Tickets cost $9 for reserved seats and $4 for Texas Tech students.

The game will not be televised.

Tickets are available by calling (806) 742-TECH or on the Web at texastech.com.

Media relations representative Randy Farley confirmed Wednesday afternoon that athletic director Gerald Myers has not yet recieved information regarding the day and time of the game, but expects to host at United Spirit Arena.

Myers anticipates the call to come later Wednesday evening or early Thursday.

Texas Tech was seeded fifth in the NIT after finishing its season 17-15. It traveled to New Jersey for the first round, defeating fourth-seeded Seton Hall 87-69 in Newark, N.J.

Tech will host Jacksonville, which as the No. 8 seed upset No. 1 seeded Arizona State on Tuesday with a buzzer-beating banked 3-point shot.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The Big 12’s coaches spent an entire season, even some time before it, telling anyone who’d listen this was the conference’s strongest year ever.

Turns out, they were right.

The Big 12 earned a conference-record seven NCAA tournament berths Sunday, including the No. 1 overall seed and two more in the top three, validating what its coaches have been saying all along.

“The more the merrier,” Oklahoma coach Travis Ford said Monday. “I know our coaches are always pleased when they see people value the product that the Big 12 schools are putting out there. To get over half your teams into the NCAA tournament is a very, very nice compliment.”

Football has been the calling card for the Big 12 since its inception in 1996, the perception being Kansas and Oklahoma State were the only teams playing real basketball.

The league has gradually changed its acumen over the past few years as Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri joined the Jayhawks in making deep runs in the NCAA tournament.

Still, six NCAA berths was the best the Big 12 could do – seven times, including the past two seasons – feeding an inferiority complex, as if the basketball power conferences were a big brother who wouldn’t let them win at anything.

Now that Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Baylor, Missouri, Texas A&M and Texas are in, this relatively new conference has moved up to a level usually reserved for older powerhouses like the Big East and ACC.

“As far as us getting seven in this year, my response is: it’s about time,” Kansas State coach Frank Martin said.

Kansas, no surprise, earned the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament. The Jayhawks start Thursday in Oklahoma City, against Lehigh.

A monumental mismatch? Probably. But after that, the road gets tougher.

The Midwest regional is considered the toughest in the tournament, one potential land mine after another awaiting the top-ranked Jayhawks.

Get by Lehigh and the second round, Kansas could face Michigan State or Maryland in the regional semifinals, then could face Georgetown or the two teams that gave the Jayhawks their two losses, Oklahoma State or Tennessee.

Even for a team that’s as deep as any in the country, one that spent all but four weeks at No. 1, that’s a tough gauntlet.

“I do believe this is a very, very difficult region,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “But, from my standpoint, to get to where you want to go, you should have to beat good people. I’m sure no matter who gets to Indianapolis they’re going to have a tough road.”

Kansas State set a school record for wins and has its highest seeding ever, No. 2 in the West. The seventh-ranked Wildcats open the NCAA tournament against North Texas in Oklahoma City on Thursday.

Baylor, No. 3 in the South and 19th in the nation, also starts on Thursday, against Sam Houston State in New Orleans. No. 23 Texas A&M gets Utah State in Spokane, Wash., as the fifth seed in the South, and Oklahoma State faces a tough first-round matchup against Georgia Tech as the seventh seed in Milwaukee. The Aggies and Cowboys both play Friday.

The other Big 12 teams in the NCAA tournament need to make quick turnarounds.

Missouri closed out the season by losing three of its final four games, including to last-place Nebraska in the conference tournament. The Tigers open Friday in Buffalo, N.Y., against Clemson in what’s likely to be the fastest game of the tournament.

Then there’s Texas.

The former No. 1 team in the nation, the Longhorns followed a 17-0 start with a crash, going 9-7 during the Big 12 regular season. Texas is the eighth seed in the East regional and opens against Wake Forest on Thursday in New Orleans, hoping to get one potentially momentum-swinging win.

