The personal story of the rise and development of the Air Raid offense, the story of the men who developed and mastered it — its originators, Hal Mumme and Mike Leach, as well as coaches like Tony Franklin and Dana Holgorsen – has been told many times and told very well. The offense itself, its raw structure, plays, and formations, nevertheless deserves deeper study given its incredible rise, its increasing importance, and and its almost shocking omnipresence, in one form or another, at every level of football.
Let’s call a pass
But the Air Raid’s evolution over time has been even more fascinating than the playbook at any one moment of time. To paraphrase Holmes, a playbook is but a crystal, transparent and unchanged, and fails to convey the pressures that led to its existence or give any indication how it will continue to be shaped and reshaped over time. Indeed, the coaches who’ve taught and learned the Air Raid have changed, the players and formations have changed, and even the plays themselves have changed. The offense, however, remains, both shaped by these coaches and their players and somehow shaping each of them in the process. The wishbone and the Wing-T were playbooks, Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense a meticulous method of gameplanning, but the Air Raid is something more akin to an idea, or at least several related ones: that to be get an advantage at modern football you need to be particularly good at something, and to be good at something you have to commit to that something, and if you’re going to commit to something it might as well be different. And thus the principles underlying the Air Raid exist almost externally from the many coaches who have taught it: a diligent, many-reps approach to practice; a pass-first and spread the wealth philosophy; and, above all else, the edict to be willing to live in the extremes, to do things just a bit differently, to approach the game unlike other coaches, to be willing, in a game where conformity is king, to be just a little bit weird.
This article is therefore less about the blood and tissue of the Air Raid’s story — the personal stories of the men like Mumme and Leach who shaped the offense, though there is some of that too — but is instead about its bones: the history and evolution of the actual formations, plays, concepts, and gameplans that made up what you saw on some random Saturday a decade ago and will see on Saturdays this fall. This story is too complex of course for a single article, but we can still distill the broad themes to their essence and focus on four main storylines to the Air Raid’s story: the classical period, including the birth of the Air Raid from its BYU roots and the original”two-back package used at Valdosta State and Kentucky; Leach’s Texas Tech era, where the head pirate-in-charge tweaked the offense and as a result the Air Raid found a home in the southwest and flourished like it never had before; the offense’s bubbling up from the high school ranks, led by former outcast Tony Franklin and his Tony Franklin System; and the next generation of Air Raid innovators, led by Dana Holgorsen and others, who have begun the work of deconstructing the offense for a modern and everchanging game.
The Classical Period: Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta State, and Kentucky
When LaVell Edwards, head coach at BYU, decided that he wanted to throw the ball around, he and his offensive coordinator Doug Scovil looked to the NFL for inspiration. Scovil brought with him to BYU the core pass plays he’d learned in there, which in fact were the Sid Gillman’s core pass plays: vertical stretches, horizontal stretches, and man beating routes. These included the famous curl/flat and corner/flat routes, strongside and weakside flood routes, and so on. In other words, these were simply the building blocks of every passing offense. Gillman, decades earlier, had the simple insight that if one properly allocated receivers across the field at varying depths with space between them, no zone defense could cover them. Although the offense only has five potential receivers while the defense can drop seven, eight, or even nine men into coverage, if the offense can always threaten both vertically and underneath, the field is simply too large for a zone defense to cover a well orchestrated passing attack. And if zone defenses could not stop such passing, then passing concepts could be constructed to also defeat the inevitable man coverage they’d face. Defenses, in turn, would have to find ways to bring pressure to disrupt this design, and thus the cat-and-mouse game between offense and defense would go. Gillman revolutionized offense, but Scovil and Edwards streamlined it so that college kids — and not professionals — could excel with Gillman’s pro-style concepts. The story of the Air Raid over the last twenty years is simply this story being retold over and over again.
Mumme, Leach, and company famously made many pilgrimages to BYU during this time, including back when Mumme was still at Copperas Cove as a high school coach. There they studied everything about BYU’s system and essentially stole it verbatim, except they eventually began adding their own wrinkles based on their experiences: they began using more and more shotgun, more spread sets, ceased flipping their formations, and generally tailored the offense to what their players — high school and small college athletes — could do. (At the end of this article is an appendix featuring the plays and reads for the BYU passing offense.)
The idea behind the “original” Air Raid package was very simple; indeed, originally, it was just the Hal Mumme and Mike Leach translation of the old BYU playbook. I’ve included the old BYU passing game playbook at the bottom of this article as an appendix. Mumme and Leach simply took those BYU plays, added a bit more shotgun, and just threw the ball more often than even LaVell Edwards had. Over time, however, they began tweaking the plays — changing this route here, altering this there — and, most importantly, tailoring the schemes not to an NFL quarterback, or even the great college quarterbacks BYU had like Steve Young, Jim McMahon, or Ty Detmer, but instead average high school and small college quarterbacks like Dustin Dewald at Iowa Wesleyan and Chris Hatcher and Lance Funderburk at Valdosta State.
