Good little read on the Mumme (and Leach) Air Raid offense:
https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj....fect-pass-s-c-gwynne-1475166931?client=safari
https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj....fect-pass-s-c-gwynne-1475166931?client=safari
S.C. Gwynne’s ‘The Perfect Pass’ Celebrates the Men Who Reinvented Football - WSJ
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S.C. Gwynne’s ‘The Perfect Pass’ Celebrates the Men Who Reinvented Football
Will Leitch reviews a thrill-a-minute book about how a pass-happy coach at Iowa Wesleyan Universitychanged the college and pro games.
By
Will Leitch
Sept. 30, 2016 12:40 p.m. ET
One of the mysteries of football’s death-grip hold on American consciousness is that the vast majority of the millions of fans who watch it with unparalleled devotion have no idea what is going on. The game lends itself so well to television that it gives one the illusion of understanding: Quarterback throws ball, receiver catches ball, receiver runs into end zone, receiver twerks. But very few of the people who watch eight hours of football every
Saturday and Sunday could name a single play in their favorite team’s playbook. The game being played and the game being watched are two different things.
It’s a little astounding, then, when you get a glimpse of some of the brainpower dedicated to a game that most of us watch with one eye on our fantasy-football app and honey mustard dripping down our chins. From Walter Camp, who created the line of scrimmage in 1880, to Knute Rockne, who popularized the forward pass, to Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense, football
It’s a little astounding, then, when you get a glimpse of some of the brainpower dedicated to a game that most of us watch with one eye on our fantasy-football app and honey mustard dripping down our chins. From Walter Camp, who created the line of scrimmage in 1880, to Knute Rockne, who popularized the forward pass, to Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense, football innovators are venerated by players and coaches with the sort of awe usually reserved for seers who have divined truths not reserved for mortals.S.C. Gwynne’s ‘The Perfect Pass’ Celebrates the Men Who Reinvented Football
Will Leitch reviews a thrill-a-minute book about how a pass-happy coach at Iowa Wesleyan Universitychanged the college and pro games.
By
Will Leitch
Sept. 30, 2016 12:40 p.m. ET
One of the mysteries of football’s death-grip hold on American consciousness is that the vast majority of the millions of fans who watch it with unparalleled devotion have no idea what is going on. The game lends itself so well to television that it gives one the illusion of understanding: Quarterback throws ball, receiver catches ball, receiver runs into end zone, receiver twerks. But very few of the people who watch eight hours of football every
Saturday and Sunday could name a single play in their favorite team’s playbook. The game being played and the game being watched are two different things.
It’s a little astounding, then, when you get a glimpse of some of the brainpower dedicated to a game that most of us watch with one eye on our fantasy-football app and honey mustard dripping down our chins. From Walter Camp, who created the line of scrimmage in 1880, to Knute Rockne, who popularized the forward pass, to Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense, football
It’s a little astounding, then, when you get a glimpse of some of the brainpower dedicated to a game that most of us watch with one eye on our fantasy-football app and honey mustard dripping down our chins. From Walter Camp, who created the line of scrimmage in 1880, to Knute Rockne, who popularized the forward pass, to Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense, football innovators are venerated by players and coaches with the sort of awe usually reserved for seers who have divined truths not reserved for mortals.
The gap between fan and coach may explain why Hal Mumme, the subject of S.C. Gwynne’s highly entertaining book “The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football,” is still so little known. Along with his protégé Mike Leach, now the head coach at Washington State University, Mr. Mumme revolutionized their sport in ways that, frankly, dwarf the legacy of Billy Beane and his gang from “Moneyball.” Everything about football that is different now from what it was 20 years ago—to put it in the parlance of a common fan, why your fantasy-football running backs are a lot less valuable than they used to be—started in 1989 with Messrs. Mumme and Leach at tiny Iowa Wesleyan University, making less than $45,000 a year between them, diagramming plays together like madmen, throwing slant patterns at the wall to see whatstuck.“The Perfect Pass” is also a thorough, without being exhausting, trip through the history of football innovation. The Air Raid offense—Mr. Leach gave it the cheesy name—drew on several pass-happy philosophies that had beenpercolating for decades. Tiger Ellison and Mouse Davis haddeveloped a strategy called run-and-shoot, in which (among other things) receivers were encouraged to look for open space rather than run a precise route. Lavell Edwards, whose Brigham Young University offense Mr. Mumme admired above all
others, won a national championship in the mid-1980s with short “tunnel screens” and a mysteriously effective crossingpattern called “mesh.” And various college and pro teams hadexperimented with a “no-huddle” offense designed to keep the defense from adjusting or substituting.