“One game, it can swing quickly,” Texas coach Rick Barnes said. “We see it all the time, teams come into that have been down and out, and they catch it and kind of ride the wave with it … This time of year, one game here or there, one play here or there can really swing it.”

After playing in the rugged Big 12, the Longhorns should be ready for it.

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Mike Leach and Texas Tech dug their legal trenches deeper Friday after a week of pretrial investigations and viral Internet videos culminated in a vitriolic new round of finger-pointing.

Lawyers on both sides of the escalating lawsuit claimed the upper hand after a week’s worth of sworn testimony from several of the case’s key players.

The coach, who now lives in Key West, Fla., gave a brief but emotional statement to reporters after his six-hour deposition Friday.

“We’ve had 10 incredible years here,” Leach said with moist eyes. “I had a really good day today. What can I say? It’s 10 years.”

District Judge William Sowder ordered the two sides attempt a settlement through mediation, which was recessed in early February until an unspecified later date. A gag order kept both sides from commenting on negotiations.

Sowder has set an April 23 deadline for the two teams to file their preliminary discovery findings. He has also scheduled a May 14 hearing on the university’s request for sovereign immunity, which could shield it from the lawsuit as a state entity.

But any talk of a possible out-of-court settlement took a back seat this week to a trickle of pretrial discovery developments that has both camps maneuvering for a courtroom showdown.

“That’s my view,” said Leach attorney Paul Dobrowski after Leach’s deposition downtown. “Certainly, we’re preparing for trial.”

A pair of newly released videos from last season has further inflamed the situation. Leach’s attorneys claim Tech purposely leaked the videos of Leach angrily chastising the team’s poor performance after the Baylor game through a profanity-infused post-game locker room rant.

Tech is denying any motive or design in releasing the videos, which were obtained by at least two media outlets via an open records request and posted online the night before Leach’s deposition.

His testimony also came a day after a Tech Chancellor Kent Hance underwent his own deposition. Charlotte Bingham, a Tech official who conducted an early investigation into Leach’s treatment of the player, testified on March 5.

Leach’s team
After the deposition, Dobrowski told a room full of reporters they dealt a heavy blow to the university’s case on Thursday when Hance confirmed Craig James personally wanted Leach fired.

Dobrowski said this, when told to the board of regents, factored inappropriately on the university’s decision to fire the coach.

“I think that we know, and they know, that our case has gotten substantially stronger by virtue of the discovery process,” he said.

Tech’s team
Dicky Grigg, an Austin-based lawyer for Tech and former Tech football player, countered Dobrowski’s statements, saying the university, not Leach, gained legal footing during the depositions.

Grigg said Leach admitted in his deposition to reacting to James’ concussion by telling a trainer to put the player in a “place so dark that the only way he knows he has an (expletive) is to reach down and touch it.”

“What this language shows is that his intent was vindictive, not therapeutic,” Grigg said. “Leach himself admitted, under oath, that he has never treated another student athlete with a brain concussion in the manner that he treated this young man.”

More subpoenas
Additional evidence gathering has also come from a far-reaching burst of subpoenas filed by the Leach team in recent weeks. One has gone to Frenship Independent School District for records involving the enrollment of his successor’s children.

Another went to Spaeth Communications, a public relations firm representing Craig James, who is scheduled to testify in Lubbock today.

In an earlier filing, according to court documents, Tech’s attorneys referred to Leach’s subpoenas as “a fishing expedition.”

“They call it a fishing expedition,” said Leach attorney Ted Liggett. “I call it a search for truth.”
The videos

Leach’s team also took aim Friday at Tech’s release of the videos — recorded by the university’s athletics department for possible promotional footage — as they rippled throughout blogs and news Web sites. The footage shows an angered coach criticizing the team for a mediocre performance against Baylor in late November.

His attorneys suspected foul play in the timing of the videos’ release.

