In spirit of Auburn hosting Mississippi State Saturday afternoon, it wasn’t a surprise that Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze was asked if he had his own “Mike Leach story.”

After all, it seems everyone in the college football world has a story featuring Leach, who coached at Mississippi State from 2020-22 before unexpectedly dying of complications from a heart condition on Dec. 12, 2022. He was 61.

“Coach Leach and I, we weren’t real close. I didn’t get to know him,” Freeze admitted Thursday night. “But I think everybody that was in college football had a Leach story.”

Considering Freeze was coaching at Liberty when Leach was at Mississippi State and Leach was at Washington State when Freeze was at Ole Miss, the two rarely crossed paths. However, there was one interaction Freeze had with Leach, which he recalled Thursday night during Auburn’s Tiger Talk radio show.

“Mine is really one phone call that I had with him about a possible hire I was going to make,” Freeze said. “Usually those take about five minutes, and Coach Leach’s conversation with me lasted about 30.”

Leach was never known for concise conversations.

More times than not, his press conferences turned into ramblings about who knows what. Pirates, wedding planning, dinosaurs, Big Foot, aliens… you name it, Leach had probably talked about it — and in great detail, at that.

But as Freeze experienced on that phone call that day, no matter how longwinded or awry conversations with Leach went, the late Mississippi State head coach was attentive.

“I will never forget how he just made you feel like you had his full attention. That’s a rare quality in coaching,” Freeze said. “Normally, we’re like, ‘Man, how fast can I get out of this conversation and back to what I was doing.’

“But Coach Leach, he honored every minute that we were on the phone together and I’ll never forget that.”