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

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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 The wishbone was revolutionary, but then it became outdated. the triple-option was revolutionary, then became outdated, then had a revival of sorts because it seemed exotic when Paul Johnson ran it at Georgia Tech.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.