Mr. Mumme put all these ideas together brilliantly and then put them into practice because, hey,why not? It’s Iowa Wesleyan. But his key contribution was, essentially,daring: passing at every opportunity, as quickly as possible, as often as possible. No one had ever thrown so much, or so successfully.
Spreading out the field by placing linemen several feet apart from one another, passing rather than rushingeven in short-yardage situations, running every play from a shotgun formation—Messrs. Mumme andLeach just kept trying to top each other with the crazy things they could come up with and ultimately ended up surprising even themselves with how often their innovations worked.Mr. Gwynne paints Mr. Mumme as a sort of football frontiersman, a free thinker in a game that discouragesindependent thought and personality; some of the book’smost amusing sections involve opposing coaches simply baffled by what they’re seeing, their larger, faster, more talented players being run off the field. Defensive coordinators watching game tape thought that the Mumme-Leach offense had an incredibly complex playbook, Mr. Gwynne explains. In fact, they had only a few plays. What opponents did not understand was that the
receivers they saw taking different routes each snap had simply been told to run where they saw open field, like kids playing a pickup game.
Mr. Mumme’s early teams set collegiate records nearly every season despite fielding mostly green, mostly untalented players, the only kids he could talk into coming out to Mount Pleasant, Iowa. His later teams not only became scoring machines; they turned around moribund football programs at Georgia’s Valdosta State and later Kentucky. Meanwhile, coaches from all across the country, at much bigger schools than Iowa Wesleyan, some even from the NFL, started peeking into Mr. Mumme’s program. What was this crazy man up to?
What he was up to was blazing a path for today’s NFL, which is far more based on the passing programs that Mr. Mumme designed for his teams than on the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust visions of yesterday. Wes Welker was an unheralded slot receiver when Mr. Leach recruited him to Texas Tech in 2000. Seven years later he was running similar routes in a Patriots offense that had adapted more than a few ideas from the Air Raid. Football is now about speed and precision rather than brute massive force—though it’s of course still incredibly violent—and while that transformation wasn’t started by Mr. Mumme, his willingness to devote himself fully to his passing cause gave the sport the shove needed to complete it.But a prophet is never understood in his own home. Iowa Wesleyan ran Mr. Mumme off for having too much power at a tiny school; Kentucky, his highest-profile gig, forced him out for recruiting violations that were later revealed not to have much to do with him. His disciples, including Mr. Leach, are all over the NFL and big-time college football now, but Mr. Mumme is nowhere near either. He’s the head coach at tiny Belhaven College in Jackson, Miss., where he went 4-17 through his first two seasons. Football might love the innovation of iconoclasts, but it has
no use for their personality. It is not a sport that encourages, or celebrates, going your own way. Mr. Gwynne’s book is a breezy, smart, enjoyable read that gives Mr. Mumme the moment he’s long overdue for without papering over his flaws: You realize his genius while still understanding why he’d be a pain as an employee—stubbornness hardly the least among the reasons.
Hal Mumme never got the dream job all coaches want—Alabama, the Dallas Cowboys—Hal Mumme never got the dream job all coaches want—Alabama, the Dallas Cowboys—and he never got the stability that eludes almost every coach. He instead got the satisfaction of knowing that his crazy ideas were right. His career has not gone the way he probably expected it to; you might never see another Hal Mumme-coached game on your television. But in a way, you see one every time you turn it on.
