How 'The Price Is Right' helped Leach choose team captain

Mike Leach Jake Crandall / USA TODAY NETWORK

How 'The Price Is Right' helped Mike Leach choose a team captain at Washington State

By Adam Gretz | Last updated 12/13/22

There were two things you could always say about Mike Leach.

The first was that he did things in his own, unique way. The second was that you never knew what you were going to get from him when somebody stuck a microphone in his face and asked him a question.

Those two things met at one amazing confluence in 2016 when he discussed choosing Washington State running back Jamal Morrow as his team captain.

This was one of his most fascinating and hilarious moments.

It was during a Week 8 news conference that year when he revealed Morrow's performance on the TV game show "The Price Is Right: was the main reason he named him team captain.

Seriously.

Leach, who died Monday, explained that choosing a team captain was an inexact science, and all the team captain had to do was call heads or tails for the coin toss. He was so impressed with Morrow's luck on "The Price Is Right" that he decided to give him the task of handling the weekly coin flip, and in Leach's words, he won that coin toss quite often.

My favorite thing Mike Leach did at Washington State was choose Jamal Morrow to be team captain solely based on his performance on "The Price is Right" pic.twitter.com/uV3I8B6GPg
— Sam Cooper (@SamDCooper) December 13, 2022

Most coaches (like, 99.9 percent of them) would have some in-depth reasoning for their team captain choices and expect them to be emotional and physical leaders in that role, even though a letter on a jersey has nothing to do with actual leadership. Leach came to realize that and decided to make this particular pick in a way that only he could.

That was the essence of the Leach news conference because you just never knew what was going to be said next.

You might get an analysis of pirates versus vikings, a ranking of Halloween candy (twice) or something else that was not even remotely related to football. It was a big part of what made him unique.

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