re: Is Hal Mumme the most influential coach in modern CFB history?

tFolder was a GA for Leach

Leach’s OG TT staff (athletic)

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Dave Aranda, LSU defensive coordinator, Leach’s first defensive GA at Tech: That staff, man.

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Give us some Cliff notes, LA

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ha, it's been a while since i read it. It basically starts out with the TTU game against #1 Texas, where TTU runs its last drive by just spamming four verts over and over and crabtree eventually catches the game-winner--then flashes back to Mumme starting out.



Begins with Mumme getting fired from some college job and having to retreat back to become a HS coach. He decides he's done with trying to run things the traditional way--he has no further to fall so he's gonna try his own ideas all the way. There was some legendary HS coach that ran the pistol or something. He got concepts from him, then became obsessed with picking the brains of as many coaches as he could, and grabbed concepts from them. The biggest among these influences was Lavell Edwards at BYU, but he sat in on tons of coaches, including the west coast offense guys in the NFL, Air Coryell, and various other coaches at really every level. Gradually he pieced together various ideas from those offenses to build what ultimately became the air raid. (I think one could argue that he actually just stole a lot of the main air raid concepts from edwards, then just kinda pushed them to an even greater extreme... e.g. the wide OL alignment).


Anyway, it goes thru his ascent thru the coaching ranks (and the corresponding progression of the air raid system), linking up with Leach, hilarious stories about them when they were still at tiny D3 indiana weslyan (i believe at one point, Leach was quadrupling as the offensive coordinator, a history professor, some type of athletic department assistant, and a janitor), then progressing to Valdosta State and eventually Kentucky.



Throughout the book, there are breakdowns of the fundamental air raid concepts, Mumme/Leach's thoughts behind adding them in, how they work, etc.


Basically goes through the whole history of mumme's career and the creation and implementation of the air raid, all the way back up to that TTU game.



Great read. Highly recommend it for any CFB fan

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(which is iffy because he didn’t really run an air raid)

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i would include him because a lot of what he did was based on air raid concepts

what briles did was match 2 back gun power runs with air raid concepts, tempo, and rpos

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Other proponents of the Air Coryell system include Al Saunders, Cam Cameron, Tom Moore, Brian Schottenheimer and Jason Garrett, and both Bill Belichick and Sean Payton give credit to Coryell for the development of the move tight end, important in their offensive playbooks.

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Al Saunders

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Now that’s a name.gif

Didn’t he have like the biggest playbook ever?

Influential prob

But man, Saban’s guys have made a ton of money

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Is Hal Mumme the most influential coach in modern CFB history?

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Opened this thread to post a snarky reply about "Influential as far as how to be an object lesson in recruiting violations sinking a promising career, then yes!" But I'll admit that reading this got me thinking. Oddly enough, I graduated from Southeastern (Go Lions, lol) right before he started as their coach 18 months or so after the Kentucky scandal, when SLU decided to revive their 20-years dead football program.

I think overall, though, the air raid offense and it's many hybrids and derivatives are not so much a reflection of a coaching tree as much as an overall coaching philosophy - similar to 4-3 or 3-4 on defense. At it's start, to me, it was a gimmicky-type of approach in trying to make small-school talent perform at a higher level than if they ran a traditional offense. Like most things (i.e., the RPO) other coaches in CFB and the NFL saw how they could incorporate aspects of it and did so - not necessarily as a result of coaching with Mumme directly, but also coaching against him or seeing the offense and adding parts in.

Football is always an ever-evolving sport. The wishbone was revolutionary, but then it became outdated. the triple-option was revolutionary, then became outdated, then had a revival of sorts because it seemed exotic when Paul Johnson ran it at Georgia Tech. Overall it's rather difficult to tie down innovations to one person, since, using your example, each coach that encountered the broadly-defined Air Raid added bits and pieces or tweaked or whatever. That's why it's called the Air Raid rather than "The Mike Leach offense" or the "Hal Mumme offense."

TL; DR: interesting thought exercise, but I think the offense is only tied to the coaching tree as opposed to being defined by the coaching tree.

I remember Joe Paterno talking about the spread back in the mid 2000s (2005 or so) and saying how he had remembered facing it back in the 1940s when he played in the New York state high school system. I believe he said it was specifically when he faced Vince Lombardi's team at the time. I have not been able to find that clip anymore.

I was a student at Valdosta State when Hal Mumme was the head coach with Mike Leach as an assistant. Guy Morris was also an assistant there under Mumme, but that predated me.

A few years later we had Muschamp as DC and Kirby Smart as the DBs coach.

Mumme's son, Matt, who played for him at Valdosta State and UK, was later the head coach at Lagrange College and was just named as the OC at Colorado State.

Mumme has been very clear that he studied Lavelle Edwards' offenses to develop the Air Raid.