The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (50 page)

Joe Giansante had served as an associate AD alongside Mike Marlow at Oregon. He’d also been a play-by-play announcer for the Oregon Sports
Network. A heavyset Italian with slicked-back black hair, Giansante had the gift of gab. He could strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. A journalist by training, he also had a reputation for being a bulldog, the kind of guy who would stay up all night poring over documents to ensure he didn’t miss something.

Marlow and Giansante were close friends, and they’d been talking for months about the prospects of luring Mike Leach to Pullman. Giansante listened to Leach’s show on Sirius Radio on a daily basis. “I was a big advocate of Mike Leach,” Giansante said. “I told Mike Marlow that Leach was the perfect fit for WSU, given their position in the Pac-12 Conference.” Immediately after the loss to Oregon State, Marlow told Giansante that the time had come to get serious about reeling in Leach. Giansante started gathering intelligence.

A week later, on October 29, WSU played Oregon in Eugene. The day before the game, Moos and Marlow ducked into El Torito restaurant for a prearranged, private dinner with Giansante. Over Mexican food and soft drinks, Giansante shared what he had come up with so far. For starters, it looked as if WSU might be in for some tough competition. At least four other schools appeared interested in Leach: Ole Miss, Kansas, Arizona State and UCLA.

But based on what Giansante had learned about Leach, he didn’t see Ole Miss or UCLA as a good fit. Both programs were known for expecting their coaches to do a fair amount of schmoozing with high-end boosters at cocktail parties. Leach didn’t own a suit and preferred to be alone in a film room analyzing game tape. Not a good fit.

Kansas, on the other hand, was a real contender. Leach was best friends with the AD there, and he knew the program well from his Big 12 days at Texas Tech. Arizona State was the wild card. Giansante hadn’t gotten a good read on the situation there.

Moos had questions about Leach’s departure from Tech. He was well aware that Leach had sued Texas Tech, ESPN and a PR firm tied to Craig James. But he wasn’t clear on the facts of the case. Giansante had obtained a copy of Leach’s wrongful termination suit against the university. He’d also read Leach’s autobiography, which gave his take on the Tech situation. “If you read Mike’s book, you’ll get an accurate account of what happened,” Giansante told Moos.

At that point, Giansante hadn’t seen any of the depositions, talked directly to anyone involved in the matter or read Tech’s response to Leach’s legal claims. But he was pretty familiar with Leach’s style. “There is no
question that when he is coaching a football team, it is not a democracy,” Giansante said. “Players don’t get a vote. There are times when players are disgruntled. That happens on any team.”

Moos wasn’t too concerned about the lawsuits. Leach was the plaintiff in each case. It would have been much more worrisome if Leach had been the target of the suits. The bigger concern for Moos was the rumor that Leach was hard to get along with. That one had to be checked out.

Giansante said he’d do more digging.

Thirty minutes into the meal, Moos had heard enough. “Mike, would you excuse us for a few minutes?” he said.

Marlow stepped outside while Moos leaned forward at the table and lowered his voice. “Joe, I’ve got to have someone that can sell me to Mike Leach’s agent.”

Giansante nodded.

“And you know what I did at Oregon when I was AD,” Moos continued.

Giansante nodded again.

“I gotta tell you this humbly,” Moos said. “I need someone who can sell me because right now Washington State has got nothing.”

A few minutes later the two men shook hands, agreeing that Giansante would come on board as a consultant to the athletic department and receive a onetime fee. For bookkeeping purposes, Giansante’s consultancy would entail visiting Pullman and taking a thirty-thousand-foot view of the overall operation from media rights to marketing and advertising and recommend ways that the athletic department might improve things. But Giansante knew the deal: he was there to help reel in Leach.

The following day, Oregon beat WSU 43–28, marking the Cougars’ fourth straight loss and dropping the team to 3-5.

Gary O’Hagan is no run-of-the-mill agent. He started IMG’s coaching practice. His first client was John Wooden. Then he signed NFL coaches Steve Mariucci and Tom Coughlin. Mike Leach was the first college coach he landed. By 2011, O’Hagan represented more college coaches than any agent in America.

The son of a New York City detective, O’Hagan was a Wall Street trader before walking away to try his hand at negotiating multimillion-dollar deals for high-profile coaches. Smart, pushy and connected, O’Hagan knew all the players in the high-finance world of college football. He was at his
home in Minnesota in the first week of November when he got a call from Joe Giansante, who introduced himself as a former associate AD at Oregon. “I’d love to talk to you about Mike Leach and his level of interest in getting back to coaching football,” Giansante began.

O’Hagan had never heard of Giansante. He wanted his background.

