I'll leave this here...enjoy:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tiny-iowa-college-that-changed-the-nfl-1540304231
The Tiny Iowa College That Changed the NFL
The Air Raid offense, which produced Patrick Mahomes and Baker Mayfield, has infiltrated the NFL. It traces its roots back to Iowa Wesleyan.
Mike Leach’s trailer was putrid.
It was 1989, and Leach was making $12,000 a year to coach the offense of Iowa Wesleyan’s football team. The nicest thing about his trailer home was the waist-high grass outside. Inside was a broken shower, a constantly overflowing toilet and a low-hanging ceiling fan that nearly decapitated Leach and his wife. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered in a bright red shag rug. The suffocating dust and mildew invigorated his asthma.
That disgusting trailer is where Leach helped changed the course of football history.
His time in tiny Mount Pleasant, Iowa, at a school with an irrelevant football program, is highly relevant to football history—and modern football. The record books of college football are still littered with the name Iowa Wesleyan, the school that spawned an offense called the “Air Raid.”
The Air Raid moved over the years from the fringes of college football to some of the biggest programs in the country. But NFL coaches hated it, criticizing its principles and the quality of football players it produced.
The naysayers have gone quiet because, 30 years later, the Air Raid has taken over the NFL.
Jared Goff
Baker Mayfield
Patrick Mahomes
Photos: Corey Silvia/Icon SMI/Zuma Press; Gregory Shamus/Getty Images; Ed Zurga/Associated Press
Scoring in the NFL is at an all-time high, spread schemes have invaded the league and it’s impossible to look at the quarterbacks of the future without seeing Leach’s past. Patrick Mahomes, Jared Goff and Baker Mayfield thrived in those systems in college, and they are flourishing in the NFL because of a newfound willingness to incorporate the ideas cultivated in Leach’s trailer.
“There are Air Raid concepts all over the NFL,” says Leach, now the coach at Washington State. “Go back to when we were at Iowa Wesleyan. It looks quite similar.”
Hal Mumme wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of coaching Iowa Wesleyan. Mumme was a high-school coach in Texas and couldn’t place Iowa on a map. Every college he actually wanted to coach for said “no.” He was told two things about Iowa Wesleyan: He’d have to take a pay cut of about $20,000 a year and the team he would inherit was the worst anyone had ever seen.
He was sold.
The Iowa Wesleyan coaching staff of 1989, including Hal Mumme (back row, left) and Mike Leach (front row, right). Photo: Iowa Wesleyan
Coaching at the college level offered something he coveted: being able to handpick his players. And he needed a lot of them. When Mumme arrived on campus, there were only two returnees. One was the punter.
He also had to fill out the staff. One candidate was a recent law school graduate with limited coaching experience whose last job was in Finland. His name was Mike Leach, and he was the only coach desperate enough to take a job in Mount Pleasant and move into a trailer. “I had never been to Finland,” Leach says. “Or Iowa.”
The pair of obscure coaching savants shared an infatuation with the BYU offenses that were revolutionary for their emphasis on passing the ball. They crisscrossed the country looking for players with that in mind. They wanted athletes who could take advantage of all the space on a football field.
The most important player in their overhaul came to them by accident. Dustin Dewald had played quarterback under Mumme at Copperas Cove High School and was good enough to play as a freshman at Stephen F. Austin. Then he quit the sport, moved to play golf at Tarleton State University and one day went to see his former coach and congratulate him on getting the Iowa Wesleyan job. That’s when Mumme made his big pitch.
“How about moving to Iowa with me?” Mumme asked.
“Coach Mumme is a pretty good salesman,” Dewald says.
Hal Mumme became the coach of Kentucky after Iowa Wesleyan. Photo: Andy Lyons/Allsport/Getty Images
The team didn’t have a weight room until they poured concrete in the basement of the boy’s dorm and bought some dumbbells. In addition to coaching the offense, Leach was the team’s sports information director, video coordinator and equipment coordinator. He also taught history and criminal law classes. He even took a few courses so he could defer his $45,000 in student debt.
But something surprising happened in their first season. The Tigers, who went 0-10 in 1988, went 7-4 in 1989. Their offense, which spread the field and passed the ball so much everybody told them it couldn’t work, was actually working. The ragtag group of players, which Mumme said included an unusual number of Polynesians and others whom every other coach at every level of college football had ignored, became the turnaround story of the NAIA. “We were the French Foreign Legion of football,” Mumme said.