—Mr. Leitch is a senior writer for Sports on Earth, a culture writer for Bloomberg Politics and the founder of Deadspin.
Will Leitch reviews a thrill-a-minute book about how a pass-happy coach at Iowa Wesleyan Universitychanged the college and pro games.
By
Will Leitch
Sept. 30, 2016 12:40 p.m. ET
One of the mysteries of football’s death-grip hold on American consciousness is that the vast majority of the millions of fans who watch it with unparalleled devotion have no idea what is going on. The game lends itself so well to television that it gives one the illusion of understanding: Quarterback throws ball, receiver catches ball, receiver runs into end zone, receiver twerks. But very few of the people who watch eight hours of football every
Saturday and Sunday could name a single play in their favorite team’s playbook. The game being played and the game being watched are two different things.
It’s a little astounding, then, when you get a glimpse of some of the brainpower dedicated to a game that most of us watch with one eye on our fantasy-football app and honey mustard dripping down our chins. From Walter Camp, who created the line of scrimmage in 1880, to Knute Rockne, who popularized the forward pass, to Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense, football
It’s a little astounding, then, when you get a glimpse of some of the brainpower dedicated to a game that most of us watch with one eye on our fantasy-football app and honey mustard dripping down our chins. From Walter Camp, who created the line of scrimmage in 1880, to Knute Rockne, who popularized the forward pass, to Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense, football innovators are venerated by players and coaches with the sort of awe usually reserved for seers who have divined truths not reserved for mortals.S.C. Gwynne’s ‘The Perfect Pass’ Celebrates the Men Who Reinvented Football
Will Leitch reviews a thrill-a-minute book about how a pass-happy coach at Iowa Wesleyan Universitychanged the college and pro games.
By
Will Leitch
Sept. 30, 2016 12:40 p.m. ET
One of the mysteries of football’s death-grip hold on American consciousness is that the vast majority of the millions of fans who watch it with unparalleled devotion have no idea what is going on. The game lends itself so well to television that it gives one the illusion of understanding: Quarterback throws ball, receiver catches ball, receiver runs into end zone, receiver twerks. But very few of the people who watch eight hours of football every
Saturday and Sunday could name a single play in their favorite team’s playbook. The game being played and the game being watched are two different things.
It’s a little astounding, then, when you get a glimpse of some of the brainpower dedicated to a game that most of us watch with one eye on our fantasy-football app and honey mustard dripping down our chins. From Walter Camp, who created the line of scrimmage in 1880, to Knute Rockne, who popularized the forward pass, to Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense, football
It’s a little astounding, then, when you get a glimpse of some of the brainpower dedicated to a game that most of us watch with one eye on our fantasy-football app and honey mustard dripping down our chins. From Walter Camp, who created the line of scrimmage in 1880, to Knute Rockne, who popularized the forward pass, to Bill Walsh and his West Coast offense, football innovators are venerated by players and coaches with the sort of awe usually reserved for seers who have divined truths not reserved for mortals.
The gap between fan and coach may explain why Hal Mumme, the subject of S.C. Gwynne’s highly entertaining book “The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football,” is still so little known. Along with his protégé Mike Leach, now the head coach at Washington State University, Mr. Mumme revolutionized their sport in ways that, frankly, dwarf the legacy of Billy Beane and his gang from “Moneyball.” Everything about football that is different now from what it was 20 years ago—to put it in the parlance of a common fan, why your fantasy-football running backs are a lot less valuable than they used to be—started in 1989 with Messrs. Mumme and Leach at tiny Iowa Wesleyan University, making less than $45,000 a year between them, diagramming plays together like madmen, throwing slant patterns at the wall to see whatstuck.“The Perfect Pass” is also a thorough, without being exhausting, trip through the history of football innovation. The Air Raid offense—Mr. Leach gave it the cheesy name—drew on several pass-happy philosophies that had beenpercolating for decades. Tiger Ellison and Mouse Davis haddeveloped a strategy called run-and-shoot, in which (among other things) receivers were encouraged to look for open space rather than run a precise route. Lavell Edwards, whose Brigham Young University offense Mr. Mumme admired above all
others, won a national championship in the mid-1980s with short “tunnel screens” and a mysteriously effective crossingpattern called “mesh.” And various college and pro teams hadexperimented with a “no-huddle” offense designed to keep the defense from adjusting or substituting.
