I Have No Idea Why This Is Being Released Now, But This Should Be Fun: This morning, the LAJ had a link for Leach emails from over a year ago, and I swear I've read these before, or maybe I just think I've read these before. The summer summary is that there are lots of emails from Jim Sowell, who wanted a contract that would make it easy to terminate Leach. I don't know why this popped up in my Google Reader now or why the LAJ published this on their website now. I went ahead and saved these to a PDF and uploaded them to the SB Nation servers for posterity. We've been down this road before and I didn't think that there was anything that we haven't heard before, but I'm also reading these for the first time in the morning with one cup of coffee under my belt.
In other Leach news, Maryland head coach Ralph Friedgen was fired, he was paid his $2 million buyout and the Maryland athletic director stated that Leach is on the short-list of candidates to replace Friedgen. DMN's Chuck Carlton writes that Leach is the right guy for the job.
Miscellaneous: There's no Texas Tech news out there, but there are some football specific odds and ends . . . BYU offensive coordinator Robert Anae has been notified by their head coach, Bronco Mendenhall, that the entire offensive staff should be looking for a job. For those of you who don't know, Anae was an offensive line coach at Texas Tech from 2000 through 2004 and then went to BYU, his alma mater, in 2005 to be the offensive coordinator. I would guess that if Leach gets the Maryland job, there may not be a better guy to hire to be the offensive coordinator and line coach than Anae . . . Tulsa World's Dave Sittler writes that the Big 12 needs to win their bowl games. It stinks that this article was posted this morning as I had already written and scheduled to post later this morning a blog-post about how the Big 12 needs to lose their bowl games. Damn, I've wasted all of that time . . . AAS has an editorial about Lake Travis' 4 consecutive state titles in football. I've looked for highlights on the FSSW website, but all I've been able to find is this news report from KXAN in Austin with some highlights:
Lake Travis 4th (via kxan)
Depressing Power Rankings: Rush The Court's Owen Kemp with this week's look at the Big 12 and your Red Raiders are at the bottom of his power rankings:
12. Texas Tech (5-6) – Texas Tech is on a three-game skid with the last two coming against mid-major talent. Tech had the offensive talent returning, but they needed to improve defensively and on the boards. Neither of those things have happened.
If you'd like to be even a little more depressed, KenPom, who has lots of fancy statistics, also has a season-long game prediction model and right now, the numbers say that Texas Tech is favored to win one conference game this year, against Oklahoma. I scoffed at the numbers last year, thinking there was no way that Texas Tech would only win 4 conference games and I think he was pretty darned accurate.