“We submit that that’s no coincidence,” Dobrowski said. “Texas Tech knows the deposition yesterday of
Chancellor Hance and Ms. Bingham’s last week went poorly for them … therefore, they’re trying to smear Mike with videos that, quite frankly, are irrelevant.”

Although Grigg agreed the videos are irrelevant, he said had no choice but to release the videos after
receiving an open information request for them.

“We had no option but to release them, under law,” he said. “Now, who told the media about them? I don’t know. There were over 100 people, obviously, in the team room after the game.”

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The 68-year-old Magee got the record with a 76-65 victory over Goldey-Beacom College on Tuesday night. Magee has won all 903 games over a 43-year career with the tiny Division II Rams.

Knight won 902 games and three national championships in a 42-year career with Army, Indiana and Texas Tech. Northern State coach Don Meyer, who announced his retirement Monday, has 922 victories between the NAIA and NCAA.

Magee led the program to a national championship in 1970.

Fans started bellowing “903! 903!” over the final minutes and students stormed the court in celebration.

DALLAS – Before Wednesday, few college football historians would have associated coaches Mike Leach and Woody Hayes.

But Texas Tech’s quirky Leach and Ohio State’s combustible Hayes now are forever linked, fired by their schools for, in effect, bullying a player.

Leach’s legion of supporters will say that his alleged closeting of injured Tech receiver Adam James in a “shed” falls well short of Hayes’ punch to the throat of Clemson nose guard Charlie Bauman during the 1978 Gator Bowl.

But Leach’s shocking dismissal and the forced Dec. 3 resignation of Kansas’ Mark Mangino seem to show that administrators, players and players’ parents are far less tolerant of what once were accepted motivational or disciplinary coaching tactics.

“When you ask, ‘Has coaching changed?’ the answer is ‘No, it hasn’t,’ ” said Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. “What’s changed is the focus, the magnifying glass, the culture we live in.”

Teaff, who coached Baylor from 1972 to 1992 and is in college football’s hall of fame, made his comments Wednesday morning, two hours before Leach’s firing.

At the time, it was bizarre enough that Leach’s attorney had filed for a temporary restraining order and injunction against Tech that would allow then-suspended Leach to coach in Saturday’s Valero Alamo Bowl.

“I’m kind of mind-boggled over it,” Teaff said. “It’s new territory.

“It’s, as I guess they say on TV, a sign of the times.”

To be sure, the era of legendary disciplinarians such as Paul “Bear” Bryant is long gone.

In 1954, entering his first season as Texas A&M’s coach, Bryant held a 10-day summer training camp in Junction, Texas.

With Bryant weeding supposedly weak players from the strong by prohibiting water breaks in 100-plus-degree heat, the two-to-three dozen players who didn’t quit became known as The Junction Boys in Aggie lore.

If there was a line football coaches weren’t supposed to cross, no one dared voice it in those days.

In ensuing decades, concerned voices have grown louder and the line clearly has moved, particularly in regard to players’ health and safety.

Leach’s alleged confining of James to “small, dark places” on two occasions occurred after he had been diagnosed with a concussion. This season, concussions have become a particular point of concern at all football levels.

During spring training in late March, Leach had demoted wide receiver Edward Britton for failure to regularly attend class and maintain good grades. Leach ordered Britton to study at a desk at midfield in 30-degree weather, albeit in a heavy coat.

“Ed didn’t like showing up and studying at places I felt like he needed to and like the academic people asked him to, so he can go study out there on the 50-yard line,” Leach told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal that day.

Leach ordered Britton to remain in the cold for 90 minutes after practice, adding:

“If somehow he fails to do that, then that’ll be the last we ever hear of Easy Ed.”

Britton has played in all 12 games this season, catching 32 passes and scoring three touchdowns.

Leach was named Big 12 Coach of the Year in 2008 after leading the Red Raiders to an 11-2 record. Kansas’ Mangino, the 2007 national coach of the year, was on the 1999 Oklahoma staff with Leach, both serving under Bob Stoops.