Mr. Mumme put all these ideas together brilliantly and then put them into practice because, hey,why not? It’s Iowa Wesleyan. But his key contribution was, essentially,daring: passing at every opportunity, as quickly as possible, as often as possible. No one had ever thrown so much, or so successfully.
Spreading out the field by placing linemen several feet apart from one another, passing rather than rushingeven in short-yardage situations, running every play from a shotgun formation—Messrs. Mumme andLeach just kept trying to top each other with the crazy things they could come up with and ultimately ended up surprising even themselves with how often their innovations worked.Mr. Gwynne paints Mr. Mumme as a sort of football frontiersman, a free thinker in a game that discouragesindependent thought and personality; some of the book’smost amusing sections involve opposing coaches simply baffled by what they’re seeing, their larger, faster, more talented players being run off the field. Defensive coordinators watching game tape thought that the Mumme-Leach offense had an incredibly complex playbook, Mr. Gwynne explains. In fact, they had only a few plays. What opponents did not understand was that the
receivers they saw taking different routes each snap had simply been told to run where they saw open field, like kids playing a pickup game.
Mr. Mumme’s early teams set collegiate records nearly every season despite fielding mostly green, mostly untalented players, the only kids he could talk into coming out to Mount Pleasant, Iowa. His later teams not only became scoring machines; they turned around moribund football programs at Georgia’s Valdosta State and later Kentucky. Meanwhile, coaches from all across the country, at much bigger schools than Iowa Wesleyan, some even from the NFL, started peeking into Mr. Mumme’s program. What was this crazy man up to?
What he was up to was blazing a path for today’s NFL, which is far more based on the passing programs that Mr. Mumme designed for his teams than on the three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust visions of yesterday. Wes Welker was an unheralded slot receiver when Mr. Leach recruited him to Texas Tech in 2000. Seven years later he was running similar routes in a Patriots offense that had adapted more than a few ideas from the Air Raid. Football is now about speed and precision rather than brute massive force—though it’s of course still incredibly violent—and while that transformation wasn’t started by Mr. Mumme, his willingness to devote himself fully to his passing cause gave the sport the shove needed to complete it.But a prophet is never understood in his own home. Iowa Wesleyan ran Mr. Mumme off for having too much power at a tiny school; Kentucky, his highest-profile gig, forced him out for recruiting violations that were later revealed not to have much to do with him. His disciples, including Mr. Leach, are all over the NFL and big-time college football now, but Mr. Mumme is nowhere near either. He’s the head coach at tiny Belhaven College in Jackson, Miss., where he went 4-17 through his first two seasons. Football might love the innovation of iconoclasts, but it has
no use for their personality. It is not a sport that encourages, or celebrates, going your own way. Mr. Gwynne’s book is a breezy, smart, enjoyable read that gives Mr. Mumme the moment he’s long overdue for without papering over his flaws: You realize his genius while still understanding why he’d be a pain as an employee—stubbornness hardly the least among the reasons.
Hal Mumme never got the dream job all coaches want—Alabama, the Dallas Cowboys—Hal Mumme never got the dream job all coaches want—Alabama, the Dallas Cowboys—and he never got the stability that eludes almost every coach. He instead got the satisfaction of knowing that his crazy ideas were right. His career has not gone the way he probably expected it to; you might never see another Hal Mumme-coached game on your television. But in a way, you see one every time you turn it on.
—Mr. Leitch is a senior writer for Sports on Earth, a culture writer for Bloomberg Politics and the founder of Deadspin.
