Mike Kilen

mkilen@dmreg.com

The players from a little college in Iowa took the field with shaggy mullet or high-top fade haircuts, wearing bandannas, their shirts untucked. They looked like a ragtag bunch. But by the sixth play of the game, the underdogs unleashed a no-huddle, hurry-up passing attack that no one — the opponents, or anybody — had ever seen.

Modern football changed that day 25 years ago, and its influence is evident today on the threshold of college football's national championship.

The coach on the sideline that day was Hal Mumme, hired from a Texas high school in 1989 to resurrect a football program at Iowa Wesleyan College that had only two winning seasons in the previous 30 years. He was joined there by a law school graduate with little coaching experience named Mike Leach, his offensive coordinator.

“In Mumme’s third year at a game in Mount Pleasant, the game changed. America had no idea it happened,” said S.C. Gwynne, a historian and author from Austin, Texas, whose book “The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football” plays out the premise in colorful detail.

That day, the Iowa Wesleyan team filled the air with 54 passes for 454 yards and five touchdowns. Mumme’s quarterback, who once threw 86 passes in a game, ran an offense that some coaches called “basketball on grass.”

Mumme split linemen wide apart, rarely used a huddle and ran plays in hurry-up, rapid-fire sequences. The coaches had a crazy idea: The quarterback, backs and receivers would have to remember only a handful of set plays and make quick decisions on the fly, as if on a playground.

They came up with the name “Air Raid,” and it stuck. Thousands of high school, college and professional programs use versions of it today, parting from decades of grind-it-out, run-heavy offenses. Clemson, which plays Alabama on Monday in the national championship game for the second consecutive season, runs an offense with "Air Raid" influences.

Gwynne’s story of its evolution should be made into a football film, as rich with characters as baseball’s own tale of reinvention, “Moneyball.”

A friend told Mumme when he applied for the coaching job at Iowa Wesleyan College (today Iowa Wesleyan University) that it was the worst football team he’d ever seen. The team was 0-10 in 1988.

He took the job anyway.

The college administration, Gwynne writes, was looking to improve its football team to help declining enrollment after seeing what Central College in Pella did with its successful team.

Mumme had been busy scratching plays on napkins for years and had studied the offensive innovations of the late LaVell Edwards at Brigham Young University and of Sid Gillman, Don Coryell and Bill Walsh in professional football. Those coaches had veered from the supposed truisms that a good running game and defense won games.

In Mumme’s first meeting with players at Iowa Wesleyan, only three returning players showed up.

“And two left. The punter stayed,” said Mumme in an interview from his home in Mississippi last month.

So Mumme and Leach set forth in a beat-up car and traveled the country to recruit players to the small school, which at the time was a member of the the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, or NAIA, and could offer scholarships, sometimes as small as $500.

Mumme was a colorful Texan with big dreams who talked a lot; Leach was a long-haired eccentric from Wyoming.

“We drove through snowstorms and wild weather because we couldn’t afford to fly,” said Leach, now the head football coach at Washington State University. “We’d drive for days and stay wherever we could afford. We would try to recruit anybody and everybody.”

Junior college players, high school kids, people in trouble with school or the law. They cast a wide net. By the time the season started, they had recruited nearly 90 athletes, and 40 were from Texas, including Mumme's high school quarterback, Dustin Dewald.

“That was quite a collection,” said Dewald from his home in Texas. “Let’s say they couldn’t be quite as selective as they wanted to be. We had some guys that didn’t last long.”

Suddenly, this town of 8,000 with little diversity was filled with it, led by a coach with big dreams.

At first, Mumme was akin to the huckster who showed up in River City in “The Music Man” to dupe the locals and start a great band, said Gwynne. “He was going to have the world’s greatest football team.

“He brought in all these black kids and Polynesians who wore robes and played ukuleles. He changed the whole campus, which is one of the reasons he was fired.”

Mumme was paid $30,000 with much less for his then 27-year-old assistant Leach, who still recalls the “nasty little trailer” he lived in.

The college team played on a poor version of a high school field. The weight room was a musty basement with a few rusted irons. There were no football offices, so Mumme went to Wal-Mart and bought big letters to spell out "Iowa Wesleyan Tigers" and painted them purple to put on the walls in the basement, where he tried to help his makeshift offices look more official.

But soon they began working their magic. Mumme talked big around town and got a few boosters to donate money. On the field, the ragtag team started coming together with his new scheme during short practices with little contact and few wind sprints.

They were running enough, going out for passes. The skill player’s job was to learn how to find open spaces in the field and exploit them. Instead of running formal routes, receivers had the option of finding the folds between pass coverages, and Dewald was to fire away with a quick release, looking for open green turf downfield. Linemen were split wide and often in two-point stances for pass blocking. Dewald took the snaps several yards deep, in a shotgun formation now common at all levels of football.

After losing the first two games of the 1989 season, Iowa Wesleyan players started to get it, reeling off 108 points in the following three wins.

“It’s just backyard plays,” Gwynne said. “You teach your kids to read the field, find open spaces. If you have 600 plays, you can’t do that. But with eight plays, you can. And you do it over and over until you understand. It was a huge change in the game.”

Before, maybe 100 people went to the games, according to the book. Interest grew. Soon, the stands were full.

“We got a booster club going, and we raised a bunch of money,” said John Lance, a football program booster and owner of Lance Surveying. “Hal’s wife, June, was a pretty lady. Blonde hair, blue eyes. We’d take her to these businesses and industries around here and raise all kinds of money.”