While at Valdosta, they primarily engaged in addition by subtraction. They cut out a few passing plays that weren’t as useful, shrank the running game to little more than an “iso” lead play and a draw, and, most famously, made the offense asymmetrical: Instead of running each play in one direction and having “right” and “left” variations on each formation, they instead made the offense entirely right-handed, always putting the tight-end or “Y” receiver to the right and the split-end or “X” to the left, and only moving “Z” around. Both Leach and Mumme have said they were inspired to do this after a conversation with former Baltimore Colts great Raymond Berry, who told them that was exactly how he and Unitas and the rest of the Colts did it. If you flip all of your formations, every time you teach a route — say, a curl or a slant — each receiver actually has to learn two routes, because he has to learn it from both the right and left sides. And the quarterback has to get used to throwing it to him to his left and to his right, depending on each receiver’s individual quirks.
Further, Berry said, he developed multiple ways to run each route depending on the leverage of the defense; if they asked him to line up to both sides he either had to give up those subtle variations or had to learn to run each of them to both sides, which was nigh impossible. Instead, he learned to run his routes on one side, and Unitas learned how to throw them to him on that side. Once Mumme and his staff made that change at Valdosta, the completion percentage of their quarterback at the time, Chris Hatcher, jumped roughly ten percentage points and won the Harlon Hill trophy, known colloquially as the Heisman trophy for D-II. Hatcher would of course go on to become an assistant to Mumme at Kentucky and is now the head coach at Murray State.
At this stage, the core of the offense was made up of a few five- and seven-step drop passing plays, specifically Mesh, All-Curl, 93 Wheel, Y-Sail, and Y-Cross. Let’s take a quick look at each play:
“92″: The infamous “Mesh”
No play is more synonymous with the Air Raid than the “mesh” concept, which was directly taken from the old BYU offense. The name of the play refers to the two receivers, Y and X, who run shallow crosses in opposite directions. The rule is that the Y “sets the depth of the mesh,” meaning he works to about six yards deep, while it is X’s job to come directly underneath him — in practice they begin by touching hands as they run by — to ensure there is no space between them. It is, at core, a “rub” route, known more derisively by defensive players and coaches as a “pick” play. It’s not illegal because the receivers do not actually seek to pick defenders but instead simply get on their paths and run by each other, forcing defenders to go around them. Meanwhile, the runningbacks both check-release — meaning they look for potential blitzers — and then release quickly to the flats.
The key innovation from Mumme on the play was to change Z’s route from a post, which is what it was in the old BYU system, to a corner route. This transforms the play into a triangle read on the frontside, with the corner, X on the shallow and F in the flat creating the triangle, which puts both a high/low and a horizontal stretch on a zone defense. Further, the corner route had some ability to adjust: against man defenses and in the red zone, it was a true corner route run at 45 degrees and to the pylon, thrown with arc; against a soft corner the receiver bent it flat underneath the dropping defender, so it become more of a true out route. At all turns, the theory was for the quarterback and receiver to simply find the “open grass.”
“96″: All-Curl
The All-Curl concept is one that is as old as the passing game itself. It goes directly back to Sid Gillman and is a true horizontal stretch. Once each receiver has run his route, there are five receivers facing the quarterback, and against any three-deep zone defense with four underneath defenders, there should always be a receiver open. They had different ways of reading the play too; their preference was to read it from the Y to the backside X, but would read the frontside against certain weak rotating coverages. Early on at Kentucky Mumme essentially spoonfed Tim Couch and told him which way to read it; as time went on he and other quarterbacks were given more freedom.
“93″: H-Wheel
This somewhat off-beat play developed out of a few BYU routes. One was the desire to run the curl/wheel combination, especially given that the H in the Air Raid ran to the flat so often the wheel was a nice change-up. But BYU also had a play called “Y-Option” or “Y-Choice,” and the pivot route by the Y receiver on this play — essentially as an outlet — was a way to incorporate the concept. This is just one of the examples of a play that began with BYU but changed forms a few times before it started showing up on Air Raid whiteboards. And in 1997 at Kentucky, Mumme’s preferred way of calling the play was actually from trips, shown below, with the Z receiver on the left in-between the X and H.
“93″: Trips H-Wheel
Kentucky used this variant a lot in that first season because the read was so simple — the curl usually came wide open — and it was the call for the game-winner (though from a two-back set) for the Couch-to-Yeast overtime gamewinner when Kentucky beat Alabama in 1997, their first time beating the Crimson Tide in over 75 years.
“94″: Y-Sail
When Mumme saw man-to-man defenses, as were prevalent in the SEC, he liked the Mesh concept. But against zones he tended to call one of his two “flood” plays, his strongside flood or “Y-Sail” concept being the first. The play looked like most three level “vertical stretch” plays, with a deep receiver (Z), a short receiver (F) and an intermediate one (Y). On this play Y had some flexibility: he could run a true corner route to the soft spot in a zone, or he could stick his foot and break flat on a true “out” route. Or he could break to the outside but then settle up in the first open window.
On the backside, the H check-released to the flat (sensing a theme here?) while the X ran a dig route — burst to ten, fake running the post, then break flat across the field at fifteen. The theory was that the only way a zone defense could defend the frontside flood is if it over-rotated to that side; if it did then the quarterback could step up and work the backside dig combination. (Note that Mumme often had the backside receiver also run either a curl or a post-curl; it often depended on the speed of the receiver he had there.)
