Mike Leach and his best Pac-12 Media Day quotes

This is Mike Leach. He says things and we don't tend to forget what he says. Let's just skip the formalities and move right ahead to the press conference quotables, shall we? Full transcript can be found here.

For more coverage of Pac-12 Media Day from a Cougar perspective, Coug Center has you covered.

Wednesday was Day 1 of Pac-12 media day which the conference should probably rename Mike Leach story hour. Leach was one of the main attractions of Day 1 with his nearly 40-minute session with the media covering the usual topics. Gnats, bear hunting, Geronimo, you know the usual.

With his prowess for telling stories, Leach is a star of what can be a rather dull media day. Session after session of the same cliches can get very old, very quickly. As you might expect, Leach was mentioned in one or two ... or a dozen stories. If you missed anything from Day 1, our story stream has you covered with videos, tweets and more.

On fishing:

"My staff and I went fishing up in McCall, Idaho on the Snake River and got a huge 9.5 foot, 350 pound Sturgeon probably 95 years old. Of course turned him loose so he could pull somebody else's boat around for a while next time. Then my oldest daughter had a granddaughter, so we went to Atlanta for that. Then went to Florida for a little bit, and on my way back from here we go to Bristol, Connecticut to do more of the same. On the way back from that, my second daughter is
getting married in Tulsa, so we'll hit that and be home for several days and be off running for camp."

On living in Macon, Georgia:

Macon might be good weather. It's not very far apart. It's right in between there is a period of time where these gnats get all over your face and they bite. And the Macon crowd is funny. They can sit there like nothing's happening. There would be gnats all over just biting the hell out of your face, and they just -- it doesn't even bother them. You're going like even down in Valdosta, because the gnats rarely got too hot, I guess. And then finally this one high school coach, as I'm recruiting there, he says try this. Now I have big old fat lips, so it didn't work very good. But he could fire up a little puck, kind of blow the gnats off, then they had Skin So Soft, which is big, and I don't know what that is, but evidently gnats don't like it. They rub that all over. But it looked kind of oily, you know? What I think is the gnats don't care about it, but it probably puts a little sheet of oil on there so it's harder to bite you. You don't feel the bite. That's just one guy's theory. I'm sure I'm wrong.

On Geronimo:

Yeah, I hope my players see the world a little like Geronimo as far as conditioning and expecting to be successful, achieving greatness. Not being surprised when you have a high level of success and do things that other people didn't think you could, because you're trained for it. You worked for it. Shouldn't be too surprising, you know?

On coaching places and roadrunners.

Everybody talks about everybody wants to win the weather battle. I'm proud to say I had a bet with a guy from Chicago who said Chicago is windier and colder than Wyoming. But Wyoming dominated them. Our weather is way windier and colder than them, and it heats like this too. Everybody wants to be in a battle for the most uncomfortable as well. You know, he'd go home and we'd have roadrunners running around our field. Actual roadrunners. They're about this high. Their joints and legs go about as high as the guy on a cartoon. Then running around our field, our mascot was a roadrunner. You know, you'd go home that night and guy would say hottest place in the nation today, Phoenix, Arizona, 112°. Well, I drove by the bank all day and it said 123 in Palm Desert, California. Then you go to the mall and there is a T-shirt. On the T-shirt there are two skeletons laying there dead next to a cactus, right and one skeleton says to the other skeleton, yeah, but it's dry heat, you know? So it's the hottest place I've ever coached.