:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/57021083/usa_today_10316009.0.jpg)
Washington State coach Mike Leach is not necessarily knocking the game-day environment at Oregon’s Autzen Stadium here. He’s just offering it tempered praise:
And finally, Coach Leach says Auzten is the loudest in the Pac-12. But are there louder stadiums he's ever coached in? Uh, there's a few: pic.twitter.com/nRKjDm8HXq
— Lindsay Joy (@SWXLindsayJoy) October 4, 2017
The partial transcript of this Leachism, if you’re interested:
Oklahoma's louder. A&M's louder. Texas is on the bubble. Nebraska was definitely louder. LSU’s louder. I never went to Alabama. We beat Alabama, but it was at Kentucky. Depending whether or not you at the cowbells, Mississippi State’s comparable. Georgia’s louder. Florida’s louder. Definitely in that one end zone at South Carolina’s louder. Tennessee’s louder.
Little Rock, Arkansas, that’s the loudest place I ever played. Entirely concrete structure. It’s as if you had a football game in the neighbors’ basement and all the kids were yelling louder than hell, and you could tell when you were starting out. You’d clap your hands and you’d hear it five times and yell, ‘Go, go, go, go, hit, hit, hit, hit.’ Well, then after, and you figure there’s 45,000. You multiply that times five. That equals approximately 250,000. That’s a lot of people, and there’s no stadiums that hold 250,000 people. So 250,000 people are louder than 100,000 people.
I don’t know.
Leach was fielding a question about the noise level in Eugene, I think. His No. 11 Cougars play the Ducks there on Saturday (8 p.m. ET, FOX), coming off an upset win against then-top-five USC in Pullman last Friday. I guess Leach has seen this before, and I guess he won’t be fazed by what might be a raucous Oregon crowd.
Leach likes to talk about Little Rock, where Arkansas plays at least one home game every year and used to play more. (The Razorbacks have two home fields.) At Pac-12 Media Days in 2014, Leach talked about Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium in the same way, almost verbatim, when responding to a question about Pac-12 facilities:
Acoustics are a funny thing. You know, the loudest stadium I've ever played in was 45,000 people at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock, Arkansas. The entire thing is concrete. It's like dropping a ball bearing in your neighbor's basement. Just the whole thing echoes. Anything you say or do echoes five times. Well, five times 45,000 is almost 250,000. It's really loud.
The coach has clearly gotten this down to a science.