The Air Raid Offense: History, Evolution, Weirdness From Mumme
to Leach to Franklin to Holgorsen and BeyondMonday, 09 July 2012 ,
by : Chris The personal story of the rise and development of theAir
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 Holgorsenhas been told many timesand 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.
Lets call a passBut the Air Raids 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 whove 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 Walshs 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 youre 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 Raids 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 Raids story:
the classical period, including the birth of the Air Raid from its
BYU roots and the originaltwo-back package used at Valdosta State
and Kentucky; Leachs 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 offenses 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 KentuckyWhen 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 hed
learned in there, which in fact were theSid Gillmans 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 theyd 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 Gillmans
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 BYUs
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. Ive
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 werent 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 receivers 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. Lets take a quick look at each
play:
92: The infamous MeshNo 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 Xs 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.
Its 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 Zs 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-CurlThe 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-WheelThis 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, Mummes 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-WheelKentucky 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-SailWhen 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-CrossBehind 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 didnt 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. Its 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 Raids 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 Mummes 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 Mummes 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 ScreenArguably 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 didnt deign to walk their
linebackers out to Purdues slot receivers, but Mummes 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 Kentuckys
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 couldnt 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:Youre 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 werent 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 its
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 CrossThe 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. Its 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. Its 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 wasnt 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 Raids 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 weve 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 Mummes 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:Leachs Odyssey: Four Wides, Four VerticalsDana Holgorsen,
in his usual fashion, has a very direct and succinct answer when
asked about Mike Leachs spin on the Air Raid: Leach is so good
because he dont 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
Kentuckys 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 Leachs 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 mightve
begun as almost a stylistic difference from the Mummes 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 Leachs 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 werent an instant success at Tech. they threw the ball
successfully and went to bowl games, but it wasnt 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
Leachs Red Raider offense. It was weird stuff, but there was method
to the madness.
In the game cut-ups from Leachs 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 wed 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
wasnt something they would consistently do so they werent
comfortable in doing it. Theyre not good at just shooting gaps
because they havent 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 werent known for their
rushing prowess, they did have some success. In 2008, for example,
Leachs 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 Leachs four-wide
receiver nearly all the time look, he was a slot receiver. And, if
your slot receiver is Wes Welker, youve 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 didnt violate the Raymond Berry principle
before, as Welker still only lined up in limited spots and didnt
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 Ive 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 didnt 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-StickStick 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 quarterbacks 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, its 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
Ive 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 VerticalsWhile 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, Leachs 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 Leachs 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 Leachs
experimental offense, high schools across the country did exactly
that. And they didnt 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 Franklins System:
Air Raid for the MassesA 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 its 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 hed 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 Mummes 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 Years Day Bowl game at
the end of the 1998 season and Kentuckys 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 Mummes 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 years
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,
Mummes 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 Lorenzens
stronger arm, and he made his switch. Bonner had been a pre-season
All-SEC pick; if youre going to make a move like that, you better
be right, or the natives will be restless.Kentuckys 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, Mummes favored recruiting coordinator, was
exposed in a variety of payola scandals and a plethora of
recruiting violations. On the field, Franklin and Mummes
