Texas Tech football head coach Mike Leach greeted news of Monday's unsuccessful pirate operation in the Indian Ocean with consternation, sources say. Today, he revealed some of those feelings at an impromptu press conference held at Applebees, ranked #2 on Lubbock's Trip Advisor restaurant rankings.
"The brotherhood of the pirate is a world fraternity," said Leach in his Tuesday morning press conference. "Today I mourn for the three lost members of the Habar Gidir clan. May Allah place acid-dipped scorpions in the rectums of their traditional enemies, the Hawiye. Although as an American citizen I oppose teenage gunmen attacking, killing, kidnapping, and ransoming personnel from international shipping freight, and I applaud our brave military for its timely intervention, I do think that those same aggressive pirate instincts could have been put to good use getting off of inside press coverage given the right coaching."
Leach had been increasing Texas Tech's recruiting presence in the Horn of Africa for the last several months, masterfully manipulating less athletic clan factions against each other and utilizing his own impeccable piracy credentials to build coalitions of support amongst the most promising Somali fighters with outstanding shuttle times. Leach is widely regarded by many world leaders to be a strong disciplinarian who could add meaningful structure to pirate lives.
Early mentoring is key
But in the wake of Monday's events, a renewed climate of hostility with the United States may prevent Leach from obtaining LOIs from his most coveted targets. CIA East Africa bureau chief Clipper Worthington-Saxby believes that this has put a damper on Leach's recruiting efforts and the strong inroads he'd made with Somali clan elders:
"From a geopolitical recruiting standpoint, he (Leach) was laying the groundwork, doing all of the right things. Somalis operate a lot like AAU basketball coaches, but with more principle. So you have to court them, build their trust; offer RPGs to help them murder a rival. But enough about AAU coaches. He's got to get Taylor Potts more help at receiver than just Detron Lewis. It was either Somalia or Houston. So he went for the garden spot."
Aleh Mohammad Siad, a prominent clan leader in Western Mogadishu whose militia of pre-teen gunmen controls fourteen burnt out cinder block buildings, a three-legged donkey with cart, and a 1983 Magnavox VCR cassette player, agreed with Worthington-Saxby's assessment remarking on CNN, "The clan leader of Lubbock gave me a Chinese dubbed VCR cassette of Michael Jackson's Thriller. This pleased me as it doubled our cassette supply - we already possessed the delightful romantic comedy Notting Hill . He also secured me tickets to Ramadanopalooza in Jeddah where some hotties in the crowd stripped down to their wrists."
But Siad is now confused about where Tech and his clan's relations now stand.
"Those were the halcyon days. With this new American aggression, we wonder if the warlord of Lubbock had not been conspiring with the men of the Togdheer region - may their urine burn like kerosene in the depths of their hyena genitals. This is all more confusing than when Angelina Jolie tried to purchase one of my best gunmen."
Still, the area beckons as a fertile, untapped recruiting era and analysts from the NSA, the Mossad, Rivals and Scout believe that the lure of the Somali pirate athlete is too strong for coaches to stay away.
Burnt Orange Beat's Gerry Hamilton, a respected analyst from Texas, offered insights as to why:
"Somalis are plus athletes. Strikers. Very aggressive. Very technical. Drive technicals. Will hit the ballcarrier, get run over, initiate a feud, track down the ballcarrier's family, murder them all brutally. So, there's an intimidation factor. They play downhill. Literally. Like sprinting downwards from a hiding place in the pressbox. Frames need work. Eating more than one meal a week and getting them off of the qat will help them add 70-80 pounds during a redshirt year, getting them up into the 190s. Great hips and change of direction, particularly when faced with withering gunfire. Great Qat-angles. They're also very explosive in the sense that they carry actual explosives."
As for language barriers and cultural acclimation?
"I don't see that as a big problem," opined Hamilton. "They're ahead of most kids from East Texas. The real downside with these Somalis is their utter inability to relate to the modern nation-state. Their clan feudal system represents a confluence of anti-modern impulse: traditional Islam and African tribalism - a combination anathema to the building of a democratic and enlightened polity. Then add the fact that they were colonized by the exploitative and comically disorganized Italians. So they'll do some mischevious kid stuff: set fire to tires and dance around them shrieking and firing bullets into the air, run protection rackets in the dorms, build a pirate flotilla in the school fountain - so it's important to get them good mentoring."
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