Further, at this time the four verticals play was not a main feature of the Air Raid (more on that in a moment), and so the vertical route by Z on Y-Sail and the vertical by X in Y-Cross below were the main “shot” routes in the offense. This was simply built into the ball-control nature of the passing game, but it also was a reason why the Air Raid developed a reputation as a dink-and-dunk offense. This was something the next generation of Air Raid coaches — as well as Leach himself — would specifically address.
“95″: Y-Cross
Behind only the Mesh concept, Y-Cross is the route I think of most when I think of the classic Air Raid. While back then the offense didn’t feature a lot of vertical, over-the-top types of routes, Y-Cross was the main “big play” generator for them. First, the X receiver had a lot of freedom to run either a true “Go” or vertical route, or to bend it back inside into more of a post if the near safety vacated the area. His job was to take the top off of the defense. Second, the Y receiver worked his deep cross — “under Sam and over Mike,” meaning inside the strongside linebacker and over the top and behind the middle linebacker — to a spot 22 yards deep to the opposite side of the field. And underneath the H, typically the halfback, ran a true option route. He burst to about five yards deep, essentially right at the weakside linebacker, and either broke his route outside, inside, or settled up in an open void against zones. He was taught to basically “step on the toes” of the weakside linebacker before making his break. The Z on the backside ran the dig route while the F leaked to the flat as the outlet.
The Air Raiders called this Y-Cross but Sid Gillman used to call it simply what it was: weakside flood. It’s the exact same concept as the Y-Sail, except the Y is coming from the opposite side of the formation. This too made it a nice change-up to the Y-Sail and Mesh concepts that Mumme ran so often, and if a team tried to overplay the Air Raid’s inherent right-handed nature, Y-Cross was there to hit them to the backside.
This route concept came directly from BYU; LaVell Edwards spoke about it many times and it was one of their best passes, and Mumme ripped it off verbatim. The only difference was the increased freedom he gave the X receiver to get deep, and that he changed the read slightly. In the BYU version, the H on the option route was the primary, and they only threw the deep cross if the defense came up to take him away. Mumme, by contrast, liked to read everything consistently deep-to-short. The concern was that the defense would overplay the cross and you needed to hit the halfback to get the cross open behind him, but Mumme’s teams threw the ball short to the runningbacks so often the linebackers were already predisposed to giving up the cross behind them. And there was no concern about not hitting the option route enough; in Mumme’s first two years at Kentucky, his “H” runningback, Anthony White, caught 59 passes in 1997 and 78 in 1998, in each case in only eleven games, many of them on the H-option.
WR Tunnel Screen
Arguably the biggest innovation Mumme and his staff brought to the SEC was the introduction of the receiver “tunnel screen,” a predecessor to the wide variety of receiver screens you see today, from jailbreaks to “now” screens or “rocket” screens and many others. At the same time Purdue was making widespread use of the “bubble screen” as an at-the-line check in the Big Ten to hurt stodgy 4-3 teams that didn’t deign to walk their linebackers out to Purdue’s slot receivers, but Mumme’s use of the tunnel screen was audacious: Any down, any distance, against any defense, he was going to throw a none-yard pass to a receiver and let him try to make a play. Whether or not you think this innovation was ingenious or nefarious likely depends on your view of the many such receiver screens ever-present throughout every level of football today. But in 1997 teams were really not prepared for it, and the bottom line was that Kentucky could not throw the ball fifty times a game like they wanted to entirely by dropping back and pass protecting. Instead they needed to get the ball to the perimeter, fast, and wear out the great defensive lines they faced. The tunnel screens gave them a way to do it.
At that time Chris Hatcher, the former Mumme quarterback who had then become a Mumme assistant, liked to say that Kentucky thought of themselves as a well-coached backyard team. This insight — at a place like Kentucky, at least — was ingenious, because almost all of Kentucky’s post-Bear Bryant history had shown that it could not compete playing the same brand of football as everyone else in the SEC. Instead they needed to change the game into something different, something, well, weird. Mumme and his staff knew they couldn’t beat the big SEC powers — or just about anyone in the SEC at all — playing normal, regular football. They could only beat them playing something more like back yard football, and the tunnel screen was the chief symbol. Because while you may not be able to run right up and knock down guys who are bigger, stronger, and faster than you, you might, on the other hand, be able to do this:
You’re not supposed to be able to throw a tunnel screen against Cover 1 press man, and your all-everything quarterback is not supposed to be sixty yards downfield throwing a (borderline illegal) block. But it was Mummeball in 1997, and it was weird, and yet despite all the weirdness it was only a taste of what was to come. And it began that following season in 1998. But first, below are coaching film game cut-ups of the main concepts from the 1997 season.
If I have my history right, the original “One-Back Clinic” was held at Washington State before the 1998 season. Mike Price, then the head coach of Washington State was there, as was Mike Leach, along with the other spread and pass-first guys. There weren’t many of them, back then. But it was an interesting group. For Kentucky, that offseason they made a few tweaks to their offense that have become very famous today. The first was that they wanted to use more one-back sets, largely because they became more comfortable that their quarterback, Tim Couch, would be able to find his hot receivers. And they also wanted to run more crossing routes. So it was that offseason they introduced the Air Raid “shallow cross series,” which, for the high school teams that run the Air Raid, may be the most popular concept out of all of them.
