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OU Football: The story behind Hal Mumme’s Jedi mind trick that still mystifies defenses
By BERRY TRAMEL Published: September 4, 2015 3:01 PM CDT Updated: September 4, 2015 3:06 PM CDTHal Mumme is 63 years old and coaching at Belhaven, a Division III school in Jackson, Miss., close in geography but far in status from the bright SEC lights under which he once flourished. But make no mistake. Mumme is having fun.
How could he not be? He’s still coaching the Air Raid. Still emperor of the offense that took the college football galaxy, particularly the American Southwest, by storm.
“Pure fun,” Mumme said of the offense he invented and is being re-installed at Oklahoma by new Sooners offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley. That offense debuts on Saturday when the Sooners play Akron in a 6 p.m. home-opener (pay-per-view).
ESPN’s Kevin Van Valkenburg profiled Mumme a year ago and wrote, “Talk all you want about the gridiron genius of Nick Saban, Gus Malzahn or Chip Kelly. But it’s Hal Mumme who brought you the game you’re watching today.”
Mumme was born in San Antonio, played high school football at Thomas Jefferson in Dallas and graduated from Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. But the offense Mumme bred has stretched all across America. Here’s how it happened.
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Hal Mumme sat in his Texas-El Paso office one day in 1983, when Mouse Davis appeared. The United States Football League had just finished its first year, and Davis, with the Houston Gamblers, was out scouting. “Sat there and talked to me for seven hours,” Mumme said. “That’s where all the ideas started.”
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Show moreThat’s what this Air Raid business is all about. Ideas. Stretch your imagination and stretch the field.
Davis ran the run-and-shoot, another new-age offense that rebelled against convention. Mumme was the UTEP offensive coordinator, running a traditional I formation.
Mumme says he couldn’t have switched offenses even had he wanted to. Head coach Bill Yung wouldn’t have allowed it. But you can’t stonewall ideas.
***
Mumme sat in a Brigham Young football office in 1986. The UTEP staff had been fired. Mumme had landed at Texas’ Copperas Cove High School. But at least he was a head coach. He could do what he wanted. And he wanted to mimic BYU.
“Best thing that ever happened to me,” Mumme said of getting fired in El Paso. “I couldn’t get a college job. But we had beat BYU that year, and it kind of opened some doors for me for those guys.”
Those guys were Lavell Edwards assistants Norm Chow, Roger French and Robbie Bosco. Mumme regularly drove the 900 miles to Provo, Utah, picking their brains about their throw-it-around offense.
“Hal was here all the time,” Bosco told Tim Layden for his book, “Blood, Sweat and Chalk”.
***
Mumme sat in his Iowa Wesleyan office in 1991, with a dilemma. He had coached the Tigers to a record of 14-9 after two years, but his ’91 team figured to be overmatched in talent. Not that you can get all that overmatched as an NAIA independent, playing the likes of Missouri-Rolla.
But Mumme liked to win. He wanted to give his team the best chance possible. So he and his lieutenant, an idea man himself by the name of Mike Leach, hatched the plan to run their BYU offense uptempo. No huddle. Go fast.
“Got stuck with an impossible schedule, so we started playing fast,” Mumme said. “That’s probably been the thing that’s set us apart. Mike Leach actually came up with the term Air Raid. All of a sudden it looked different.”
***
Mumme sat in his office at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, in 2011, chatting with Dana Holgorsen, one of the great Air Raid legacies. At Houston, OSU and eventually West Virginia, Holgorsen would enhance the Air Raid. New OU coordinator Lincoln Riley, too, adding all kinds of run-game wrinkles.
That was a little foreign to Mumme and Leach. “Mike (Leach) and I, we always kind of considered runs a wasted play,” Mumme said. Mumme’s Kentucky teams were SEC offensive terrors in the late 1990s, so much so that when Bob Stoops got the Oklahoma job in December 1998, he brought along Leach.
Mumme’s and Leach’s offenses never slowed. Their coaching careers did. Mumme lost his Kentucky job amid NCAA violation allegations in 2001; Leach lost his Texas Tech job in 2009 amid conflict with university brass. Leach would eventually land at Washington State. Mumme would take the Air Raid to New Mexico State, McMurry and Belhaven.
