NCAA Football

Some Of Mike Leach’s Seniors Have An “Empty Corpse” Quality

by Glenn Davis | 5:02 pm, October 10th, 2012

If you’re like me, when you picture a team of football-playing zombies, you think to yourself, “That would be the scariest football team ever.” Who wants to deal with a bunch of undead creeps who don’t care one bit about your well-being – don’t care a bit about your life – and will storm all over the field in an unthinking rampage? You think regular football is dangerous? You don’t want to see what would happen against the hypothetical zombie team, believe me.

Or maybe you do. Because if what Washington State coach Mike Leach said recently is any indication, a zombie team might actually not be that good. Leach’s own Washington State Cougars are the zombie team in question, they’re only 2-4 (0-3 in the Pac-12), and their coach sounds none too happy about the way they’ve handled themselves on the field:

“Some of (the seniors) have been great and some of them have been very poor. Some of them have had kind of this zombie-like, go through the motions, everything is like how it’s always been, that’s how it’ll always be.

“Some of them quite honestly have an empty-corpse quality. That’s not pleasant to say or pleasant to think about, but that’s a fact.”

Well, what might be really unpleasant to think about is that Leach seems to be so confident in knowing exactly what “an empty-corpse quality” is. Further, thinking about it more, I do see how a zombie team might be less than formidable – the human team would almost certainly have organization in their favor. The zombies would have flesh-ripping prowess on their side, but the padding, helmets and facemasks would at least make that a bit tougher.

And so zombies join pirates, fat little girlfriends, and computer schemes in the Leach lexicon. Maybe Wazzu will come out to this against Cal on Saturday. And let’s face it – when it comes to his team, Leach isn’t totally wrong. Yeah, their last two losses – both to top 25 teams – are totally understandable, but before that? They lost to Colorado. One-win, down-35-to-Fresno-State-after-one-quarter Colorado. And to paraphrase a prominent non-zombie pop cultural figure…