Mumme got the actual series from Mike Shanahan, then head coach of the Denver Broncos, but it’s unclear to me how much Mumme synthesized it in the translation. The concept was classic Air Raid: They really could only run it from one set — with two receivers to each side — but within that limitation they had ultimate variation.
Shallow Cross
The key for the play was to have the shallow come from one side and the square-in or “Hunt” route come from the other. The Hunt route was just a ten yard square-in, where the receiver had the flexibility to settle in any open void. The outside receivers ran vertical routes while the runningback check-released to a short hook to the side the shallow came from. The variation came in that they could call any receiver to run the shallow: “Y Shallow,” is shown above, showing the tight-end running the shallow cross and H on the Hunt route. But “Z Shallow” would look similar, but with Z running the shallow cross, the Y outside releasing to a vertical route, with H on the Hunt backside. Or they could call “H Shallow” or “X Shallow,” with the designated receiver running from left to right and the Y running the Hunt. It’s the same play and concept, but allowed them to vary who they wanted to get the ball to based on game plan or mismatch. I never saw Kentucky run this once in 1997, but it emerged in 1998 as a key play and, as time would go on, has stayed a mainstay in the Air Raid. It’s hard to imagine the Air Raid before the true shallow cross play, but that shows the fluidity the offense has shown over the years. The shallow cross was always there in spirit, if not always in practice, and once it was introduced it was a perfect fit.
The 1998 season was a fairly successful one, ending with the Wildcats in a New Years Day bowl (once upon a time a bigger thing than it is now, though the Outback Bowl has never been confused with the Rose Bowl).
Kentucky would return to a bowl game in 1999 despite replacing almost its entire offense, and Mumme seemed on top of the world. Losses and NCAA violations made sure that that wasn’t the case, and that brief moment of wonderful weirdness vanished as quickly as it came. But it was the introduction of the wider world to the Air Raid — and introduction that notched several big wins in the Air Raid’s records, including against SEC opponents — and as such it was the launching pad for a number of careers and a shocking amount of the innovation we’ve seen in the last decade. And along the way the Air Raid has evolved along with its chief practitioners, and there is no one in the history of the offense who stands taller than Mumme’s one-time right-hand man, the mercurial Mike Leach. But, before we leave Mumme behind — and indeed, Mumme is still throwing it around, albeit at McMurry — below are some clips of him explaining his offense back in that Kentucky era, courtesy of dacoachmo at one of the original one-back clinics:
Leach’s Odyssey: Four Wides, Four Verticals
Dana Holgorsen, in his usual fashion, has a very direct and succinct answer when asked about Mike Leach’s spin on the Air Raid: “Leach is so good because he don’t change shit.” When Leach first went to Oklahoma, the lack of change to the classical Air Raid was by design, as Bob Stoops, the new first-year head coach at OU, simply wanted to hire Kentucky’s offense. He had observed the difficulty of defending the Air Raid first hand while at Florida. Despite the wide talent disparity between Kentucky and Florida — and the fact that Florida won its matchups against Mumme fairly handily, he found the offense extremely difficult to defend and thus, once Stoops became a head coach in a turnaround situation at Oklahoma,, he wanted a guy who could install the Air Raid exactly as Mumme ran it at Kentucky. That coach ended up being the mercurial Mike Leach. As the video cut-ups from Leach’s first year at Oklahoma show, he really did install the Kentucky “original” Air Raid package almost verbatim. The one difference was a harbinger of some changes for the future: the increased use of true four-wide, one-back sets. This change might’ve begun as almost a stylistic difference from the Mumme’s preferred approach, which featured more two-back sets, but would necessarily lead the next evolutions in the Air Raid, which of course took place at Texas Tech.
Mike Leach’s success at Texas Tech needs no introduction. His teams blitzkrieged the previously conservative Big 12 conference, frequently leading the nation in passing yards and total offense, and not only did he have success with his own team but he had an outsized effect on the rest of football in the southwest, on his own conference and high schools across Texas.
But his teams weren’t an instant success at Tech. they threw the ball successfully and went to bowl games, but it wasn’t until the 2002 season, when his quarterback Kliff Kingsbury was a senior did the offense really explode. Leach himself told his story in his book, and I trace some of the schematic evolutions at play in mine. At that point, first with Kingsbury but then during an incredible run of four straight fifth-year senior quarterbacks, and then finally with Graham Harrell and Michael Crabtree in 2008, the “pure” Air Raid turned into one of the best attacks in football history, shredding defenses and record books at an alarming rate.
The changes Leach made were not major, but they were important. While he kept the basic structure of the offense basically the same as what he and Mumme had used at Kentucky, he did make some changes, many of them necessitated by his increased use of a four-wide receiver set, rather than the two-back look they had used at Kentucky. These changes were: (1) wide linemen splits, (2) running some concepts through the left “inside receiver”, the “H” receiver, as well as through the “Y” receiver, and (3) the increased focus and adaptation of four verticals.
Linemen splits. It was impossible to flip over to a Texas Tech game and not be shocked at the enormous amount of space between the offensive linemen, at least as compared with other teams. The trend across football had been a tightening and homogenization of line splits as every team seemed to go to a basic inside zone/outside zone running game, and on the outside zone in particular teams used relatively small splits. But then there was Leach’s Red Raider offense. It was weird stuff, but there was method to the madness.
