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2018 Pac-12 Football
Media Day

July 25 on Pac-12 Network
Hollywood & Highland | Hollywood, CA

2018 Pac-12 Football Media Day: Mike Leach fears he might bring the bustle of Los Angeles to Pullman

Jul 25, 2018

When he wasn't busy talking about tweeting videos of a monkey attacking people in a foreign country or a dog using a human bathroom to relieve itself (and flushing the toilet, no less), Washington State football coach Mike Leach was busy extolling the virtues of Pullman, Washington.

Not that there's anything wrong with Los Angeles, where Leach and player representatives Kyle Sweet and Jalen Thompson were discussing the upcoming season at 2018 Pac-12 Football Media Day. After all, there's a lot of trafffic in Los Angeles, and that can lead to humorous situations — at least in Leach's view.

"You might sit in the car, listen to the radio, look at the person beside you — you get flipped off. I always thought it was kind of funny when somebody flipped me off. I'd get a laugh," Leach told reporters Wednesday morning.

But there are sacrifices you'd have to make if you were to live in Pullman. Chief among them: not being able to wait in line anymore.

"Good food is right there. 'Well, I'd like to wait in line.' 'Ok, well you can stand there, but I'll be here at the counter doing nothing, so when you're ready to order, come order,'" Leach continued.

But if you can get past not being able to wait in line and not having to plan ahead ("it sucks if you want to develop your planning skills," Leach noted about Pullman), then Washington State is a great place for a prospective student-athlete. Because in the Palouse, they love their Cougs.

"The other thing up there is 365 days a year, it's the Cougs," Leach said. "They'll remember a game you played the rest of your life. This isn't the deal where you might have the game of your life and you walk three blocks and they might not even know you had a game. No, they know you had a game, and they know it's a big deal."

When Leach joined the Pac-12 Networks crew on set, however, he was a little afraid he perhaps promoted Pullman too well. Too many people might be intrigued by Pullman, and soon enough, Pullman will have Los Angeles problems.

"I screwed that whole thing up from the standpoint that we're going to have a whole bunch of people move from Los Angeles to Pullman," Leach told Mike Yam and Yogi Roth. "Pretty soon we're going to have everybody from LA and then if we get too many, once I get out of football, I might have to come to the small town of Los Angeles as they vacate it to come to Pullman. ... I'm trying to stay one step ahead of the crowd."

If they start constructing a 12-lane highway that leads directly to Martin Stadium, you know who to thank.