Giansante rattled off the names of a few people he had worked with over the years. O’Hagan recognized most of them. Then Giansante said he was calling on behalf of Washington State. WSU, he said, was seriously considering a change at head coach and was looking at Mike Leach.

It was the first that O’Hagan had heard about WSU contemplating a change. He was immediately skeptical. Since Leach had lost his job at Tech two years earlier, O’Hagan had received at least a dozen similar inquiries. None of them had panned out. Moreover, O’Hagan didn’t like working behind the back of a currently employed coach. He never liked it when a school worked to undermine one of his clients. So as long as Paul Wulff was the head coach at WSU, O’Hagan didn’t want to say much.

Nonetheless, he wasn’t opposed to listening. He reached for a pen and paper and took notes as Giansante made his opening overture.

Giansante began by talking about Moos, saying he was a coach’s AD who had the full support of his president. At WSU there would be no interference from the president’s office, regents or boosters. There was one more thing. Giansante had researched how Maryland had almost hired Leach, only to change its mind at the last minute. “They had gone through the entire process,” Giansante said. “And then the president got cold feet and nixed it.” Giansante wanted to assure O’Hagan that a similar thing wouldn’t happen at WSU.

“WSU is not going to be afraid of some of the other things that some schools will be afraid of,” Giansante told O’Hagan.

O’Hagan was intrigued.

Giansante then stressed that Moos knew how to build championship teams. He’d done it at Oregon. He’d also overseen Oregon’s construction of the best facilities of any football program in the country. Plans were under way to expand and upgrade the stadium at Washington State, as well as to build a new state-of-the-art football operations facility. “There is an opportunity to be good here, and it absolutely can happen,” Giansante told him.

O’Hagan marked that down as another plus.

There was one more thing Giansante wanted O’Hagan to know about Moos. WSU was his last stop. There would be no more jobs after this one. Moos wanted to go out with a winning legacy.

O’Hagan has a saying: “The only good pass is a pass that can be caught.”
It’s a sports euphemism for his philosophy about communication. In other words, for your message to get through to a stranger, you have to have the right pitch. It was clear to O’Hagan that Giansante had done his homework on Leach. After his experience at Texas Tech, the last thing Leach wanted was to go to another school where he’d be answering to multiple masters. Leach was looking for a situation where he could work closely with an AD who shared the same vision.

O’Hagan thanked Giansante for his call and said he would pass along the information to Leach.

By the fall of 2011, Mike and Sharon Leach had lived in Key West for nearly two years. They hadn’t owned a car that entire time. They hadn’t even bothered to get Florida driver’s licenses. Leach had a license to go lobstering instead. They fished. They swam. They biked. They lived in bathing suits and cargo shorts. Island life suited them quite well.

Nonetheless, the Leaches were restless without a coaching job. Mike had found plenty of work to occupy his time. He had a radio gig. He’d also been active on the speaking circuit and putting on coaching clinics here and there. But he wanted back into coaching in a bad way. He’d interviewed at a number of places, and in 2010 he was a finalist for the Maryland job. But the circumstances surrounding his departure from Tech weren’t helping matters.

In an attempt to clear his name and tell his story, Leach had gone as far as to write a memoir called
Swing Your Sword
. He was busy promoting it in the fall of 2011. O’Hagan was helping him line up appearances. Each night they’d check in. When Leach called O’Hagan one evening in early November, they went through the typical stuff: How did the event go? How many people showed up?

Then Leach asked if there was anything new on O’Hagan’s front.

“You know, I got a really interesting call from a guy named Joe Giansante,” he said.

“Who is he?”

“He’s working with Washington State University. They may make a change at head coach.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, he was really sharp. I was surprised.”

Leach wanted to know what was so surprising about him. O’Hagan shared Giansante’s comments about Bill Moos. “I really think he gets it, Mike.”

Leach said to keep him posted.

The following morning, O’Hagan heard from Giansante again. “Did you talk to Mike?”

“Yes, I spoke to Mike.”

Pleased, Giansante reiterated that Leach would enjoy working with Bill Moos.

O’Hagan didn’t dispute that. But he preferred not to talk much further about the WSU situation until the season was over or it became clear that the job was truly available. Three years earlier, after Texas Tech knocked off No. 1–ranked Texas, Tennessee officials repeatedly called O’Hagan in an attempt to lure Leach out of Lubbock. When O’Hagan declined to have Leach fly to Tennessee for a job interview during the regular season, Tennessee came up with a creative plan to ensure that no one would know the two sides were talking. The officials offered to fly to Texas in a private plane and rendezvous in the middle of nowhere with Leach. O’Hagan said no way, and a couple weeks later Tennessee hired Lane Kiffin.