relationship turned icy; despite Franklins title as offensive
coordinator and Mummes 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 youre 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, thats to me, thats publicly flaunting
the cheating.[...]Farrey: Theres no love lost between Bassett and
Franklin . . . but on this they agree cheating is still common in
some college football programs.Bassett: Theres the pressure to go
to bowl games. Theres the pressure to win the SEC East. Theres 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 dont 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, Kentuckys
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, wrotea book about the ordeal,
figuring his life in coaching was over. Franklin, however, got a
call from Probst, who asked if he wouldnt 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 didnt 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 Leachs 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. Im not sure what the
lesson of Franklins career has been, other than, if nothing else,
never underestimate The System.Dana Holgorsen: New Wave
DeconstructionMany of Mike Leachs 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, Holgorsens 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 Franklins 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, Holgorsens 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 didnt 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 lets place this innovation within
the larger setting. As he explains in the clip below, its all
grounded in the same things Holgorsen learned from Hal Mumme as a
player at Iowa Wesleyan, though its only natural natural for him,
at least to put ones 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 Leachs
eye-in-the-sky as Texas Techs offensive coordinator well prepared
them. But he hasnt hesitated to change things to fit his personnel,
sometimes drastically. And its this creative reassembly of the
various Air Raid parts into a coherent whole that has distinguished
Holgorsens 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; its not
illegal). Specifically, its 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, its 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 Leachs offense was not just
an offense; it was a mood: optimism. Thats true, but also
incomplete. The Air Raid is the ultimate optimists offense, but the
offense is also something else. Its 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 Holgorsens offense, and Ive previously
described many of them. But for now lets just focus on the larger
trend, and that is this idea of deconstructing football. Whats
amazing about Holgorsens offense is it is based on what is
undoubtedly one of the greatest passing systems every designed,
but, by need and by desire, hes had to get away from Mummes
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 its not
clear that it is different. Holgorsen may or may not be successful
as a head coach; I wouldnt be shocked if within a couple of years
some other hot shot Air Raider doesnt 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
Holgorsens 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 lines 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:This is football deconstruction. Its taking the building
blocks of the Air Raid, of football itself, and placing them in
slight variations we havent seen before. Theres no rule that
football has to look a certain way. In this game, the chess pieces
can always do the unexpected.The FutureI never knew about any of
these guys before the 1997 football season at Kentucky.
Portentously, in the first quarter of the first game that season
against Louisville, Kentucky scored three touchdowns all passes. I
cant say that I knew, roughly fifteen years ago, that this offense
would have such a dramatic effect on football itself and would
remain so vital today. But what makes it so interesting and so
vital is that, unlike the great Tee-formation offenses, the Wing-T,
the Wishbone or even the Run-and-Shoot, is that the Air Raid has
actually grown beyond the original formations and plays that
defined it early on. In that game against Louisville I watched the
classical version of the Air Raid in full bloom: two-back sets and
the basic plays, called by its inventor, Mumme, and in the first
game no-less, the product of the offense having been installed in
three days back in the spring and fall of 1997. Leach stretched the
classical idea as far as it could go with more receivers, more
passing, and even more fluidity, while Franklin took the product to
the legions of high school coaches who wanted to try it for
themselves, and each had their contributions to make. And now the
latest generation, led by Holgorsen but by no means limited to him,
have begun the fascinating work of stripping the offense to its
core just a few plays, a method of practicing, and, above all else,
the mood and command that underlie the entire thing and rebuilding
it back up for a modern game. The development of all ideas in
football works just like this, but rarely is the process so naked
and apparent for careful study.Maybe the most shocking thing about
the Air Raid is that we now have three generations of Air Raid
coaches, all still coaching today: Mumme is at McMurry and Leach is
now at Washington State, while Dykes, Franklin, Hatcher, and
Holgorsen, each former assistants for Mumme, Leach, or both, now
have their own programs and offenses to coordinate and their own
wrinkles to introduce. Were even looking at what might be fourth
generation Air Raid coaches, as Kliff Kingsbury at Texas A&M,
Neal Brown at Texas Tech, and many, many others who maybe played
for Mumme or Leach or learned the system from coaches like Franklin
and Holgorsen, are now developing their own attacks. No one can
stay ahead of the game forever, but these guys and this off-beat,
backyard offense have been doing it for an awful long time, scoring
an awful lot of points, and winning an awful lot of games. And that
may be the weirdest thing of all.Air Raid Appendix: Links from
Bruce Eiens website: (A) Play and concept diagrams, (B) Explanation
of the Airraid shallow cross concept, (C) Airraid for High School
(quick diagrams of some core pass concepts). Playbooks: (A) 2000
Valdosta St (Chris Hatcher); (B) 1999 Oklahoma (Mike Leach); (C)
2001 Hoover High School (Rush Probst HC). Archive of Smart Football
articles tagged as Airraid here and here Kentuckys Airraid Offense
AFCA Clinic article by Chris Hatcher, Tony Franklin, and Guy
Morris. Hal Mummes Airraid Practice Plan Valdosta States Passing
Attack Chris Hatcher article on the shallow and the mesh concepts.
