Mike Leach fails in legal battle over firing at Texas Tech

Washington State coach Mike Leach has long been one of college football’s most candid speakers. Just in the last two years, Leach has appeared onstage with Donald Trump, let loose on Chicago Cubs fans, and drawn a Pac-12 fine for publicly accusing an opposing coach of cheating by stealing his signs.

Leach’s Twitter account, @Coach_Leach, is mostly a collection of retweets on everything from WSU players to inspirational quotes to climate change denials. But of late, Leach has shared a lot about sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine that protects governments from being sued. That’s prevented Leach from litigating in court a years-long dispute with his former employer, Texas Tech. Now Leach is litigating it by tweet.

District Court Judge Bill Sowder has dismissed Mike Leach’s defamation lawsuit against Craig James, ESPN and Spaeth Communications, according to a report from KCBD-TV in Lubbock. In a statement, Spaeth Communications attorney Scott McLaughlin said the truth won out.

With the dismissal, all of Leach’s lawsuits stemming from his firing at Texas Tech are resolved. His case against the university was dismissed and his appeal was denied by the Texas Supreme Court in February. However, the Washington State head coach can still appeal the decision by Judge Sowder.

A man used his power to take another man’s job. So, of course, it’s Mike Leach that’s doing the bullying here.

Update: Via Awful Announcing, there’s now a video version:

For more on Red Raiders football, visit Texas Tech blog Double-T Nation.

So you’re telling us, Peter Berg, that if there’s a Friday Night Lights movie*, it could be loosely based on the trials of Mike Leach, hopefully featuring Buddy Garrity as the heroic car salesman who steps up to pay coach’s due bonus when Lubbock State University refuses to do so after Riggins passes out drunk within five feet of an electrical closet? Just tell us how much money you need and where to start camping in line.

Who might play Leach, if it doesn’t end up being Coach Eric Taylor who’s getting fired by a Craig James character**? The obvious recommendation:

Craig James’ Senate campaign in Texas has a pair of big, Texas-centric scandals to overcome, leaving the former SMU star looking for a little help wherever he can find it:

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I’ll just let Washington State blog Coug Center take it from here. A sampling of Brian Floyd’s asunder-renting of Texas Tech’s letter regarding Mike Leach’s settlement request:

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Mike Leach’s new lawyer stayed on the offensive this week, taking his tour to -- where else? -- Paul Finebaum’s show on Wednesday. In just about a week of work, Stephen Heninger, formerly lawyer for Mike Price and current lead attorney for Leach, has already sent out a press release accusing Craig James of making conflicting statements and called into The Finebaum Show. There’s probably not a better way to get started than this.

Heninger’s appearance on Finebaum was a lot of the same, with updates on the two cases Leach is pursuing and more on James’ role in the whole ordeal. Right now, the suit against Texas Tech is waiting for a sovereign immunity ruling, and the suit against ESPN, Spaeth Communications and James is waiting on the Texas Tech case. It’s all intertwined and all waiting on the complicated sovereign immunity issue.

I’m not a lawyer, but that’s probably not going to stop me from playing one on the Internet for a moment. On Thursday, Mike Leach hired a new lead lawyer -- the last having stepped down quietly a week or two ago. The lawyer is the same one that represented Mike Price back in the day, and his new legal team seems to have gone on the offensive immediately.

This press release is how Stephen Heninger, Leach’s lawyer, introduced himself. It’s lengthy, it’s thorough, and it essentially takes dead aim at Craig James. The summary, which hopefully makes sense:

For more on Leach, visit Washington State blog Coug Center.

You knew ESPN would respond in some fashion to former employee Bruce Feldman’s Thursday multimedia blitz. After Feldman tore apart the company on the Dan Patrick Show, at SI.com and at the Wall Street Journal over his suspension last month for participating in Mike Leach’s book, the college football world granted the floor to ESPN:

Nothing changes the fact that ESPN still allows Craig James to talk about college football after he hired a PR firm to get a college football coach fired, and nothing changes the growing perception that ESPN’s Longhorn Network is already affecting its coverage of the team.

Bruce Feldman’s suspension at ESPN, which was never actually a suspension despite being a suspension, somehow dragged on for more than a month, with Feldman’s last ESPN-sanctioned tweet coming on July 13. Thursday, Feldman uttered, announcing he’s moved on to CBS Sports. He then went on the Dan Patrick Show to talk about the Mike Leach book that got him suspended in the first place due to its unflattering (accurate) portrayal of ESPN golden boy Craig James.

Which is the perfect setting, of course. Patrick is a fellow former ESPNer who’s had plenty of things to say about his ex-employer. Feldman teed off on ESPN and James, saying he lost faith in his longtime bosses after being the first ESPN.com hire 17 years ago.

Here’s audio of the interview, and you should go listen to it immediately, but here’s an attempt at a quick transcript. And here’s video via SportsGrid, in case you like looking at Dan Patrick:

Bruce Feldman wasn’t suspended. Or maybe he was. None of us know for sure, and it will probably stay that way, with one side steadfast in the assertion ESPN put him on the sidelines and ESPN steadfast in the assertion it didn’t. And at this point, the argument has devolved into a debate about semantics, triggered by an oddly-worded press release from the WorldWide Leader.

Read the press release again, noting it says Feldman was never suspended, but will now resume his normal duties. Call it what you want, but throwing in a line about him resuming his duties clearly implies some kind of suspension -- pressing the pause button, if you will.

After being mercilessly ripped on Twitter for the better part of a day, ESPN now says that its suspension of Bruce Feldman for participating in a book by Mike Leach (after getting the network’s permission to participate) wasn’t a suspension at all. Here’s the entire statement (which seems to be loading right now).