In the game cut-ups from Leach’s year at Oklahoma you can clearly see his move to a four-wide set and, with it, some of the advantages of that approach in terms of having another immediate downfield receiving threat and a clearer picture for the quarterback. But the clips also show some issues the Sooners had in pass protection, particularly against Colorado and Texas as they used blitzes from safeties and outside defenders who came free. Back then, the primary response was either for the quarterback to check the play to a quick pass, to try to identify a hot receiver to throw the ball quickly to, or to bring an inside receiver in “orbit” motion (where he goes one direction and then pivots back to the opposite directly) and essentially become an extra runningback to check release after watching for the extra blocker. These worked but were unsatisfactory answers. The solution Leach came up with were these maximum splits, which had the effect of (a) stretching the defensive line from sideline to sideline, lengthening the space they had to rush from and (b) making any extra interior blitzers or guys who wanted to shoot the gaps more obvious. In terms of the passing game, Leach felt that it put his guys at a significant advantage. As he put it:
To me, the ultimate offenses in terms of distribution are what we do and the old school wishbone offense and both of them have wide splits with their lineman. We would do it for zone run lanes and pass blocking assignments because the edge guys are now wider from the QB than they would be. We start out at three feet. If we had no trouble in blocking them than we would widen, if we had trouble then we’d tighten them. Defenses would try to keep a guy in the middle of a gap and shoot that gap, if they did that we would keep it at three feet. We would just take deeper drop steps to get angles in our run game. No defenses ever had success in doing that [shooting gaps] against us because, again, it wasn’t something they would consistently do so they weren’t comfortable in doing it. They’re not good at just shooting gaps because they haven’t done it except for three practices in preparing to defend us.
The interplay of the wide line splits with the run game was also interesting, however. The wide line splits made it impossible to use double-teams like traditional zone running teams did, and as a result it was more about each lineman blocking his man one-on-one. But, because the only time Leach wanted to run the ball is if the numbers in the box were extremely favorable, the wide line splits helped his linemen in their run blocking because they almost always had angles. If the defense tried to stretch out with his linemen, there were almost always running lanes inside; if they tried to pinch down and shoot the gaps, it was easy enough for his linemen to block down and seal the edge for his runners to scoot around edge. And while his teams weren’t known for their rushing prowess, they did have some success. In 2008, for example, Leach’s top two rushers combined for 1,475 yards on over 5.8 yards per carry.
At one time or another, Leach coached every position on offense, including offensive line. And he had strong views of how line should be played, and both he and Mumme firmly believed in the value of one-on-one battles. While slide pass protection and zone blocking have increasingly become the rage, Leach always focused on “man blocking,” where the goal was to win the battle versus the guy across from you. The wide splits were simply that principle taken to its extreme: each lineman split out enough to where he was essentially on an island, as far from the quarterback as possible. On the line, at least, the goal was actually to have as many one-on-one matchups as possible. And Leach was confident his guys would win them.
Bilateral concepts: H-Stick, H-Corner. As discussed in The Essential Smart Football, at Texas Tech Mike Leach had an unrecruited, undersized slot receiver named Wes Welker playing the “H” position. In the classic Air Raid, “H” was so named because he was the halfback and was actually a runningback; in Leach’s four-wide receiver nearly all the time look, he was a slot receiver. And, if your slot receiver is Wes Welker, you’ve got a pretty good one. As a result Leach made some of the traditional Air Raid plays — Y-Stick and Y-Corner, specifically — bilateral, by introducing H-Stick and H-Corner. Note that this didn’t violate the Raymond Berry principle before, as Welker still only lined up in limited spots and didn’t have to learn a plethora of new routes, but it did let Leach run the concept to both sides.
Both Y-Stick and Y-Corner were plays Mumme and Leach used at least as far back as Kentucky, though it was only over time that they eventually became key Air Raid staples. At Kentucky in 1998, Y-Corner was rarely called at all, and at Oklahoma in 1999 it similarly was not a featured play. Y-Stick was a bit more prominent, but it too was more of a supporting pass concept and the goal of the play was more about throwing it to the runningback in the flat than hitting the quick stick. At Texas Tech, however, the two plays became centerpieces of the offense; indeed, there were years at Texas Tech where each play was called more often than staples like Mesh and Y-Cross. And a big reason for that is because Leach — and his quarterback — could call them to either side of the field.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, Stick and Corner (also known as “Snag”), are essentially the same read: They both create a “triangle” stretch on the defense, combining both a high/low stretch and an inside/outside or horizontal stretch in the same concept. This makes them particularly adept at attacking a limited number of zone defenders in a given part of the field. In other words, even when he didn’t know exactly what coverage the defense was in, Leach could call Stick and Corner, isolate vulnerable defenders with good, well organized routes, and get a positive completion.
H-Stick
Stick is very simple: The outside receiver runs a fade with a mandatory outside release to pull defenders; the runningback (or the inside slot in trips) runs to the flat in the form of either a swing, shoot or true out route; and the inside receiver runs a “stick” route where he pushes to five-to-six yards between the Mike and Sam (middle and strongside) linebackers, plants his outside foot and turns his numbers inside to the quarterback. Against zone defenses the stick runner tries to find the open void and shuffle slightly outside, whereas against man-to-man he may plant his foot and pivot to the outside. The quarterback’s job is to throw the ball quickly to the slot to his outside number, away from the interior defenders and so that he may catch the ball and turn upfield.