Leach and Tech Flying High Article by Bob Davie on Texas Techs
offense Quarterbacks reading is done on field at Texas Tech
Washington Post article Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep Profile of
Mike Leach for the New York Times Magazine by the always excellent
Michael Lewis. Running Back Routes in the Airraid American Football
Monthly article by Hal Mumme Dana Holgorsens West Virginia Air Raid
Offense Why Every Team Should Install Its Offense in Three Days
Brophys Air Raid Archive** Correction: An earlier version of this
article incorrectly stated that Tony Franklin was fired at
Kentucky. He resigned.BYU Appendix:Below are the major Airraid/BYU
concepts combined with Norm Chows reads for each. Note that this
more closely hews to the original BYU version than the Airraid
version, which has slight differences. If you cant figure out the
differences after reading all of the above, then heaven help you.
(Thanks to Bruce Eien for some of the diagrams.)61 Y OPTION
5 step drop. Eye Y and throw it to him unless taken away from
the outside by S/S (then hit Z), OR inside by ILB (then hit FB).
Dont throw option route vs. man until receiver makes eye contact
with you. Vs. zone can put it in seam. Vs. zone no hitch step. Vs.
man MAY need hitch step.62 MESH
5 step drop. Take a peek at F/S if hes up hit Z on post.
Otherwise watch X-Y mesh occur somebody will pop open let him have
ball. Vs. zone throw to Fullback.63 DIG
5 step drop and hitch (7 steps permissible). Read F/S: X = #1; Z
= #2; Y OR HB = #3.64 OUT
5 step drop. Key best located Safety on 1st step. Vs. 3 deep
look at F/S if he goes weak go strong (Z = #1 to FB = #2 off S/S);
if he goes straight back or strong go weak (X = #1 to HB = #2 off
Will LB). Vs. 5 under man Y is your only choice. Vs. 5 under zone X
& Z will fade.65 FLOOD (Y-Sail)
5 step drop and hitch. Read the S/S. Peek at Z #1; Y = #2; FB =
#3. As you eyeball #2 & see color (F/S flash to Y) go to post
to X. Vs. 2 deep zone go to Z = #1 to Y = #2 off S/S.66 ALL
CURL
5 step drop and hitch. On your first step read Mike LB (MLB or
first LB inside Will in 3-4). If Mike goes straight back or strong
go weak (X = #1; HB = #2). If Mike goes weak go strong (Y = #1; Z =
#2; FB = #3). This is an inside-out progression. NOT GOOD vs. 2
deep 5 under.67 CORNER/POST/CORNER (Shakes)
5 step drop and hitch. Read receiver (WR) rather than defender
(Corner). Vs. 2 deep go from Y = #1 to Z = #2. Vs. 3 deep read same
as 64 pass (Will LB) for X = #1 or HB = #2. Equally good vs Cover 2
regardless if man OR zone under.68 SMASH
5 step drop and hitch. Vs. 2 deep look HB = #1; FB = #2 (shoot);
Z = #3. Vs. 3 deep stretch long to short to either side. Vs. man go
to WRs on returns.69 Y-CROSS/H-Option
5 step drop hitch up only if you need to. Eye HB: HB = #1; Y =
#2. QB & receiver MUST make eye contact vs. man. Vs. zone
receiver finds seam (takes it a little wider vs. 5 under). Only
time you go to Y is if Will LB and Mike LB squeeze HB. If Will
comes & F/S moves over on HB HB is HOT and will turn flat quick
and run away from F/S. Otherwise HB runs at his man to reinforce
his position before making his break.Here is an article from LaVell
Edwards describing the concept.Related Posts: Combining quick
passes, run plays and screens in the same play Dana Holgorsens West
Virginia Airraid offense Snag, stick, and the importance of
triangles (yes, triangles) in the passing game Teaching a
quarterback where to throw the football Quarterbacks checklist on
pass plays