestly. We were so out of shape it really hurt us on both sides of the ball.

As far as our QB getting hit- I mean, we used to run the power spread option. You can't tell me that our QB is going to get hit more with Leach than Dan. Some years we're going to have QB injuries and some years we'll be lucky. But that's just football.

I'm fine with Franks. I just hope he comes in soon enough to participate in spring practice. I think that hurt us some with Tommy last year. I actually think we'll be OK at WR. Payton and Osirus are seniors. Austin Williams is a junior and can handle one of the slot positions. Heath and Ducking are JUCO guys- Heath was UA All-American and Ducking is the kind of guy Leach and turn into a productive player. I bet we move Dontae Jones and Keytaeon Thompson to WR. We're adding Tulu who is an UA All-American and Jaden Walley looked good in the MS/AL ASG practices. Pretty decent group of athletes to work with. Especially if they get good coaching and improved S&C.

I agree on Feld.

I don't agree on Cohen. It's pretty clear that Cohen is making a great effort to fix football and is about to sink more money into it. I'm not going to nit pick him over 500K after he landed Mike Leach. It sounds like we're about to invest more in recruiting and analysts as well. We bitched all year long and it looks like he is hearing us and trying to fix it. I was pretty upset that we kept Moorhead after the Egg Bowl- and even moreso after the way he acted in the press conference. Somehow after the Music City Bowl all of our leaders got on the same page finally and it worked out in the end. Plus yeah- we won the Egg Bowl. I bet gameday is a lot better next year as well. And the best part is you know the New Mexico game probably won't be an 11 AM special now.

We'll see about next year. I bet we win more than six though. If we get Franks and Kylin returns all of a sudden we have a fairly senior laden offense potentially. The key is going to be if the JUCO's can adjust quickly on defense. Our DT's will still be young but they're experienced sophomores now. And again- with likely better S&C.