How the Air Raid Changed Football Forever

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ground and pound. That’s what defined college football offenses for the first 100 years the game was played. But then a coach named Hal Mumme hooked up with some lawyer from LA named Mike Leach … and everything changed. Playbooks were tossed. Passes were thrown. Records were broken. And the Air Raid offense was born. Now everyone from your local high school QB to Patrick Mahomes is executing some version of this on Game Day. And when it’s done right … man, it is fun to watch. So today, Dave Wilson delivers the origin story of this innovative offense and tells us how this once taboo concept changed the game of football forever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dave Wilson you are coming to us from Texas the birthplace of the
0:05.4	vaunted air raid offense a system invented by Hal mummy but perfected by the late
0:10.5	Mike Leach and as we are about to start the college bowl season, I want to ask
0:15.0	you about this play the Texas Tech ran to start the Texas Bowl against Old Miss last December.
0:20.3	And now Texas Tech on its first play from scrimmage strain.
0:24.6	How about this?
0:26.0	Honoring the late Mike Leach, the head coach in Lubbock in Lubbock in 2000 to 2009.
0:32.0	He passed away earlier this month you see the wide splits on the offensive
0:36.3	line. That's that's what his offense did. What was the significance of that play?
0:41.9	Well Mike Leach is, you know, beloved in West Texas for what he did for Texas Tech,
0:48.0	became the winning his coach in school history all by doing things in a very I guess non-traditional manner.
0:56.2	So after Coach Leach died last year,
1:00.3	Texas Tech decided to honor him one more time on the field.
1:03.2	Very cool moment.
1:04.4	So as Bowl season starts here in college football,
1:08.4	are we going to see signs of the air raid offense anywhere?
1:11.2	I think you're going to see it everywhere.
1:15.6	It permeated all levels of football, starting at the high school level and kind of moving
1:21.1	up rather than the old school where things started in
1:24.5	NFL moved down. But you know you can think back just a few years ago to that year
1:31.8	2011 when Alabama and LSU played to a nine to six game in the
1:36.2	regular season and then played 21 and nothing game in the national championship game in the BCS.
	...

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