You say Raider, I say Twitter

Texas Tech invites the public to a gallery of team frustration
By Matt Hinton

Texas Tech boss Mike Leach has never been much for customs, conventions or arbitrary constraints of any kind, an independent streak that's tended to work in his favor as long as the Raiders' profile has continued to climb. With increased success, though, comes increased expectations, and after Saturday night's last-second loss at Houston dropped its record to 2-2, Tech's chances of equalling last year's breakthrough, 11-win record are essentially nil -- the first time in Leach's nearly decade-long tenure that the team has demonstrably regressed from one season to the next, and the kind of trend that can threaten to turn an eccentric savant into an irresponsible flake.

Naturally, that's led to some frustration, some of it public -- see Marlon Williams' Twitter account for Exhibit A, where the senior linebacker admitted Sunday morning the season is not going as expected, and by Sunday afternoon was expressing outright frustration with Leach's flakiness:



That post has been deleted, but Williams' frustrated reaction to the Houston loss -- "WTF I can't believe what happened man my senior season isn't goin anything like what I busted my azz for .... New week now F$&@" -- remains for now, along with similar sentiments from offensive lineman Brandon Carter:

"This is not how I saw our season," [Carter] wrote on Twitter early Sunday morning. "I just cried like am (sic) idiot. I want us to be so good my last year and I feel like I’m letting everyone down."

Carter also used the feed to break the news that he'd been suspended for next week's game against New Mexico and stripped of his captaincy, which the school later acknowledged, after that post, too, had been deleted once it fueled a round of wire stories Sunday night. One of these days, players are going to realize Facebook and Twitter are public statements akin to sitting in front of a microphone or issuing a press release, and then we won't know anything.

Yep, I knew sooner or later this was going to happen. Its fun to have a crazy, unconventional pirate as your coach until you start losing games. Then all the stuff you used to find endearing about him (like showing up half an hour late for meetings and his legendary spoken/unspoken love of the sauce) become annoying.

Make no mistake, if that 4th-and-1 would have been successful Marlon Williams and any Tech fan would be singing the unconventional pirate's praises. I commend Leach for taking responsibility for the Houston loss but I'm not making any excuses for the way he runs the program. The problem for him now is that he raised expectations to the point that people will begin to question his quirky behavior and decision making when he loses. Sometimes a pirate can beat a soldier. Sometimes a pirate can just be a clown in a funny costume with a parrot. It works both ways.