But their breakthrough came in 1991. Mumme and Leach thought they had their best team yet with Dewald and a mulleted wide receiver named Dana Holgorsen. Still, they worried they’d lose more games than they won because of a schedule that included a number of highly-ranked opponents from higher divisions of college football.
Their unexpected epiphany came in the most unexpected of places. Mumme and Leach were in Florida to recruit and visited the Orlando Thunder, a team in the World League of American Football, where they watched a practice led by coach Don Matthews, a legend of the Canadian Football League.
One particular drill astounded them. It was called Bandit. It was a frenetic exercise designed to prepare the team for two-minute drills during games, when the offense needs to move quickly down the field. The offense and defense took separate sides of the field, like in a real game, and engaged in a fast-paced frenzy like they had never seen before.
“That’s our answer,” Mumme told Leach. “That’s not going to be a two-minute offense. That’s going to be our offense.”
Washington State coach Mike Leach’s roots go back to his days at Iowa Wesleyan. Photo: Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
Leach and Mumme shortened the team’s menu of plays and turbocharged Iowa Wesleyan’s pass-heavy offense. “At the time,” Dewald says, “we didn’t realize we were doing anything groundbreaking.” Their first game of the season was against a Division-II team that made the playoffs the prior season. By halftime, Northeast Missouri State, now called Truman State, led 24-7. Mumme walked into the locker room with the distinct feeling their strange new strategy was idiotic.
Then Dewald rushed over to him. “We’re going to win,” he told Mumme. The quarterback felt they had been unlucky to not score more, and he noticed that the defense was completely gassed.
He was right. Mumme was wrong. Iowa Wesleyan won 34-31.
“That was the first Air Raid game ever,” Mumme says.
The Tigers finished the season 10-1. The team’s records are standing to this day. Dewald’s 61 completions in one game are still the most in NAIA history and more than any NCAA Division I quarterback ever, too.
Mumme and Leach climbed the coaching ladder, eventually going to Kentucky together. Leach became the head coach at Texas Tech in 2000 and is now at Washington State. Other coaches began incorporating their tactics, and their disciples spread throughout the game: Holgorsen, the wide receiver, is now the head coach at West Virginia.
After leaving Iowa Wesleyan, Dewald wasn’t showered with offers to play professional football. He started a home-building company with his family.
Dewald’s modern successors have different careers. They’re the best young NFL quarterbacks.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tiny-iowa-college-that-changed-the-nfl-1540304231
The Tiny Iowa College That Changed the NFL
The Air Raid offense, which produced Patrick Mahomes and Baker Mayfield, has infiltrated the NFL. It traces its roots back to Iowa Wesleyan.
Mike Leach’s trailer was putrid.
It was 1989, and Leach was making $12,000 a year to coach the offense of Iowa Wesleyan’s football team. The nicest thing about his trailer home was the waist-high grass outside. Inside was a broken shower, a constantly overflowing toilet and a low-hanging ceiling fan that nearly decapitated Leach and his wife. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered in a bright red shag rug. The suffocating dust and mildew invigorated his asthma.
That disgusting trailer is where Leach helped changed the course of football history.
His time in tiny Mount Pleasant, Iowa, at a school with an irrelevant football program, is highly relevant to football history—and modern football. The record books of college football are still littered with the name Iowa Wesleyan, the school that spawned an offense called the “Air Raid.”
The Air Raid moved over the years from the fringes of college football to some of the biggest programs in the country. But NFL coaches hated it, criticizing its principles and the quality of football players it produced.
The naysayers have gone quiet because, 30 years later, the Air Raid has taken over the NFL.
Jared Goff
Baker Mayfield
Patrick Mahomes
Photos: Corey Silvia/Icon SMI/Zuma Press; Gregory Shamus/Getty Images; Ed Zurga/Associated Press
Scoring in the NFL is at an all-time high, spread schemes have invaded the league and it’s impossible to look at the quarterbacks of the future without seeing Leach’s past. Patrick Mahomes, Jared Goff and Baker Mayfield thrived in those systems in college, and they are flourishing in the NFL because of a newfound willingness to incorporate the ideas cultivated in Leach’s trailer.
“There are Air Raid concepts all over the NFL,” says Leach, now the coach at Washington State. “Go back to when we were at Iowa Wesleyan. It looks quite similar.”
Hal Mumme wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of coaching Iowa Wesleyan. Mumme was a high-school coach in Texas and couldn’t place Iowa on a map. Every college he actually wanted to coach for said “no.” He was told two things about Iowa Wesleyan: He’d have to take a pay cut of about $20,000 a year and the team he would inherit was the worst anyone had ever seen.
