Mike Leach is still winning, but can he ever win big?

The most unbridled fun I’ve ever had watching a college football game may have come 10 years ago, when a young wide receiver named Michael Crabtree caught a pass and tiptoed along the sideline for a last-second touchdown to lead Texas Tech to a paradigm-altering victory over Texas. That was the moment when Mike Leach and all of his radical ideas slithered their way firmly into the mainstream; that was the moment when college football became something wilder and weirder than it had ever been before.

A decade later, and here we are: Leach’s Air Raid, or some version or portion thereof, is essentially the de facto offense for a large percentage of the college football programs in America. That is a spectacular thing for those of us who mainline the product on a regular basis, for there is little doubt that Leach’s wide-open philosophy — not to mention the seemingly endless conversational diversions he’s capable of producing — has made college football more enjoyable.

But here’s the odd thing: I’m still not sure if anyone truly takes Leach seriously, at least not the way they take other coaches seriously. It’s odd and probably not coincidental that the two major conferences that have struggled the most in the playoff era — the Big 12 and the Pac-12 — are the two conferences in which Leach has coached and in which his influence is arguably the most widespread. Leach has expanded the depth of both of those conferences by introducing an offense meant to equalize for lesser talent by stretching the field to its limits. At the same time, he’s arguably injured each conference’s playoff chances by encouraging both overarching parity and a perceived lack of defense.

Leach’s Washington State team is now most likely the last best hope for the Pac-12 to avoid missing out on the playoff for a second consecutive season: The Cougars are 6-1 after a 34-20 win over Oregon that drew ESPN’s "College Football GameDay" to his campus for the first time in the show’s history. And yet, it still feels like an illusory 6-1 — like at any moment, perhaps even this weekend against a physical (if undermanned) Stanford team, the flaws in Leach’s philosophy will eventually show themselves.

Some of that is based on Leach’s track record. Three weeks after Crabtree scored that touchdown in 2008, Leach’s team lost to Oklahoma, and lost badly, by a score of 65-21. It turned out that team was flawed, and in the years since, both at Texas Tech and at Washington State, Leach’s teams have never lost fewer than four games. Maybe you can blame that on personnel, since it isn’t exactly easy to recruit kids to either a dusty West Texas college town or a sleepy little burg near the Idaho border. (Nor did the contentious ending to his tenure at Texas Tech help his cause.) But maybe it’s also because Leach has always come across like an outsider, even now.

A funny thing happened during the offseason: According to public records, the University of Tennessee, in the midst of perhaps the most painful coaching search in modern history, wound up turning to Leach for a brief moment. I’m mostly glad it didn’t work out, because I’m not sure if Tennessee or any Southeastern Conference fan base would have had the ability to tolerate Leach’s inherent whimsy, both about football and about life itself.

That may mean Leach completes his career at Pullman, or perhaps even at some small school located on a dusty plain hundreds of miles from the nearest major media market. It may mean that his teams are overachieving and fun but that they’re never quite good enough to make a playoff. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. He’s almost better off trolling on the edges of the sport, even if a decade after a game that forever altered the way the game is played, he can now be considered a pioneer.