Like all good carnival hucksters, Wazzu front man Mike Leach uses the sideshow and patter to set the crowd up for the fleece.
He dazzles the rubes with his well-practiced schtick, prattling on about rankings and star ratings, grousing about slights, mocking his own reputation. He'll go into entertaining diatribes and asides, the local hack scribbling feverishly, the crowd's mouths agape, hanging on his every word.
"We're no good," he'll declaim, "We're lazy, entitled and fat. Our quarterback is slow and our linemen our slow-witted. Our receivers are so out of shape they can barely jog back to the huddle. It's a wonder we ever win a game."
It's a coaching tradition of pour-mouthing and deflection that goes back to Lou Holtz at Notre Dame and Arkansas, even far further back to the Single Wing and Gloomy Gil Dobie.
Then he'll launch into a long aside, jerking every head among the torch-lit mass to something else. Maybe Geronimo. Or wedding advice. Pirates. Using coffee as an insecticide. Twitter. The ineptitude of his team. The time he did a cameo on "Friday Night Lights."
The act is well-practiced, and by the time the rubes are reaching for their wallets, Coach has obscured all evidence that he's an assassin in board shorts, a hard-partying mystic who carries a folded piece of paper with eight plays on it, eight plays he's run forever like the initial moves in 3-card monte, a side hustle he's run for years.
It's when he picks up the pace and adds the subtle little wrinkles that heads start swimming and the defense loses their place. His quarterback has thrown for 500 yards and six touchdowns. Receivers are running free all over the place. Some no-name Samoan defensive lineman has eight tackles and three sacks, and Leach escapes town with a gunny sack full of cash and a 47-34 victory.
The pundits never saw it coming, just like the last four times the grubby, disheveled sideshow rolled into town.
He wins games he's never supposed to win with players no one else wants. He kicks them like dogs and bans them from using their cell phones, introducing them to the hard-knock life in the rudest way.
He promises the marks the three-breasted woman and the crocodile boy. They get lost amid the yarns and rough jokes. By the end, they forget what it was they paid $5 for.
The huckster's at the podium, working his patter, all the time thinking about what he'll do after the Holiday Bowl or the Kraft Fight Hunger, a precious two weeks grouper fishing and hanging out in a bar in Key West.
Last weekend the Ducks escaped Husky Stadium with a heady and determined 35-31 victory that's the perfect setup for Leach's trap.
Oregon just beat the two-time defending conference champions in their building. They're 6-1 and ranked 11th in the country. The Cougs are 1-3 in conference and two-touchdown underdogs. Nothing to see here, right?
Except in the marquee win the Ducks exhibited a couple of exploitable weaknesses. One of their veteran cornerbacks got beaten over the top. A 4-star safety gave up a big play on a fade to the corner. The Dawgs quick little running back beat them with outside runs and smart cutbacks, gashing a previously indomitable front for 140 yards.
Even though that defense rallied in the second half to spark an improbable win, they left too much for Leach and his crew to break down and assault on Saturday night.
Coug quarterback Anthony Gordon has thrown for 29 touchdowns and 2,981 yards this season while completing 71% of his passes. He throws to the usual array of greyhounds and misfits, but his chief weapon is running back Max Borghi, 5-10, 198 pounds.
Borghi is the shiv hidden in the gunny shack. He's speedy and deceptive, a low-rent Christian McCaffrey running free on the Paloose. He catches the ball well and squirts and darts for big plays.
Leach sends five guys crisscrossing all over the field with two running deep, and while the cornerbacks and linebackers have their back to the line of scrimmage he has Gordon slip the ball to Borghi on the delay. Other times he'll wheel him down the left sideline in splendid isolation, just a diminutive cannon shot across an empty field, splintering your broadside while The Pirate cackles in rum-soaked glee.
The offense gives them fits. It's so simple but so hard to prepare for, different than what everyone else does, the field inverted, the angles and vectors impossibly changed.
Gordon has this quirky release. The ball comes out almost sideways, with a flick of the wrist, but it's fast and deadly accurate, like a rattlesnake's fangs sinking into the soft thigh of a greenhorn on the forbidding expanse.
A senior who won the job over three guys including a celebrated graduate transfer, he's the latest oddly effective passer Leach has rescued from the football scrapheap and turned into the wizard that runs his show.
If the Ducks have any hangover from their post game dance over Washington, it'll be a rude shock at Autzen for PAC-12 After Dark. It's the perfect setup for the game Leach has run for years. The Cougs have no chance, until suddenly they do.