When reports surfaced in late November of this season that Kansas officials were investigating Mangino’s alleged mistreatment of players, Leach, during his weekly conference call with reporters, came to Mangino’s defense.

“Nobody truly knows what went on in Kansas,” Leach said at the time. “But my suspicion is Mark’s in the middle of a witch hunt, which is unjustified.

“Heaven forbid somebody should ask the guys to pay attention and focus in, and for the sake of all his teammates and coaches and everybody else, pay attention. Well, there’s different ways to ask a guy to do that, and sometimes after you’ve asked him a number of times, you raise the bar.”

In the Mangino case, Leach and others noted, player complaints about their treatment only came to light when the program hit a losing spell.

“The interesting thing to me is all the (reports) went from (Mangino) hit some guy in the face to, ‘Well, he didn’t even touch anybody, but he did say mean things to them,’ ” Leach added.

“A mean man told some players something they didn’t want to hear. Well, there’s a mean man in Lubbock who tells people stuff they don’t want to hear, too, and that’s part of it.”

As the Leach saga played out in a dizzying 48-hour span this week, Cotton Bowl coaches Mike Gundy of Oklahoma State and Houston Nutt of Ole Miss were more than hesitant to offer a reaction.

“I think the young men out there want discipline and structure and accountability,” Gundy said. “You can coach them as hard as you want to if they know you care about them and you’re going to do whatever you can to make them a better person off the field and bring them along on the field.”

Said Nutt, whose father, Houston Sr., was a coach for 34 years: “I will never hire anyone unless I would want him to coach my son. We tell our players all the time, ‘We’re going to coach you very hard.’ Off the field, we’re going to talk about fishing, basketball, girlfriends or family.”

Earlier this season, Leach wondered aloud whether some of his players were being adversely influenced by their “fat little girlfriends.” At the time, most media and fans laughed.

Teaff said the overwhelming majority of coaches he knows entered the profession for the same reason he did – to mold young people in a positive way.

But some coaches who started soon after World War II or the Korean or Vietnam wars, Teaff noted, believed that military-training techniques like physical confrontation and cursing were effective.

“But that didn’t last,” he said. “Those guys are long gone, and that philosophy is long gone.”

Teaff noted that college football coaching is personality driven. “Each coach handles things in a different way. There’s no standards. You can’t cookie-cut a coach and his personality.”

And these days, Teaff said, if there is an incident between coach and player, “we have instantaneous media, the Internet; you have every detail of every aspect looked at and magnified.”

When Hayes on Dec. 29, 1978, punched Clemson’s Bauman after the nose guard’s game-clinching interception, many TV viewers saw it live, but announcers Keith Jackson and Ara Parseghian missed it. Replays also failed to catch the punch.

That could never happen now, of course. Teaff agrees that the Hayes incident changed the way fans and media perceived tough-approach coaches.

“The Good Lord and everybody saw that on television,” he said. “What made it so interesting is Woody went to his grave and never believed he actually did that.”

Mike Leach doesn’t publicly speak about injuries to his football players. How he handled one in private a little more than a week ago led to his suspension Monday.

The announcement Leach would not coach the Red Raiders in Saturday’s Alamo Bowl against Michigan State came after the parents of receiver Adam James — father Craig is an ESPN college football analyst — complained about how their son was treated.

While defensive coordinator Ruffin McNeill was tapped to take Leach’s place, Leach’s attorney, Ted Liggett, said he hasn’t given up hope that Leach will coach in the bowl.

“We’re going to do everything we can to see that our client is duly served justice and that he’s reunited with his boys as soon as possible,’’ Liggett said.

Asked how he planned to go about it, Liggett said, “Through the court system, don’t ya?’’

