PULLMAN, Wash. -- The conversation started with a question about using plays suggested by prison inmates and quickly shifted to a Valdosta State custodian named Big John who once offered a helpful tip for the school's offensive linemen.
It was typical Mike Leach, for whom football is both an all-consuming passion and merely a platform for indulging his renowned curiosity about the worlds outside of his own.
"I looked at all of them and thought them out," Leach said, pantomiming himself scrawling the so-called "prison plays" on the whiteboard at the front of the room.
And Big John, as it turned out, had correctly noticed Leach's offensive linemen had gradually gotten sloppier in their stances over the course of the season.