S. C. Gwynne - The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football

For my wife, Katie, who encouraged me to write this book, and for my daughter, Maisie, who came up with its title

We decided that since football is a game with a ball in it, we should use the ball, we should let the boys play with the ball, we should put the ball in the air, we should let people see the ball.

Glenn Tiger Ellison

Head Football Coach

Middletown (Ohio) High School, 19451963

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

Mark Twain

Praise for The Perfect Pass

The most entertaining book on football this decade... [Gwynne] writes with the enthusiasm of a fan and the scope of a historian.

Allen Barra, The Dallas Morning News

A thrill-a-minute book... Along with his protg Mike Leach, now the head coach at Washington State University, Mr. Mumme revolutionized their sport in ways that, frankly, dwarf the legacy of Billy Beane and his gang from Moneyball .

Will Leitch, The Wall Street Journal

Informative and entertaining and a must-read for anyone interested in the inner game of football strategy... If you are a football coach, football fan, or simply a guy who likes a good story, S. C. Gwynne scored a touchdown.

Tony DeMeo, American Football Monthly

The tale of Hal Mumme and how he changed American football is a David and Goliath story with similarities to Michael Lewiss Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.... That was a different sport and era, but both Beane and Mumme found themselves in underdog positions and used creative, out-of-the-box thinking to level the playing field.

Houston Press

Being a football coach who goes against the way the game has long been played is deeply challenging. S. C. Gwynne captures perfectly how Hal Mummes Air Raid offense helped change the landscape of college football forever. Its a great story.

Bruce Arians, head coach, Arizona Cardinals

When we played against a Hal Mumme offense, our defense had to be changed dramatically. You had to throw away everything you knew or you were going to get beat. Every offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator in football better study this book to find out why.

Jerry Glanville, former NFL and college head coach

Hal Mumme has always been a true American genius, and every year teams running his offense are among the tops in yards and points. I know, because I wouldve liked to have hired him. He has a brilliant football mind, and here at last is his amazing story, told in full.

Bob Stoops, head coach, University of Oklahoma

The Perfect Pass is a perfect book about footballand the transformative power of innovation. S. C. Gwynne brings the same remarkable reporting and storytelling skills he used in Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell to reveal the dramatic history behind the passing revolution that disrupted and forever changed Americas favorite sport. His portrait of Hal Mumme, the unknown underdog coach who unleashed the Air Raid offense on the modern game, is superb, at once capturing the passion and genius that made him an unsung hero of his generation.

Texas Monthly

If you are a coach, a manager, an entrepreneur, an executive, an MBA student, etc., looking for a real-life example of thinking way outside the box and changing your industry or field completely, then The Perfect Pass is the book for you. Read it, digest it, and then apply it to your lifes work.

Texas History Page

[An] illuminating history.

The New Yorker

Rich, well-told story of Hal Mumme, who spent years losing before inventing the Air Raid offense, which has swept football.

Sports Illustrated

It is undeniable that the Air Raid, the fast passing game, and the frequency of the forward pass are now imprinted on football, especially, as Gwynne notes, on the college level, though also in the NFL. That makes his subtitle all the more fitting, for undeniably, the two coaches changed the gameand brought glory to their institutions. A superb treat for all gridiron fans.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Excellent sports history... an inspiring reminder that great ideas dont automatically permeate the existing ideology. Sometimes a devoted few must pursue their principles with diligence, even if they dont get the glory.

Publishers Weekly

A rousing tale of innovation finding success in the face of the gale-force winds of convention.

Booklist

Gwynne masterfully reports how this eccentric offensive genius... followed his own path and put passing at the forefront to runaway success. His stamp is everywhere, even in the NFL.

Austin American-Statesman

The most fun football book Ive read in some time.

Chris Brown, SmartFootball.com

T he Red Raiders are almost out of time.

With 1 minute and 23 seconds left in the game, Texas Techs football team trails the University of Texas, 3332. They have the ball on their own 38-yard line, 62 yards from the end zone. They have one time-out left, but the clock is just one of their problems. Texas is the top-ranked team in the country, loaded with future NFL draft picks. In the previous three weeks the Longhorns have beaten, consecutively, the first-, eleventh-, and seventh-ranked teams in the nation, on whom they have hung a collective 129 points. Texass Heisman-candidate quarterback, Colt McCoy, has just engineered a textbook-perfect, 11-play, 80-yard touchdown drive to take the lead. On the Texas sideline you can see that the Horns are juiced. They are chest-bumping. They are jumping up and down. They are screaming.

So are the 56,000 Red Raiders fans in the stands, who have watched, agonizingly, as their teams 226 lead has steadily vaporized in the second half. They are desperate to win. Tech is ranked sixtha rare occurrence in itselfand has never beaten a number-one-ranked team in its 85-year history. The game has been wildly hyped. The West Texas campus has been turned into a giant, free-floating pep rally. ESPNs College GameDay carnival has trundled into town with its 15,000 hangers-on. An elaborate tent city with 2,000 residents has sprung up around the stadium, loaded with so much digital technology and generator-powered electricity that it glows at night.

But as the clock ticks perilously toward 0, the feeling in Lubbock on this warm November night in 2008 goes much deeper than that. In spite of the odds, Tech fans believe, as an article of unwavering faith, that they will win. They do not doubt it. That is not just because their football team is having an exceptional year. The real reason is that they are the possessors of what is, by the traditional standards of the Big 12 Conference and the rest of the NCAA, a sort of gridiron black magic, a brand of offense so profoundly different from what their opponents play, so alien to the conventions of the rest of American football, and so astoundingly effective that for almost a decade it has consistently defied the best efforts of the best defensive minds in football to stop it. They call it the Air Raid. Thats because the magic is in the air: balls thrown and balls caught. In their hearts, the citizens of Red Raider Nation do not believe that it can be stopped.

Most of America is seeing the offenses oddities for the first time, as Texas Tech sets up at the line of scrimmage. Conventional wisdom holds that offensive linemen should position themselves close together so that there is no more than a foot or foot and a half between them, creating the effect of an impenetrable wall. Often they are closer than that. Texas Techs offensive linemen are, as one amazed commentator puts it, strung out from here to Amarillo. There are four or more feet between the center, guards, and tackles, creating a line that looks, when viewed from the end zone, shockingly porous. As though any self-respecting linebacker could just walk right through those vast open spaces and kill the quarterback. Nobody lines up like this. The linemen, moreover, do not get down in the normal three- or four-point stance, ready to fire out, like everybody else. Instead, they stand, hands resting lightly on their thighs, looking like men waiting for a bus. Nor do they even position themselves on the line of scrimmage. They are set back from it, deeper than the center. Football traditionalists would tell you that they look like a group of fat men who are about to be knocked backward onto their Buick-sized hindquarters, while the defensive tackles and linebackers ravage the backfield. Tech has been setting up this way for years. Hardly anyone, anywhere, does any such thing.