On the backside, the inside slot runs a one step slant and is available as a “hot” throw against a blitz, while the outside receiver runs a three-step slant. Against man or outside leverage zone he plants and breaks flat inside. Against soft coverage, it essentially turns into a hitch. (Note that this was something Leach changed from the classic Air Raid, which had that backside receiver run a “slant-return” route.) The quarterback determined whether to throw frontside or backside simply depending on where the “most open grass” was. The only difference between Y-Stick and H-Stick — H-Stick being with Welker as the stick runner — was that all the assignments switched, though the alignments did not. Below are some clips of Stick, courtesy of Trojan Football Analysis (look at how good Welker was at getting straight upfield after the catch on “618 H” in the below clips).
Corner is the same basic concept — a high/low stretch combined with an inside/outside one — except how they get there is altered slightly. Now, the slot runs deep via his corner route and the outside receiver runs inside, while the runningback still runs to the flat. The corner route is an 8-10 yard corner (on the short side to mesh with the quick game timing), while the outside receiver runs a one-step slant to the inside, with the ability to settle in an open void against zones. Again, it’s the same concept as Stick — just a simple ball-control triangle read — but by varying the routes Leach could call the same concepts over and over while still keeping the defense off balance. Below are clips of Y-Corner and H-Corner, again courtesy of TFA:
Four Verticals. That Leach came to embrace the four verticals play was really no secret, and was of course a logical extension of his other changes: how do you become a four wide team without running four verticals? But it took him some time and, as with everything else, he had to do it his way. As I’ve discussed previously and as his then staffers — Dana Holgorsen, Sonny Dykes, Bill Bedenbaugh and Bob Anae — laid out in this coaching clinic article, he transformed four verticals into a read-on-the-run-find-the-open-spots wherever they are play.
“6″ – Four Verticals
While each receiver was given a landmark they had to get to in order to stretch the appropriately stretch the defense, they were given lots of freedom to settle down their route or even break it off if they found open space along the way. So while the play was known as four verticals, the instruction was really, “Stay in your vertical lane, but then get open.” And with this play as its new centerpiece, Leach’s offense really exploded. Combined with an extra game in the season and some rules changes for the clocks, what had been “good seasons” previously became pedestrian. Under Leach’s tutelage in 1999, Josh Heupel re-wrote every Oklahoma passing record around as he threw for 3,850 yards and 30 touchdowns, by all accounts a monstrous season statistically. Just a few years later in 2003, equipped with wide splits, H-Stick and H-Corner, and a fully refined Four Verticals, B.J. Symons threw for 5,833 yards and 52 touchdowns.
And yet, while Leach was at Texas Tech spreading the good news of the Air Raid his way — namely, by blitzkrieging opponents with barrages of points and yards — the offense had begun taking hold in another fashion. While Michael Lewis mused on whether the NFL would ever try Leach’s experimental offense, high schools across the country did exactly that. And they didn’t do it the traditional way, merely by watching games on Saturdays and visiting Lubbock in the spring, though plenty took that approach. Instead, they did something far different, far more radical: they went out and bought the offense, complete with installation guides, DVDs, flash drives, diagrams, and practice tapes. The Air Raid was for sale, and it was (and remains) a great product. Viva la capitalism.
Tony Franklin’s System: Air Raid for the Masses
A few years ago, no doubt going for a real life Friday Night Lights, MTV developed a show about a community obsessed with their high school football team, Hoover High. The show was called Two-A-Days, and it featured the usual assortment of teenage angst over dates and playing time, though in Hoover MTV did select a rather intriguing squad, given that at the time they were deemed the mythical #1 high school team in the country. It was not good television, but, for whatever it’s worth, Hoover played good football. They won four straight Alabama 6A titles from 2002-2005, and added another to make it five titles before MTV had begun filming.
Hoover had not always been very good at football, however, and when their head coach, Rush Probst, took over in 1999, he needed an edge. He got it by contacting an unemployed, cast-off, blackballed and essentially dead broke coach by the name of Tony Franklin. When Hal Mumme was hired to Kentucky in 1997, he more or less knew what he wanted from his staff. He had a recruiting coordinator, Claude Bassett, a guy he’d admired back when Claude was at BYU. He had his receivers coach and offensive coordinator, Mike Leach, as Leach had followed him around for decades. He had his offensive line coach, former NFL player Guy Morriss. And he had a graduate assistant to help with tight-ends, his former Harlan Hill winning quarterback, Chris Hatcher. All he needed was a runningbacks coach. On Mumme’s staff at Valdosta had been a young coach named Dana Holgorsen, a former player for Mumme at Iowa Wesleyan, who had gone on to Mississippi College to have a larger hand in coordinating an offense. But Holgorsen had no connections to Kentucky — to the south at all, really — and instead Mumme looked for a local coach, maybe a high school coach, who could coach runningbacks and help be an outreach arm into the community. He found his man in Tony Franklin, a high school coach there in Kentucky.