But their proteges would live on in more influential places. Houston. College Station. Lubbock. Berkeley. Stillwater. Norman.
AIR RAID EVOLUTION
Hal Mumme’s Air Raid offense is ranks among the most unique passing offenses invented over the last 60 years. Here are the notables, with descriptions from Tim Layden’s great book, “Blood, Sweat and Chalk; The Ultimate Football Playbook: How the Great Coaches Built Today’s Game”:
AIR CORYELL
• Patriarch: Don Coryell
• Origin: 1959, Whittier College
• Disciples: Joe Gibbs, Norv Turner, Mike Martz, Jason Garrett
• Beneficiaries: San Diego State’s Don Horn, Dennis Shaw and Brian Sipe; St. Louis Cardinals’ Jim Hart; San Diego Chargers’ Dan Fouts; Dallas Cowboys’ Troy Aikman and Tony Romo
• Description: “Combined technical simplicity with daring downfield strikes written into almost every play. Pass routes were numbered in a basic 1 through 9 ladder. Quarterbacks were instructed to read from deep to short and to get rid of the ball quickly. Formations with four wide receivers became common, and eventually, players in motion became routine.”
RUN-AND-SHOOT
• Patriarch: Tiger Ellison
• Origin: Middletown (Ohio) High School, 1959
• Disciples: Mouse Davis, Jack Pardee, John Jenkins, June Jones
• Beneficiaries: Portland State’s Neil Lomax, the Houston Gamblers’ Jim Kelly, Houston U.’s Andre Ware and David Klingler, Houston Oilers’ Warren Moon
• Description: “All the elemental run-and-shoot plays involved option — or readable — pass routes, where the receiver is reacting to the defense and the quarterback is reading the receiver … Each receiver determines his next cut, based on the reaction of the defense. The quarterback is throwing to a spot where the receiver should be.”
WEST COAST
• Patriarch: Bill Walsh
• Origin: 1970, Cincinnati Bengals
• Disciples: Mike Holmgren, Sam Wyche, Mike Shanahan
• Beneficiaries: Cincinnati Bengals’ Ken Anderson, San Francisco 49ers’ Joe Montana, Denver Broncos’ John Elway, Green Bay Packers’ Brett Favre
• Description: “First pass offense in which timing was the critical element … More emphasis on shorter, more horizontal routes … Before Walsh, the forward pass came with significant risk; since Walsh, it has been a much more reliable chain-moving tool. It was the first offensive system to assign and incorporate … ‘hot’ receivers … into the void vacated by a blitzing linebacker.”
AIR RAID
• Patriarch: Hal Mumme
• Origin: Iowa Wesleyan, 1991
• Disciples: Mike Leach, Dana Holgorsen, Kevin Sumlin, Kliff Kingsbury, Sonny Dykes, Lincoln Riley
• Beneficiaries: Kentucky’s Tim Couch, Oklahoma’s Josh Heupel, Houston’s Case Keenum, West Virginia’s Geno Smith, Texas Tech’s Kliff Kingsbury and Graham Harrell
• Description: “Everything in the (BYU) offense was run from a spread formation, with wide line splits.” Then uptempo, no-huddle was added by Mumme and Leach in 1991, and the Air Raid was born.
Compiled by Berry Tramel
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AIR RAID TIMELINE
A look at the developments that led to the Air Raid offense making a resurgence this season at Oklahoma and Oklahoma State:
• 1930s: TCU coach Dutch Meyer, with great quarterbacks Davey O’Brien and Sammy Baugh, created the first spread, splitting out his two ends.
• 1950s: Tiger Ellison, a high school coach in Middletown, Ohio, spread out his linemen and started throwing passes on most downs. Ellison called his offense the run-and-shoot.
• 1970s: Brigham Young offensive coordinator Doug Scovil, incorporated run-and-shoot formations and concepts to a vertical passing game.
