STARKVILLE — This doesn’t happen.
For those wondering how often a situation like Mike Leach’s sudden death at age 61 on Monday night occurs in college football, well, it really doesn’t.
The Mississippi State’s coach’s passing is almost unprecedented in the sport, and with it come questions about the Bulldogs’ future that will be tough to answer.
In the past 55 years, it appears only Northwestern coach Randy Walker suffered a fate similar to Leach’s death Monday, which Mississippi State announced was a result of complications from a heart condition.
Walker was just 52 when he died suddenly of an apparent heart attack on June 29, 2006.
Leach was reported to have suffered a heart attack in his Starkville home Sunday, requiring an airlift to a Jackson hospital.
Linebackers coach and recruiting coordinator Pat Fitzgerald succeeded Walker as the Wildcats’ head coach, a position he still holds.
A year after that, tragedy struck the Big Ten again as Indiana’s Terry Hoeppner died of brain cancer at age 59 on June 19, 2007.
Hoeppner had announced earlier that month he would sit out the 2007 season for health reasons.
In February 1989, South Carolina coach Joe Morrison collapsed while playing racquetball and died of congestive heart failure.
TCU’s Jim Pittman — a Mississippi State alum — also died of a heart attack while on the sideline Oct. 30, 1971.
The four are among the few active head coaches who have died from medical conditions in recent years.
Plane crashes claimed several coaches’ lives in the 1970s and 1980s.
Rex Dockery of Memphis was killed in a December 1983 crash in Tennessee at age 41.
LSU’s Bo Rein died in a plane crash on Jan. 10, 1980, at the age of only 34. He was hired from North Carolina State less than two months prior and never coached a game for the Tigers.
In 1970, a pair of infamous plane crashes claimed the lives of two other coaches.
That October, Wichita State football coach Ben Wilson was killed along with 14 players and 16 others in a plane crash in Colorado.
Barely a month later, the Marshall football team plane crashed near an airport runway in West Virginia, killing all 75 people on board.
Head coach Rick Tolley, eight other coaches and administrators and 36 players died in the crash.
Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne also died in a plane crash in 1931.
That appears to be the extent of FBS coaches dying during their tenures.
It makes events like Leach’s death both tragic and almost unheard of.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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