When I watch a football game, here’s most of what I see: either guys going out for passes and quarterbacks throwing the ball in their direction or blockers trying to push defenders aside to create holes for runners to charge through. In other words, I see almost nothing. Multiply me by millions of other weekend fans, and a fair number of sportswriters, and it becomes clear why Hal Mumme (pronounced mummy), who turns out to be the James Madison of 21st-century football, has spent his career bouncing from schools like Copperas Cove High to Iowa Wesleyan College to, currently, Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. In a coaching career that has stretched from 1986 to the present, even Mumme’s one venture into the big time was at the Southeastern Conference’s football backwater, the University of Kentucky, and it lasted only three years.
Part of the explanation for Mumme’s checkered career is ingrained in the nature of the coaching profession, and as S. C. Gwynne points out here, a football coach’s “job security is a joke. . . . The difference between being loved and being run out of town is the difference between 7-4 and 5-6.” In an average year, the turnover rate for coaches in the NCAA’s elite Football Bowl Subdivision is about one in five.
But most of the explanation for why Mumme’s name hasn’t (yet) joined the pantheon of Knute Rockne, Vince Lombardi, Bear Bryant, Bill Belichick, and other fabled coaches is that he was too far ahead of his time. Gwynne doesn’t quote the political scientist Michael Mandelbaum, author of the splendid The Meaning of Sports (2004), but he could have. Mandelbaum wrote that football was the right game for the mid- and late-20th-century “machine age because football teams are like machines, with specialized moving parts that must function simultaneously.” With the coming of the contemporary, postindustrial era, he argued, football yielded much of its prominence of place to basketball, whose free-flowing, networked action harmonizes with the spirit of the age.
What Mumme did, in a sense, was find a way to bring football into the postindustrial world. For many years, the mark of a successful coach was a fat playbook that told everyone on the field exactly where they were supposed to be on every play. (The Chicago Bears’ George Halas bragged that his was 500 plays long.) The playbook was the equivalent of a large factory’s manual of standard operating procedures. Consequently, adapting flexibly to changing circumstances on the fly was hard.
Most of what was in the playbooks, Mumme saw, were running plays because—well, that’s the way it had always been done. Caution was the watchword, the received wisdom of the football ages being that “there are three things that can happen when you pass, and two of them”—incompletions and interceptions—”are bad.” The truth of that adage was self-fulfilling: In the 1960s, for example, the completion rate for the relatively few passes that NFL quarterbacks threw was less than 50 percent, and the interception rate was 6 percent, double the fumble rate on running plays.
Other conventions of football-as-usual struck Mumme as misguided, such as punting on fourth down and jamming offensive linemen close together. Why turn four opportunities to move the ball down the field into three, he wondered? Why make the field narrower than the 53.33 yards it actually is by bunching up your players? For that matter, why not run a “hurry-up” offense all game instead of confining it to the last two minutes? And why assume that when you’re backed up to your own goal line you have to wage “an elemental war of blood and guts and slobber at the line of scrimmage” when, just beyond, lies “the better part of an acre of grass with no one in it”?
Mumme’s answer to these questions, which he formulated with his colleague Mike Leach, was the offense now widely known as the Air Raid. As Gwynne shows, Mumme didn’t invent it out of whole cloth: He borrowed bits and pieces from Brigham Young’s innovative coach LaVell Edwards, the San Francisco 49ers’ Bill Walsh, Portland State’s Darrel “Mouse” Davis, even from a 50-year-old book called Run and Shoot Football by the Ohio high school coach Glenn “Tiger” Ellison.
The Air Raid offense is grounded in a small number of plays that appear bafflingly complex (“a whirring, high-speed, multidimensional machine”) to the defense, but are simple for the offense. Simple, as Ronald Reagan used to say in a different context, but not easy. The Air Raid sends out lots of receivers over the entire width of the field and, depending on how the defense responds, lets each of them decide which of several possible routes to run instead of telling them exactly where to go.
That puts a lot of responsibility on the receivers and at least as much on the quarterback, which is why Mumme’s idea of practice isn’t grinding through a fat playbook but, rather, running a few plays from a couple of formations again and again until the players learn how to make maximum use of their freedom. It’s industrial-age football reborn as networked-age basketball—”fast break on grass,” in former Kentucky athletic director C. M. Newton’s description.
As early as 1991, Mumme’s teams were throwing the ball 60 times per game and completing two-thirds of them, much more than in the NFL or college ranks. Today, Air Raid and its variations “dominate huge swaths of American football . . . from the pee-wees to the pros.” In 2015, Gwynne writes, “25 NFL teams had completion rates above 60 percent” and “51 college quarterbacks had averaged 65-plus percent over their careers.” Interceptions are down to about one per team per game, “confirming what Hal had long theorized: that the more you passed, the better you got at it.”
Football has become Hal Mumme’s world, even if his current address is a hotel room in downtown Jackson. It’s good to be right, but risky to be right too soon.
Michael Nelson, Fulmer professor of political science at Rhodes College, is the author of Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and
Dividing Government.