Tech completed an initial investigation before suspending Leach. The Avalanche-Journal learned during that investigation Leach did not dispute the facts, but did not believe he had done anything wrong. Leach also told officials James was a slacker and his father was always calling and acting like a Little League dad.

Leach had until Monday to write an apology and when he did not, the university officials felt they had to take action.

Leach has been suspended indefinitely, with pay, from his role as head coach.

“We obviously think the allegations are very serious,” said Jerry Turner, Board of Regents vice chair.
James practiced with the team in San Antonio on Monday.

Tech did not release details of the incident, saying only that it “received a complaint from a player and his parents regarding … Leach’s treatment of the athlete after an injury.”

Craig James was scheduled to work the Alamo Bowl broadcast; ESPN confirmed on Monday he’ll be replaced.
The A-J learned that on Dec. 17, Leach ordered James to stand in a dark shed at the Tech football practice facility because he thought James was faking a concussion he’d suffered during practice the previous day. Leach had him watched, and when James sat down, Leach had things removed from the shed so he could not sit.

Two days later, Leach forced James to stand in a dark room for three hours.

“Mr. and Mrs. James took the step with great regret and after consideration and prayer to convey to the Texas Tech Administration that their son had been subjected to actions and treatment not consistent with commonsense rules for safety and health,” the James family said in a statement issued through a publicist.

Liggett said it’s “ridiculous’’ to characterize the building adjacent to the team’s practice fields as a “shed’’ or an “electrical closet.’’

“Because of the fact that he had a concussion and he was extremely limited in the physical activity he could undergo, Mike felt like that was the best place for him and still be close to and part of the team,’’ Liggett said.

Liggett said while James was secluded on two occasions, he was not treated inappropriately and had a doctor’s statement attesting to that.

“There’s much, much more than meets the eye,’’ Liggett said. “The diagnosing doctor has signed a note stating that Adam James was in no way injured by the actions coach Leach took. In fact, he was better off in the building than he would have been outside.”

The decision to suspend Leach was made in consultation with the Tech president, chancellor and Board of Regents members.

Regents chair Larry Anders said he could not comment on the investigation because it is a personnel issue, but the decision was ultimately made by Tech President Guy Bailey and Athletic Director Gerald Myers.

“We’ve been briefed, but ultimately, at the end of the day, it came down to a decision by the president and (athletic director),” Anders said.

Bailey and Chancellor Kent Hance did not return phone calls for comment. Tech football players did not give interviews after their first practice in San Antonio on Monday night, and an ESPN representative said Craig James will not be giving interviews at this time.

“We have a sense of regret this has come right before a bowl game,” Turner said. “I really hope our team can rally behind coach McNeill.”

Leach received three national coach of the year awards in 2008 after leading Tech to an 11-2 record and a Cotton Bowl berth. It also earned him a new, five-year, $12.7 million contract that came after the school and the coach had a heated and contentious battle to get the deal done. If the contract is terminated, Tech would have to pay Leach $400,000 for each remaining year.

Tech is 8-4 overall and 5-3 in the Big 12 this season.

Leach is known for his outspokenness.

This fall he famously criticized players’ family and friends as “fat little girlfriends” who beefed up players’ egos. He changed quarterback Taylor Potts’ jersey to say “Nick” because he thought Taylor wasn’t a masculine enough name for the QB. He suspended linebacker Marlon Williams and banned players from using Twitter after Williams posted “Wondering why I’m still in this meeting room when the head coach can’t even be on time to his on (sic) meeting.”

Leach suspended offensive guard Brandon Carter after the Raiders’ loss to Houston on Sept. 19 for an outburst that included smashing his helmet and loudly criticizing the coaching staff.

Last spring, Leach sent split end Edward Britton to study on the football field despite 30-degree weather and snow flurries because Britton had missed a study session.

(A-J Editor Terry Greenberg, Sports Editor Courtney Linehan and staff writers Matthew McGowan, Don Williams and Adam Zuvanich contributed to this report.)

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