• 1983: Mouse Davis, offensive coordinator of the USFL’s Houston Gamblers and a run-and-shoot aficionado, visited Texas-El Paso offensive coordinator Hal Mumme. They talked for seven hours, and ideas began exploding in Mumme’s brain.
• 1986: Mumme is named head coach at Copperas Cove High School in Central Texas and installs the BYU offense.
• 1989: Mumme is named head coach at Iowa Wesleyan and hires a 30-year-old assistant named Mike Leach.
• 1991: Facing a tough schedule, Mumme and Leach decide to play uptempo, no-huddle with their BYU offense. The Air Raid was born.
• 1998: Remembering the 406 passing yards and five TD passes his Florida defense allowed to Leach’s Kentucky offense, new OU head coach Bob Stoops hires Leach as offensive coordinator.
• 2000: New Texas Tech coach Leach unveils the second Air Raid attack in the Big 12, and the lid is off offenses in the traditionally run-bound league.
• 2008: Leach disciple Dana Holgorsen is hired as offensive coordinator at Houston U., and Holgorsen adds a run-game emphasis to the Air Raid, which he also took to OSU in 2010 and West Virginia in 2011.
• 2012: Kevin Sumlin, Holgorsen’s boss at Houston, goes to Texas A&M and inherits quarterback Johnny Manziel, who wins the Heisman Trophy with Sumlin adding QB runs to the Air Raid.
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AIR RAID TERMINOLOGYA few of the classic Air Raid pass routes and plays. Most are from the Hal Mumme/Mike Leach playbook and might have different names in Lincoln Riley’s and Dana Holgorsen’s versions:
• Hitch: A route in which the receiver runs downfield, stops suddenly and turns around.
• Corner: A route in which a receiver runs downfield, then makes a diagonal break toward the sideline.
• Wheel: A route in which a halfback, or possibly a wide receiver in motion, zips to the sideline and heads straight upfield, designed to create confusion from a zone defense that might find its original territory empty.
• Post: A route similar to a corner, except the receiver breaks off diagonally toward the goal post.
• Dig: A route in which a receiver breaks off a post route and cuts straight across the field
• Smash: A two-receiver combination, with the outside receiver on a 6-yard hitch and the inside receiver on a 12-yard corner route. Designed to defeat Cover-2 defenses, in which two safeties play deep and each take half the field.
• Mesh: Perhaps the most iconic Air Raid play. A receiver on each side runs a short crossing pattern, close enough that defenders have to go around them. Meanwhile, running backs float into the flat on each side, and a wide receiver on one side runs a corner route, which creates a triangle on that side.
• Shallow Cross: A play in which the two outside receivers run deep, trying to open the field, an inside receiver runs about seven yards upfield and cuts across the middle and the other inside receiver, on the opposite side, goes one yard upfield before cutting across the middle. A halfback darts outside, opposite the inside receiver running the shallow route. The play is designed to open the middle.
• Four Verts: A play in which four receivers, or three receivers plus a halfback, run straight down the field, forcing a defense, set up to stop the crossing patterns, to get back deep and quickly.
• Y-Cross: A classic Air Raid play — an outside receiver runs deep, the opposite inside receiver runs a deep cross (almost a corner route from across the field), the other outside receiver runs the dig route into area perhaps opened by the deep cross, while halfbacks flood into the flat on each side.
• Stick: A basic Air Raid play. An outside receiver goes deep, the inside receiver on the same side runs a “stick” route, 5-6 yards beyond the line of scrimmage, in which he curls into an open void between the linebackers. On the other side, the inside receiver and outside receivers both run slants, as quick options against the blitz.
• Y-stick: A Dana Holgorsen addition to the Air Raid, with the offensive line blocking a draw play, the two outside receivers going deep and two inside receivers on the same side, one running an out pattern and the other a hitch to the outside of the linebacker, who has to decide between playing the draw or the pass.
• Shakes: Another play designed to dent the Cover-2. The outside receiver runs a deep corner route, and the inside receiver on his side runs virtually straight down the field, putting pressure on the deep safety on that side. On the other side, the outside receiver runs a deep corner, keeping that safety at home. Each halfback swing into the flat.
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