For three years under Mumme, Franklin did a nice job with the runningbacks, helped design the game plans with respect to run plays and pass protection, and, from the New Year’s Day Bowl game at the end of the 1998 season and Kentucky’s first back-to-back bowl game in ages at the end of the 1999 season put Mumme and his whole staff in high regard around the country. This high regard resulted in the hiring off of several of Mumme’s staff, when Leach left for Oklahoma before the 1999 season and when Chris Hatcher, now a full-time a assistant, left to become head coach of Valdosta State before the 2000 year. The offseason for the 2000 season got off to a tumultuous start when Mumme — in the middle of the summer, after spring practice ended — publicly announced that the prior year’s starting quarterback, the workmanlike but unspectacular Dusty Bonner, was being benched in favor of a strong-armed true freshman named Jared Lorenzen. No one had confused Bonner with Tim Couch, Mumme’s former star pupil and the top overall draft pick of the Cleveland Browns, but Bonner had led the SEC in passing and passing efficiency in his first year as a starter, and did it with an extremely depleted receiving corps. Yet Mumme liked Lorenzen’s stronger arm, and he made his switch. Bonner had been a pre-season All-SEC pick; if you’re going to make a move like that, you better be right, or the natives will be restless.
Kentucky’s 2000 season went about as badly as can be imagined. Lorenzen had several huge passing days — including 528 yards against Georgia — but almost all of them came in losing efforts as Kentucky limped to a 2-9 record. (Dusty Bonner transferred over the summer to play for Hatcher at Valdosta State, where he won the Harlan Hill trophy — twice.) Worse still, Claude Bassett, Mumme’s favored recruiting coordinator, was exposed in a variety of payola scandals and a plethora of recruiting violations. On the field, Franklin and Mumme’s relationship turned icy; despite Franklin’s title as offensive coordinator and Mumme’s role as playcaller, the two of them essentially ceased speaking to each other for the entire second half of the season. But things took a dramatic turn when the NCAA came calling on Kentucky.
Franklin: If you go back and you look at the $1,400 money order, how stupid, if you’re going to be a guy who is going to cheat, to sit and yell at someone across a hall to come to you, give them $1,400 bucks and say, go send this to Tim Thompson at Melrose. I mean, that’s — to me, that’s publicly flaunting the cheating.
[...]
Farrey: There’s no love lost between Bassett and Franklin . . . but on this they agree – cheating is still common in some college football programs.
Bassett: There’s the pressure to go to bowl games. There’s the pressure to win the SEC East. There’s the pressure to, you know, obviously now the thing we call the BCS. But to say that I was one lone crazy guy, no, I don’t buy into that.
Franklin: Was [Bassett] the only person who should be taking the fall? Absolutely not, and, you know, I make that point in my book. I said in the book that I felt like that Coach Mumme knew.
Farrey: Franklin implicates the leadership at Kentucky. He cites a conversation last December with Larry Ivy, Kentucky’s athletic director.
Franklin: You know, we were talking about the Memphis situation and Mr. Ivy said to me, you know, “Every now and then you got to cheat to get a good player.”
After the 2000 season Franklin resigned and Mumme and Bassett were fired**. Franklin found himself, as he described it, blackballed from all coaching jobs. Franklin, essentially broke, wrote a book about the ordeal, figuring his life in coaching was over. Franklin, however, got a call from Probst, who asked if he wouldn’t mind consulting for Hoover High School; much like Bob Stoops hiring Mike Leach, Probst wants Franklin to help him install the Air Raid at Hoover High. He does, and they do, and the rest — all those state titles — is history.
But Franklin didn’t stop there. Seeing an opportunity — he knows the offense and has proven it can be taught at the high school level — he began consulting with lots of schools and developing lots of materials. Indeed, Franklin, tapping into that network of coaches that was the reason Mumme hired him in the first place, packages, brands, and begins selling the Air Raid — now, The Tony Franklin System or simply, The System — for around $3000 a team. But $3000 got you more than just the plays (you could have always found those on Smart Football at least as far back as 2003), but instead got you gobs of information, drill tapes, installation guides, gameplans, and, most important of all, a direct line to Tony: Weekly calls to discuss whatever problems your team was facing, what adjustments you needed to make, how you could make it work. Remember, this was the early- to mid-2000s, and the changes we saw in the NFL and college were even more dramatic at the high school levels. Areas of the south like Kentucky, Alabama, or even Texas had been dominated by run-oriented programs for decades. Suddenly, the pass was the thing, and how in the world do you teach the passing game to high school kids without undergoing years of growing pains? Simple: You hire Tony, a successful college coach with a simple, straightforward system and proven results, to hold your hand through the entire process. And as it grew The System became about the community; not only did you go to Tony and his coaching buddies for guidance, but you went to other clients of the Tony Franklin System, other high school coaches going through exactly what you were going through.
Like almost everything about the Air Raid, it was and remains beautiful and simultaneously extremely weird: Tony Franklin had to get fired, blackballed, and cast out of the coaching community to arguably do more for the evolution of football at the high school and lower levels than any coach of the last decade. While Mike Leach’s teams throwing for 500 or 600 yards on Saturdays was a great commercial for the Air Raid, it was Franklin that actually brought it to the people — though not without charging a fee for his valuable services.