He was sold.
The Iowa Wesleyan coaching staff of 1989, including Hal Mumme (back row, left) and Mike Leach (front row, right). Photo: Iowa Wesleyan
Coaching at the college level offered something he coveted: being able to handpick his players. And he needed a lot of them. When Mumme arrived on campus, there were only two returnees. One was the punter.
He also had to fill out the staff. One candidate was a recent law school graduate with limited coaching experience whose last job was in Finland. His name was Mike Leach, and he was the only coach desperate enough to take a job in Mount Pleasant and move into a trailer. “I had never been to Finland,” Leach says. “Or Iowa.”
The pair of obscure coaching savants shared an infatuation with the BYU offenses that were revolutionary for their emphasis on passing the ball. They crisscrossed the country looking for players with that in mind. They wanted athletes who could take advantage of all the space on a football field.
The most important player in their overhaul came to them by accident. Dustin Dewald had played quarterback under Mumme at Copperas Cove High School and was good enough to play as a freshman at Stephen F. Austin. Then he quit the sport, moved to play golf at Tarleton State University and one day went to see his former coach and congratulate him on getting the Iowa Wesleyan job. That’s when Mumme made his big pitch.
“How about moving to Iowa with me?” Mumme asked.
“Coach Mumme is a pretty good salesman,” Dewald says.
Hal Mumme became the coach of Kentucky after Iowa Wesleyan. Photo: Andy Lyons/Allsport/Getty Images
The team didn’t have a weight room until they poured concrete in the basement of the boy’s dorm and bought some dumbbells. In addition to coaching the offense, Leach was the team’s sports information director, video coordinator and equipment coordinator. He also taught history and criminal law classes. He even took a few courses so he could defer his $45,000 in student debt.
But something surprising happened in their first season. The Tigers, who went 0-10 in 1988, went 7-4 in 1989. Their offense, which spread the field and passed the ball so much everybody told them it couldn’t work, was actually working. The ragtag group of players, which Mumme said included an unusual number of Polynesians and others whom every other coach at every level of college football had ignored, became the turnaround story of the NAIA. “We were the French Foreign Legion of football,” Mumme said.
But their breakthrough came in 1991. Mumme and Leach thought they had their best team yet with Dewald and a mulleted wide receiver named Dana Holgorsen. Still, they worried they’d lose more games than they won because of a schedule that included a number of highly-ranked opponents from higher divisions of college football.
Their unexpected epiphany came in the most unexpected of places. Mumme and Leach were in Florida to recruit and visited the Orlando Thunder, a team in the World League of American Football, where they watched a practice led by coach Don Matthews, a legend of the Canadian Football League.
One particular drill astounded them. It was called Bandit. It was a frenetic exercise designed to prepare the team for two-minute drills during games, when the offense needs to move quickly down the field. The offense and defense took separate sides of the field, like in a real game, and engaged in a fast-paced frenzy like they had never seen before.
“That’s our answer,” Mumme told Leach. “That’s not going to be a two-minute offense. That’s going to be our offense.”
Washington State coach Mike Leach’s roots go back to his days at Iowa Wesleyan. Photo: Ted S. Warren/Associated Press
Leach and Mumme shortened the team’s menu of plays and turbocharged Iowa Wesleyan’s pass-heavy offense. “At the time,” Dewald says, “we didn’t realize we were doing anything groundbreaking.” Their first game of the season was against a Division-II team that made the playoffs the prior season. By halftime, Northeast Missouri State, now called Truman State, led 24-7. Mumme walked into the locker room with the distinct feeling their strange new strategy was idiotic.
Then Dewald rushed over to him. “We’re going to win,” he told Mumme. The quarterback felt they had been unlucky to not score more, and he noticed that the defense was completely gassed.
He was right. Mumme was wrong. Iowa Wesleyan won 34-31.
“That was the first Air Raid game ever,” Mumme says.
The Tigers finished the season 10-1. The team’s records are standing to this day. Dewald’s 61 completions in one game are still the most in NAIA history and more than any NCAA Division I quarterback ever, too.
Mumme and Leach climbed the coaching ladder, eventually going to Kentucky together. Leach became the head coach at Texas Tech in 2000 and is now at Washington State. Other coaches began incorporating their tactics, and their disciples spread throughout the game: Holgorsen, the wide receiver, is now the head coach at West Virginia.
After leaving Iowa Wesleyan, Dewald wasn’t showered with offers to play professional football. He started a home-building company with his family.
Dewald’s modern successors have different careers. They’re the best young NFL quarterbacks.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
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