Last month, about an hour before Kansas State faced Texas, one of the members of the game crew came over to me to share a story. Well, actually, Billy Schott wanted to show me something.
The 71-year-old Schott — the game’s “Red Hat,” or more specifically the TV timeout coordinator — pulled up the left sleeve of his shirt. There it was tattooed across his biceps, a black pirate flag with the words “Swing Your Sword” above it and Mike Leach’s name below it.
Schott first met Leach in 1990 in Wichita Falls, Texas. Leach was an assistant at Iowa Wesleyan who was playing Midwestern State that day. Schott was the side judge.
“He had me cracking up the whole game,” Schott remembered. “I guess he liked me because I laughed at his jokes and because I was listening.”
About a month later, Schott was reffing a game in Sherman, Texas, when he got a tap on his shoulder pregame. It was Leach, who recognized him from earlier in the season. “He said, ‘By the way, my name is Mike Leach — not that it’s gonna mean anything in the long run,’” Schott recalled. “We just hit it off from there.”
Schott, a former Texas kicker, married his wife in Key West. They’d go back down there every year and hang out with Leach and his wife, Sharon. By the end of the night, or…
