The week began with Mike Leach sharing a hoax video of former President Obama speaking at an international conference, where the clip Leach shared was obviously edited to portray Obama showing the opposite message of what he was actually saying.
Numerous followers pointed out to Leach that the video was a hoax, to which he continuously challenged them to "Prove it."
Leach later deleted the original tweet, but he's still arguing in its proverbial mentions. After USA Today's Dan Wolken penned a column critical of Leach, the coach responded by lobbing numerous personal attacks at Wolken, and then carried the attacks over to this Q&A with Seattle Times writer Matt Calkins. "The biggest thing is, I don’t know who exactly that guy is, but the thing is people in the industry hate him too from what I understand," Leach said. "And some of that is because they disrespect his skills as a reporter and expect a little more bias than he provides because he hides behind some agenda and tries to push it forward."
The Q&A continued from there, and at the risk of taking Leach out of context, I thought I'd share the entire relevant portion here.
Calkins: So you said that you realized the video was “incomplete,” but I think a lot of people were wondering why didn’t you just say, “Oops, I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I posted a heavily edited video, sorry about that, I didn’t mean to mislead anybody.” Do you understand why people might want to hear that from you? And why didn’t you say that?
Leach: Do you think I’m gonna get a wealth of apologies from all these people that are saying all the things that I intended, that I meant …
Calkins: No, I don’t. I think they would still probably criticize you. But I also think it would be the right thing to do for someone in your position.
Leach: Well, for one, I’m not particularly sorry. I thought (the video selection) was poor from the standpoint that … and anytime you quote a guy it’s difficult because there’s always a broader context to any conversation. I didn’t think the context to that was as precise as I wanted it to be, so from that standpoint I thought it was sloppy.
I’m not particularly sorry about it, because it was in his speech and he did say it. I just think it was plugged together in a bad way by whoever made the video.
You get passed things all the time. It’s not like I researched or looked it up. I just listened to what was sent and was like, “Oh yeah, this might work.” But that doesn’t change the fact that people should be able express their thoughts.
I just don’t understand all this name-calling. I never took a position on any of it. You look at anyone of them, I didn’t take a position at any point.
All in all, I don't know what any of this solved, but Leach is back to being his normal self.