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Mike Leach absolutely blasts Mississippi State’s receivers with epic rant about dinosaurs and not having hands
By Rolando Rosa
Published:
There’s perhaps not a better quote in college football than Mike Leach and he delivered one for the (prehistoric) ages after Mississippi State’s 15th consecutive loss to Alabama.
Mississippi State lost 30-6 against Alabama and Leach unleashed on his receivers for their role in the defeat. No receiver had over 73 yards and Leach lamented the numerous drops throughout the loss.
In his postgame press conference, Leach dug deep into his past for a longwinded and fascinating anecdote involving toy dinosaurs and his family’s station wagon.
Via Bama Central:
“Well I think we need to use our hands better. We don’t move our hands very good. You know, when I was a kid and I was in grade school, there was this nice big dinosaur guy. I can’t remember the gas station, but they would give you a free dinosaur [toy]if you filled up there. That’s back when they had commercials on TV and then they would give something to the kids like me,” Leach said. “And then the idea was that you should raise hell with your parents every time you’re in the station wagon. We had one, a good classic like one off the Wonder Years, one of those fake woody ones, you know, fake painted-on wood. But then the best is it would always without exception the finish and the varnish on it would peel. So then it looked more bogus than ever.”
Leach then described how he imagined the station wagon was a space ship and that he learned in school that dinosaurs are a possible evolutionary example of unused body parts disappearing.
“So we had one of those and of course I tried to sit way back, in that jump seat back there, so you could pretend you were in a spaceship or something, and, but anyway, so they’d have these commercials and they’re hoping to get the kids to raise hell, ‘Let’s go to this gas station.’ I can’t remember what the gas station it was, and they’d give you a little dinosaur, you know. And you’d go to grade school and all that, and they’d start talking about evolution like as in if you don’t use a certain part of your body, as time evolves over century upon century, in natural selection, that part of the body disappears and even that animal might disappear.”
OK, so you can probably telling where Leach is going with this. Yep, he feigned apprehension that his Mississippi State receivers are about to have their arms go extinct after all those drops.
“I’m genuinely fearful that on our team if me and the other coaches don’t get them right, that about a generation from now their kids and their grandkids won’t have hands. Because from a lack of use those hands just disappear. Maybe they’ll be like this (Leach does raptor hands at the podium), like those dinosaur hands like this, And you’ve got like a tyrannosaurus rex, which is clearly really good at eating things, with big ol’ jaws and all that stuff, certainly athletic and can run. Those hands are like this (gestures again).”
Leach is still confident in his players but he repeated the “if you don’t use it, you lose it” mantra once again.
“I think we took a very, very, very big step as a team, which we have to correct this. We have to correct this because, you know, I think that it’s best in the end for these guys that they have good hand development and that they don’t evolve to where they don’t have hands. OK, but we definitely didn’t use ours and so there certainly wasn’t any genetic reinforcement on our part that we should maintain our hands.”
Leach wrapped up the hysterical rant hopeful the receivers will regain their hands during the bye week and not go the way of the dinosaurs.
“I mean, and I don’t want all of a sudden guys driving across this country and then they get to Starkville, Mississippi, and all of a sudden there’s these athletic-looking friendly guys, because we have great guys, that don’t have any hands. And I hope that that’s not the case, but that’s where we’re headed right now. And we’re going to try to get that fixed during this off week.”
Mississippi State will take on Auburn on Nov. 5.
