Mississippi State has released a statement after a recent tweet from football coach Mike Leach.
Leach tweeted and deleted a photo of a woman making a noose to hang her husband after spending too much time with him during coronavirus isolation. (RELATED: David Hookstead Is The True King In The North When It Comes To College Football)
He also apologized if anybody was offended by the joke.
I sincerely regret if my choice of images in my tweets were found offensive. I had no intention of offending anyone.
— Mike Leach (@Coach_Leach) April 2, 2020
Now the school has officially weighed in. According to CollegeFootballTalk, athletic director John Cohen released a statement, and stated in part, “No matter the context, for many Americans the image of a noose is never appropriate and that’s particularly true in the South and in Mississippi. Mississippi State University was disappointed in the use of such an image in a tweet by Coach Mike Leach.”
The school also said Leach would “participate” in “listening sessions with student, alumni, and community groups and to provide the coach with opportunities to expand his cultural awareness of Mississippi.”
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Is Leach’s tweet unfortunate? It’s probably not smart to tweet about a noose in Mississippi given the state’s violent racial history.
Having said that, the idea the photo was anything more than an attempt at a joke is absurd. Mike Leach isn’t a racist.
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He’s a guy who enjoys cracking jokes on social media and winning football games. This one fell flat in the state of Mississippi, but people need to stop acting like Leach ended the world by a failed attempt at humor.
Patrice O’Neal had the perfect words for this situation.
Anybody who honestly believes Leach is a racist shouldn’t be taken seriously. They’re just looking for a reason to be outraged. Let them burn out their energy.
While Leach probably shouldn’t have sent that tweet, he has nothing in his past to suggest it was anything other than a joke, which I honestly laughed at when I saw.
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Let’s hope Leach can get this whole situation behind him and get back to focusing on winning football games in the SEC.