Even when chronically-wrong Chronicle sports columnist Richard Justice gets something right, he immediately follows it with more poorly-reasoned blather.

In this blog post, Justice pays tribute to former Texas Tech football coach Spike Dykes, who is truly one of the nicest men ever to be a successful head coach in the big-time college football.

But rather than leave well enough alone, Justice proceeds to engage in more myth-making about current Tech head coach, Mike Leach:

Not many Division I schools would have hired Mike Leach, either. Not many Division I coaches look or sound like him. He’s funny, arrogant, off-the-wall and occasionally infuriating.

He’s also a great coach. He wins games and graduates his players. His ninth season begins with high hopes on the South Plains. The Red Raiders are 12th in the AP poll, the highest they’ve been at the start of a season in 31 years.

Tech has sold every season ticket for the first time in the 84-year history of the program. The Red Raiders have 18 starters back, including WR Michael Crabtree and QB Graham Harrell. There’s depth all over the place on offense, and if Ruffin McNeill’s defense plays the way it did after he took over last season, Texas Tech could be in the BCS mix.

Where to begin?

In his eight years at Tech, Leach has a 65-37-0 record, which works out to a 63.7% winning percentage. Although that is the best mark of any long-time coach at Tech over the past 70 years, a substantial component of Leach’s success has been his 25-5 (83.3%) record against non-Big 12 opponents, which have been mostly sacrificial lambs.

In fact, of those 30 non-conference games, only five have been against other BCS-conference teams — Ohio State (loss), Mississippi (2 wins) and North Carolina State (2 losses). Moreover, the last time that Tech even played a non-conference game against a BCS-conference opponent was five years ago in 2003.

Meanwhile, Tech under Leach has feasted on cupcakes such as Division 1-AA teams Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston State, Indiana State, Southeastern Louisiana and Northwestern State and undermanned Division I outfits such as SMU and New Mexico. Heck, ten of Tech’s non-conference games under Leach have been against SMU and New Mexico. That Tech wins over 80% of such games is certainly no feather in Leach’s cap.

On the other hand, Tech’s Big 12 conference record under Leach is another story — 35-29 (a 54.6% winning percentage). Leach-coached Tech teams are only 3-13 against Texas and Oklahoma and his teams have had only a 4-4 Big 12 conference record in four of Leach’s eight seasons at Tech, including the last two.

Finally, Leach has used extremely poor judgment in some of his public remarks about assistant coaches on his staff.

In short, objective evaluation of Leach’s career at Tech reveals that his teams run up big numbers, but they don’t often beat teams with comparable or better talent because those teams can control the ball enough to keep Tech’s offense from scoring a winning number.

And despite what Justice suggests, Tech’s defense under Leach has never stopped any good offensive team.

Tech is rated highly this season in pre-season polls (14th in the USA Today Coaches Poll), but their non-conference schedule is again largely a joke — two D-1AA teams (Eastern Washington and UMass) and a rebuilding SMU should again be easy wins for the Red Raiders. In an unusual twist, Tech will have a reasonably difficult non-conference game this season when they travel to Reno on September 6 to play a well-seasoned Nevada Wolfpack team from the Western Athletic Conference.

But I’ll wait to see how Tech fares in the Big 12 before conceding that the Red Raiders have reached a new level under Leach. So far, Leach’s success at Tech looks more like good public relations to gullible sportswriters such as Justice than any major elevation of the program.