Many football historians credit former Brigham Young University head coach LaVell Edwards as the father of the spread offense. Edwards' tenure began with BYU in 1972 and his drop-back passing game went against the norm of most college programs that were based on running.
Among the many coaches intrigued by the unconventional offense were Hal Mumme and Mike Leach. The pair met at BYU's spring football camp where they built a relationship that eventually turned into a decade of collaboration and an expansion from the spread offense into the Air Raid Offense.
Mumme, hired as McMurry University's head football coach in April, brought on Leach at Iowa Wesleyan College in 1989. Leach was Mumme's offensive coordinator and kept the same title with Mumme through 1998.
From Iowa Wesleyan, Mumme and Leach moved to NCAA Division II Valdosta State, and then Leach joined Mumme at the University of Kentucky for two seasons (1997-1998) before moving on to the University of Oklahoma in 1999 as the OC and then went to Texas Tech, where he's been the head coach of the Red Raiders since 2000.
From there Leach has put Texas Tech on the national map. Most recently in 2008, Texas Tech defeated the University of Texas in the regular season and earned a No. 2 national ranking. All in all in nine years with the Red Raiders, he's compiled a 76-30 record with nine-straight bowl appearances all while using much of the Air Raid Offense that Mumme is credited for innovating.
Leach said he still considers Mumme a mentor.
“No question, we worked together for 10 years and I learned an incredible amount and had an opportunity to win a lot of games. It was a good experience,” he said.
Mumme's most public display of the Air Raid came in the late 1990's when he coached the Kentucky Wildcats with Tim Couch and Jared Lorenzen running five-wide offensive system at quarterback. Couch was the 1999 Heisman Trophy runner-up and the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft by the Cleveland Browns.
Though Leach moved on from Kentucky, he kept the air raid system in tact when he went to coach for Bob Stoops at Oklahoma. Now at Tech, he's had a chance to use what he learned from Mumme and make it his own.
“Well at the time we had the opportunity to borrow a lot from BYU,” Leach said of the offense. “[Coach Mumme] and I travelled to all corners of the earth really. We had the opportunity to put together a lot of things, experiment with a lot of things, and ultimately we came up with a pretty good pile of plays. But the most important thing is packaging and deciding what you're going to run. We went from everywhere to the [Green Bay] Packers and the [San Francisco] 49ers and little high schools in between.”
While Leach is in the limelight of NCAA Division I, he said that he was excited to hear that Mumme had taken the job at NCAA Division III McMurry.
“Well I think he'll really enjoy it. I think one of the jobs he enjoyed the most was at IWC. Coach Mumme is good at doing a lot of things. He likes being in the middle of a lot of things,” Leach said. “In a lot of ways there's a lot more moving parts in a place like McMurry. You're directly involved in fund raising, you have to figure out how to make each dollar count. I think he's always been very good at balancing a lot of items and then putting it all together.”
McMurry's football program is a project. Mumme is no stranger to projects; he took Valdosta State to the national playoffs for the first time in school history, he started the Southeastern Louisiana State Program from scratch and finished with a winning record there in two seasons, and his first season at IWC he turned around a team that went 0-10 before his arrival and posted a 7-4 record in his first year there in 1989.
As a result, Leach said that he believes that McMurry selected the right man to right the ship of McMurry football.
“He's had a lot of success at other places; I think he's the perfect person to change the culture at McMurry,” said Leach. “He's an incredibly enthusiastic guy, I think he's a person that's got a vision for the total program; not just a game here or game there, a play here or a play there, and I think he'll be exactly what McMurry needs.”
“He's never not thinking about football. It was nothing for us to get in the car and drive in all kinds of rain or snow to go somewhere and study football,” Leach said. “He's really incredibly diligent in all aspects of the program.”
Mumme and McMurry have their first practice Thursday night at 8 p.m. McMurry will play host to Trinity University in its first game of the season in Abilene Sept. 5 at 6 p.m.