Maybe I’m just a stickler for silly things like ‘coherence’ and ‘the meanings of words,’ but ... if he wasn’t suspended, what was there to “resume”? Why was he (apparently) not even allowed to tweet during the review period? And if he honestly wasn’t suspended, why did ESPN wait to make a statement while every sportswriter from Tallahassee to Tacoma was trashing the network Thursday night? It’s good to see that Feldman is back on the job, but let’s be clear - by every indication, he really was suspended, and what’s really going on here is that ESPN has given up trying to defend the indefensible.

While Feldman has remained quiet, though, Leach has been very publicly defending him and the book. During his interview with the Big Dog, Joe Rose on WQAM in Miami (via Sports Radio Interviews), he accused ESPN of having an agenda and responded to the assertion that James may be the channel’s golden boy:

During World War II, General Joseph Stilwell had to fight a war in China without troops, supplies, or help from his allies. It was bound to happen: a war machine is a big thing to run, and eventually some lonely department is going to fall into a hole of bureaucratic neglect. That vacuum of oversight will be filled by someone, and in most cases that vacuum will be filled by someone completely insane and incompetent.

Case in point: Stilwell had to answer to Chiang Kai-Shek, a morphine-addicted lecher who would go on after the war to offload the entire Bank of China onto a boat, go to Taiwan, and slaughter tens of thousands of native islanders. Like many people who love power, he was completely crazy. During the middle of one battle, as Stilwell and his troops fought for survival in Burma, as the entire campaign was “crashing down around his ears,” Stilwell was pulled to the back lines for a very, very important message from Chiang. In a perfect world this would have been a promise of reinforcements, supplies, or at the very least, encouragement from his only real ally.

It’s not often you see a media member trend because of the outrage of their suspension. But it’s also not often you see a major media organization drop the hammer on one of its most beloved reporters for something seemingly innocuous. Yet here we are: Bruce Feldman is on the outs with ESPN, and a social uprising on Twitter is afoot. College football fans are a passionate bunch, and when one of their own quality reporters goes down, they rally.

And rally they did. Here’s what the trending topics on Twitter look like. That’s Feldman, above Harry Potter and below Sexual Fear. This is an odd list of topics, but nevertheless!

Senior writer at ESPN the Magazine Bruce Feldman has been suspended indefinitely by the Worldwide Leader in yet another display of muscle-flexing from the head honchos in Bristol. Via Sports By Brooks:

If SbB is to be believed, the move is not only a head-scratcher, but a ridiculously over-the-top one. Feldman is a talented writer — just read this piece he wrote on Mike Leach before the whole controversy blew up — who doesn’t appear to have an ulterior motive to bash the mothership.

In December of 2009, Texas Tech fired Mike Leach. A couple of weeks later, Leach filed a wrongful termination suit against the school. A year passed, likely full of lawyer-y type stuff, and now this: the 7th Court of Appeals has thrown out Leach’s breach of contract claim.

Essentially the court ruled on Friday that Texas Tech is “immune to Leach’s attempts to receive monetary damages from the university.”

Short recap: Craig James’ son, Adam, was allegedly shut in a closet while he had a concussion. Mike Leach was eventually fired, Craig James was bumped from Alamo Bowl duty, lawyers descended. Which brings us to this.

And why would Leach think Spaeth Communications had anything to do with the purported clip post online of Adam James in the tight space?

Less than sixty shopping days until Leachmas! For those of you not following along in your page-a-day Countdown To Mike Leach Calling Craig James Horrible Names In Court calendars, look alive. We’re under two months now until the Dread Cap’n Leach faces Texas Tech’s band of marauding bureaucrats before the jolly magistrate:

The Amarillo appeals court handling former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach’s lawsuit against the university over his 2009 firing has set Oct. 7 for oral arguments.

The school in Lubbock is appealing a trial court judge’s ruling that, by its conduct, the university waived its right to sovereign immunity in Leach’s breach of conduct claim.Oct. 7, by the way, falls the week after the Iowa State game, so it’s fairly safe to say spirits will be high on the University’s side. It’s also a mere two days before the Red Raiders are scheduled to meet Baylor at the Cotton Bowl. Will the old Cap’n is planning on pressing his pirate academy student section into service for a few warmup cheers on the courthouse steps? Stay tuned.

Follow along with college football’s latest trial of the century here and at SBN’s Texas Tech community, Double-T Nation.

Man, Craig James just looks better and better in the whole Mike Leach ordeal. He already developed enough of a reputation over his and his son’s actions that set the dominoes in motion, eventually leading to Leach’s firing. Wednesday night it was revealed for the first time that James threatened to sue the university if it didn’t investigate then-coach Mike Leach.

Through his spokesperson, James denies the allegation. Not that it matters much at this point. All parties involved certainly can’t look much worse anyway.

This was an inevitable end for the Texas Tech-Mike Leach kerfuffle, but still. Mike Leach officially announced that he will seek legal retribution against Texas Tech University. From the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal:

This comes on the heels of motions that Leach’s legal team filed on Thursday, which petitioned the court for a speedy trial. This is going to be fun!

You can’t be good at everything. Take Bob Davie, for instance. Bob Davie can tan. My god, can that man tan. Bob Davie has a multi-layered coating of sun-baked skin flakes a rotisserie chicken would envy. If people randomly approach him on the street with basting brushes and holding forks, surely they’re not to blame.

No one pays him to think, though. He’s paid to talk, and on ESPN these can be very different things depending on who’s doing the speaking. Davie is known as an announcer these days for ESPN’s college football team. He has trademarks. He overemphasizes unimportant words in sentences like this: “The most important thing IN the game is taking care OF the footbaw.” He also loves saying the word “footbaw,” which would be charming if it didn’t make up thirty percent of what he said. Take this sentence from Saturday’s broadcast of the Alamo Bowl, for example: