The Air Raid offense — the pass-first attack developed by Hal Mumme and Mike Leach from the old BYU offense — is seemingly everywhere. In the last couple of weeks, Cal hired former Leach and Mumme assistant Sonny Dykes as well as his offensive coordinator, the mercurial Tony Franklin; Southern Miss hired Oklahoma State’s nouveau guru Todd Monken, after he impressively orchestrated the Cowboys attack over the last two seasons, both with a future first round quarterback and while rotating three different quarterbacks; Mark Stoops is bringing prodigal son Neal Brown back to Kentucky to run the Wildcats’ offense; and Kliff Kingsbury, fresh off his tutelage of Heisman winner Johnny Manziel, returns to his old stomping grounds at Texas Tech to become one of the youngest head coaches in college football history. These new hires, together with existing Air Raid programs, brings my count to ten different college football teams that will all be using some variant of the Air Raid in the fall of 2013.
And when you throw in teams that I consider part of the extended Air Raid family, like Oklahoma, UCLA, and Indiana — offenses heavily Air Raid influenced even if they don’t quite fit the definition — you have thirteen different schools whose offenses are direct descendants of the ideas Mumme and Leach developed at places like Copperas Cove high school, Iowa Wesleyan, and Valdosta State. And last season, nine of the top twenty offenses in the country were among this group — and we’ve only added more Air Raid schools to the mix. As someone who has had his hand in this offense in one way or another for roughly fifteen years, the feeling is not quite vindication; it’s more like contentedness: yes, this is where it all was undoubtedly headed all along, the questions were only how and when.
But there’s another element, maybe less of a feeling so much as it is a realization: This may be as good as it gets. The larger trends are going to continue independent of this offense, contra the wishes of Nick Saban (and, admittedly, maybe every defensive coach in the country): for the foreseeable future at least, the game will continue to get faster and more wide open at basically every level, and athletic directors will continue to hire hotshot offensive coaches who promise yards and points to draw crowds and eyeballs for TV, something increasingly important as schools crane their necks to be noticed in an era of conference realignment. This factors are not unique to the Air Raid, and other attacks, primarily Chip Kelly’s at Oregon, are arguably more famous.
Yet this recent spate of hiring of Air Raid aficionados seems to me to represent a different realization: not only can these guys put up big numbers, but they can replicate it elsewhere. When Steve Spurrier left Florida for the NFL, he didn’t leave a fixed system in place that others could easily pick up and translate. Indeed, even Spurrier had difficulty translating his system from the wider culture, tradition, and environment that he had at Florida. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, as that’s how most institutions operate. Whether it’s successful businesses, schools, departments, etc., the answer is often the same: the success is difficult to replicate because you can almost never identify the essential elements in the overall gestalt of one place’s success. The one guy who offered his services on the promise that he could bring Spurrier’s offense somewhere else was Buddy Teevens, the assistant offensive coordinator at Florida at the time Spurrier left. Stanford hired Teevens and he promised big results; in three seasons, he went 10-23.
The Air Raid, by contrast, was always designed to be picked up and installed elsewhere. Mumme and Leach brought it to several schools before they wound up at Kentucky; Leach was hired to install it verbatim at Oklahoma, and he left after one season to go to Texas Tech; and, of course, Tony Franklin has taken it the next step by systematizing “The System” into something that can be bought and then installed anywhere, for any high school or college that wants it. But this wasn’t entirely about moving from school to school. It also was an acknowledgment that in college football, every year brings a different team, so you might as well start over. One of the difficulties with prior passing systems — the west coast offense most prominently comes to mind — is that they took years to master, and for a team to have a great season they needed the right confluence of talented but also veteran players, primarily at quarterback. Now a redshirt freshman playing in the country’s toughest division for a team in its first year in the system can win the Heisman trophy and lead his team to ten wins. This is what athletic directors hope they are hiring, and what the Air Raid now promises.
What gives me pause, however, is that the offense was also always designed to be different, and it’s difficult to be different when two-thirds of your conference, in the case of the Big 12, runs the same offense, or when prominent teams all over the country all use the same attack. Ask any high school coach and they will tell you that being “contrarian” is largely a function of what their district looks like: if everyone in the district is pro-style, then the wing-T is pretty different; but there are districts where teams are predominantly wing-T, or flexbone, or Air Raid, or Oregon spread, or whatever. The Air Raid as a system is well organized, well defined, and well practiced enough to succeed even if the other team knows all about it; but it can’t be doubted that something is lost when your opponent has faced a version of your offense on six of the prior seven Saturdays.
So enjoy this moment when weirdness became normal, and it seemed that suddenly everyone realized that what these guys were doing was both just a little easier on the kids to learn and practice and just a little bit ahead of the curve for defenses to prepare for. Because to say both of those things is to indicate why neither status can last: you can’t fight the establishment when you are the establishment. The schools who’ve hired these guys are hoping it’s the beginning of the Air Raid era, but in doing so they’ve guaranteed it’s the end of the Air Raid as the quirky, outsider attack it has been until now.
It may even be time to inter the very term “Air Raid,” as while all of these excellent coaches are from the same intellectual family, it’s inevitable that the offense will splinter apart and evolve in new directions. But if that’s the case then they can’t all be Air Raiders, and the term should instead be reserved for the offense as it coalesced over these last few decades rather than vapidly used to describe increasingly different attacks. Even if it’s not the old Air Raid, I’m confident it will remain true to the underlying principles: simplicity, fundamental football, and a whiff of contrarianism, whatever that happens to be. And, of course, points. Lots of points.