But winning was the key to keep the money coming. Iowa Wesleyan finished 7-4 in 1989. The next year they were 7-5, but the offense rolled up the yards, and two losses were to powerful teams in a much higher league, NCAA Division II.

Things had settled in Mount Pleasant as busloads of people would even follow the team to away games, though some observers then said some townspeople were leery of the outsiders invading their quiet town. Troubled players washed out, but the atmosphere remained colorful, and Mumme had to deal with it.

One large lineman who Mumme was told had a distinct problem — he wanted to fight everybody — had done so in a game. Mumme had enough and told the player he was done. The player began taking his uniform and pads off on the field as he walked off, a striptease that was nearly complete as he exited the stadium.

It was the stuff that became legend around Mount Pleasant. But Mike Hampton, today the softball coach at Iowa Wesleyan, said Mumme was known not to put up with too much from players who were bored in a little town and acted out.

Hampton knew law enforcement in town who told him that when players ever came to visit, it wasn’t long before Mumme shuffled them out of town.

“But it got to the point that his name wasn’t too highly thought of on campus,” Hampton said. “They thought he was getting everything.”

Modern football changed on Aug. 31, 1991, at Iowa Wesleyan, claimed Gwynne. It was the beginning of the full-on Air Raid.

Mumme had refined his system. He decided to add another facet to the quirks in his offense, a hurry-up sequence usually reserved for desperation in the closing minutes of a game when a team snapped the ball as fast as they could after the previous play.

The first game of the season that day was against Division II powerhouse Northeast Missouri State, and the Iowa Wesleyan players looked like a junior high team compared to them, wrote Gwynne.

“We got our little ragtag uniforms and our white kids from the farm and some Polynesian guys, and we took the opening drive right down the field,” Mumme recalls.

A series of miscues led to a 24-7 Iowa Wesleyan deficit at halftime.

“Our left tackle (Shawn Martin) came up to me at halftime and said, ‘You don’t have to say anything to the team. We’re going to win.' " Mumme said. “I said, ‘Are you watching the same game as I am?' ”

But the hurry-up offense, the players knew, had already tired the opponents. It turned out to be true, and Iowa Wesleyan pulled off a stunning 34-31 upset on a way to a 10-1 record. They lost in the playoffs in a blizzard in Moorhead, Minn.

But the Air Raid had officially launched. Dewald set numerous NAIA passing records that still exist today, including most completions in a game (61) and most in a season (468), as well as most passing attempts (715).

There was one problem. Mumme’s program had gotten too big for the little college in Iowa. He had pressed to eventually move up to Division II football.

But President Bob Prins had called him into his office earlier in the 1991 season and told him it would be his last, though the coaches kept it quiet, and neither Prins nor Mumme discussed it publicly afterward, Gwynne wrote. There was jealousy among faculty that the football program was spending too much.

“Hal was too big for Iowa Wesleyan College, in terms of what the institution could support,” said Carol Nemitz, who was the dean of students at the time and has since retired. “I just don’t think they could support all that he wanted.”

Mumme said the perception that they were spending too much money on football was a bitter pill to swallow, but he went on to get a coveted Division II job at Valdosta State and then Division I Kentucky of the Southeastern Conference. Both offenses piled up yards on offense using the Air Raid.

“I always found it humorous. Everybody at Valdosta said it might work at a cow-pasture college, but not here, and we lit it up, “ Mumme said. “Then two boosters pick us up at the airport in Kentucky, and the first thing out of their mouths is that you can’t run (that offense) in the SEC. I mean, the naysayers are everywhere.”

At Kentucky, his offense — led for several years by prep phenom quarterback Tim Couch, the No. 1 pick of the 1999 NFL Draft — finally got national notoriety and was copied. Just how much influence the Air Raid continues to have is up for debate.

“Back then, you didn’t see it every day,” said Phil Fulmer, former Tennessee coach who faced Mumme at Kentucky. “Even now, it’s incredible the numbers you see put up, because it’s hard to prepare for from a defensive standpoint.

“But we never lost to him. And you don’t see those guys yet playing for championships.”

Its influences, however, are clear. Versions of it are run by nearly every Big 12 team, for example, except for Kansas State, football experts say. It's so pervasive and feared that in recent years, Alabama coach Nick Saban even called for rule changes to slow down hurry-up, no-huddle offenses to make the game safer for players.

“The top offenses, without exception, have an Air Raid influence,” said Leach, whose 8-4 team lost to Minnesota in the Dec. 27 Holiday Bowl. “My team was second in the nation in passing this year.”

What happened to Mumme after reinventing football?

He was caught in a recruiting scandal and resigned in 2001 at Kentucky. The NCAA's Committee on Infractions' investigation of the scandal in 2002 found Mumme innocent of rule violations, but concluded that he failed to monitor the activities of a recruiter who was guilty of three-dozen violations.

Mumme took his offenses to a series of small colleges over the years and is now at Bellhaven University in Jackson, Miss.

He has gravitated to challenged programs and often brought fan excitement and more wins, but he's fallen short of making the championship level. At Bellhaven, they haven’t been good, but they are passing for a lot of yards and having fun.

Maybe that’s the real reinvention of football that started back in Iowa many years ago — keep it simple and have some fun.

“It was more about the art than the venue,” Mumme said of his coaching jobs. “The great artists of the world never had their art in a museum when they were alive. They are discovered after they are dead.

“We just love the beauty of putting the offense together, to get kids to work in sync.”