Oklahoma State’s Role In The Invention Of The Air Raid

On Saturday night in Palo Alto, Washington State crushed Stanford 42-16. I couldn’t help but smile at what Mike Leach is doing up in Pullman.

Mike Leach won 9 (!) games at Wazzu last year & is beating Stanford to a pulp. Texas Tech hasn't won 9 games since Leach's last season '09.

— Carson Cunningham (@KOCOCarson) October 9, 2016

The reason I couldn’t help but smile is because I finished a book last week called The Perfect Pass. It’s about the invention of the air raid offense, and Leach is its primary disciple. The man under whose tutelage he sat for years was named Hal Mumme. Mumme has coached everywhere, but the most fascinating place he coached was in Georgia at Valdosta State. Leach was one of his offensive coaches and he had a graduate assistant there who also played for him at his previous job at Iowa Wesleyan named … Dana Holgorsen.

Anyway the book is tremendous, and you should definitely read if if you’re interested in college football offenses. I learned a ton, and there’s some stuff in there about Oklahoma State. OSU was actually one of the reasons Mumme created this offense. Here’s an excerpt from early on in the book when Mumme was the offensive coordinator at West Texas State in 1980. They played OSU in Stillwater.

For a man who dreamed of throwing passes, however, Hal was in the wrong place. Head coach Bill Yung was a run-it-up-the-gut guy from the oldest of the old schools, playing in a league with like-minded coaches. He ran the ball out of a traditional I-formation and he ran it three-quarters of the time. He called the plays.

The exception was when he was badly overmatched, and then he would let Hal, who sat up in a box high above the field with headphones on, call the passing plays. The first time that happened was in September. West Texas State was playing Oklahoma State, a Division I-A power with a fast-rising coach named Jimmy Johnson and a fearsome defensive end named Dexter Manley, both of whom would go on to exceptional careers in the NFL.

Oklahoma State, playing at home in Stillwater, was expected to make sausage out of West Texas State. The score was likely to be 7o-o Hal, who had been stealing practice time to teach his quarterbacks and receivers more-advanced routes, had developed a modest repertoire of passing plays. And now Yung was giving him some scope, letting him do what he wanted. Hal could see, as the game progressed that Johnson was staying with a conservative zone defense. 

So he went to work, probing for weaknesses. If the Oklahoma State cornerbacks stayed back, he would call quick outs to wide state receivers in the flat. If the corners came up, the receivers would run patterns that would drop them into holes between the corners and the safeties. Hal systematically exploited slow linebackers and cheating safeties. He found unoccupied seams.

His plays worked, and he quickly discovered that Johnson’s zone defense could not stop them. For some reason he never came out of his Cover 2 and covers formations, perhaps because he could not quite believe what was happening to him. Hal made him pay for this conservatism.

West Texas QB Matt Patterson threw for 209 yards and a touchdown and West Texas won, 20-19, in what remains one of the greatest victories in school history. Hal believed that, had Yung allowed him to throw the ball more, he could have gained 40o yards through the air.

For Hal it was more than a thrilling win. So much of what he had drawn up over the years was theoretical, unproven. The Oklahoma State game offered tangible evidence that he could read the shifting patterns of a Division I-A pass defense with defensive backs who were bigger and faster than his receivers and find their weaknesses He had never doubted that he had this talent. He had never lacked self-confidence. But here was proof that he could do it.

It was a shocking loss for Johnson and OSU who would not really recover and go on to a 4-7 season despite high expectations.

The Oklahoman called it the most colossal loss in OSU football history. Jimmy Johnson called it “a big setback.” You can read the newspaper clippings from the game here.

What Johnson didn’t know is that 30 years from that season, OSU would hire someone who was still in elementary school but would go on to play for West Texas’ offensive coordinator 10 years later and eventually coach under him (Dana). And in 2010, when he was hired and brought Mumme’s air raid with him, OSU’s offense (and Brandon Weeden’s career) would never be the same.