And while at the beginning of their relationship it was Probst who had the privileged position and it was Franklin who was desperate, life takes many turns. Probst was run out of Hoover after his own set of scandals, while Franklin — after a severe hiccup as the short-lived offensive coordinator at Auburn — is now again part of the establishment, both in terms of all coaches and in Air Raid specific ones, as offensive coordinator at Louisiana Tech under former Mike Leach assistant Sonny Dykes. I’m not sure what the lesson of Franklin’s career has been, other than, if nothing else, never underestimate The System.
Dana Holgorsen: New Wave Deconstruction
Many of Mike Leach’s assistants at Texas Tech have gone on to prominent gigs as offensive coordinators and head coaches. But none are more interesting — schematically and otherwise — than Dana Holgorsen. On the one hand, Holgorsen’s offense is in many ways bread-and-butter Air Raid, and is based on many of the same key principles as offenses orchestrated by Mumme, Leach, and each of Tony Franklin’s clients: repetitions, repetitions, and more repetitions, a cohesive approach to practice management and installing an offense, and, yes, most of those key Air Raid passing concepts. Moreover, many of those other Leach disciples who have gone on to other jobs where they, and not Leach, called the plays have made changes to the offense, primarily to either make the offense even more spread out with more no-back and other sets or to diversify the run game and add some play-action.
On the other hand, however, Holgorsen’s attack is at once the same but different, and I can only describe as a Derridean deconstruction of the Air Raid, rebuilt and repackaged — and packaged some more — into something that is both familiar and very different. Many of the key Air Raid plays are there for Dana — Y-Cross, Y-Corner, Y-Stick, All-Curl (Holgorsen has actually combined 96 All-Curl and 93 H-Wheel into the same play) – but others, like Mesh, are not. The reason? They were too different, and simply didn’t fit, and were too expensive to practice. Simple as that. In its place have come all manner of subtle variations on the Air Raid staples; variations that have had unexpected benefits. But first let’s place this innovation within the larger setting. As he explains in the clip below, it’s all grounded in the same things Holgorsen learned from Hal Mumme as a player at Iowa Wesleyan, though it’s only natural — natural for him, at least — to put one’s own spin on the offense.
Just like Leach and Mumme, Holgorsen installs his offense in three days and then repeats that process throughout camp. And his time as Leach’s eye-in-the-sky as Texas Tech’s offensive coordinator well prepared them. But he hasn’t hesitated to change things to fit his personnel, sometimes drastically. And it’s this creative reassembly of the various Air Raid parts into a coherent whole that has distinguished Holgorsen’s attack from other Air Raid spin-offs. The most obvious version of this are the “packaged plays,” where two seemingly unrelated plays are put together, such as Y-Stick combined with the offensive line blocking a draw play.
Once explained and as shown in the clips below, the wisdom of such a concept makes perfect sense (also, offensive linemen are allowed to get three yards downfield on pass plays; it’s not illegal). Specifically, it’s a run play, but, just like bubble screens or some particular blocking schemes, the stick route controls the linebacker to take him out of the run play. And once one has gone down that route, it’s a small leap to begin thinking about combining all sorts of concepts, including quick passes and other runs, screens and runs, screens and quick passes, and so on. Once your mind has gotten beyond the typical heuristics that tell us how football is supposed to work, almost everything is on the table.
Michael Lewis famously said that Leach’s offense was not just an offense; it was a mood: optimism. That’s true, but also incomplete. The Air Raid is the ultimate optimist’s offense, but the offense is also something else. It’s a command to all of its practitioners to do one specific thing, at least when it comes to football. The command is not unique to football, but it is rare within it, and that command is to think different.
There are a lot of cool things to learn from Holgorsen’s offense, and I’ve previously described many of them. But for now let’s just focus on the larger trend, and that is this idea of deconstructing football. What’s amazing about Holgorsen’s offense is it is based on what is undoubtedly one of the greatest passing systems every designed, but, by need and by desire, he’s had to get away from Mumme’s original idea, which was to drop back and throw it as many times as possible. The primary reason is that such a tactic is no longer thinking different: in 1989 it was; in 1997 and 1998, in the SEC, it was; in the Big 12 in 1999, or 2003, or even in 2008, when carried to the extremes Leach took it, it was. But in 2012 it’s not clear that it is different. Holgorsen may or may not be successful as a head coach; I wouldn’t be shocked if within a couple of years some other hot shot Air Raider doesn’t step up and take the mantle of “brightest young mind” in that lineage away from him. Kliff Kingsbury, former Texas Tech quarterback and assistant under Holgorsen, may earn the title if his teams have success at Texas A&M.
But for now, chew on this: In the Orange Bowl, where Holgorsen’s West Virginia squad bombarded Clemson for 70 points with a variety of interesting tactics, and where his quarterback racked up over 400 yards passing and six touchdown passes, how many true, Air Raid-style dropback passes did they throw? And be careful, when you make your evaluation, because you must study the offensive line on each play. On many of those downfield passes, the linemen did not pass block at all, but instead faked a screen or a run-play for play-action, or some other diversion. Holgorsen was not comfortable with his offensive line’s play all year, so he increasingly found ways to throw the ball and get players on the perimeter and in space, while barely pass blocking at all. Study the game for yourself:
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