The story of one man's ideas that changed how you think about the game
Book Review: The Perfect Pass by S.C. Gwynne
“It’s not what we know, but what our players know.”
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Hal Mumme’s Air Raid offense is everywhere.
If you watched a single football game last year, you probably saw Mesh run 92 times in that single game.
But Mumme’s passing game has not always dominated football. In fact, people rejected his ideas about not just the passing game, but his ideas on football for many years.
Mumme, however, kept plugging along and eventually shaped the way we think about how we should coach and play football.
His ideas are at the same time both provocative and obvious.
Summary of The Perfect Pass
S.C. Gwynne’s book The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football tells the story of a man who saw the game of football differently than everyone else during his time. He started out as a college assistant coach who rose to become the offensive coordinator at UTEP before getting fired and spending three years as a high school football coach. During that time, Mumme struggled to “fit in” because he was not thinking about football the same way that his peers were.
Mumme believed that you could create an offense that used the passing game as the primary means to score points. He also believed that football was supposed to be fun.
Below Gwynne describes how radical Mumme’s ideas were to his players:
The recruits had heard from coaches all their lives only how hard they were going to work, how tough it was going to be, how much sweat and blood and dedication it was going to take, and how all that would pay off in the end. Hal did not talk about those things. He sometimes thought he was the only on in all of football talking about the joy of playing the game.
At this point in time, nobody but Mumme was imagining a world where playing football like this as possible.
So when he got a job at Iowa Wesleyan where he was able to do whatever he wanted, he started to make real what his mind imagined. For the first time ever, an offense dedicated their identity to the passing game.
Mumme refined this pass first offense which led him to great success at Valdosta State. He reached the pinnacle of his career by getting the job at Kentucky where he unleashed the Air Raid on the SEC and even beat Alabama.
What does all that mean for you and me?
Mumme’s story is an inspiring tale because he saw a world that didn’t yet exist and went out and made that world. And that world wasn’t only without teams passing the ball all the time.
No, in that world people did football differently.
Chapter 10, “Hal’s Theory of Relativity,” reveals how Mumme started to shape a new way to think and do football. In short, he gave his team a competitive advantage by teaching them to play so radically different than their opponents so that the defense would feel as if they were playing a different game than the offense.
Gwynne describes this approach by saying that “while the opposing team played on a small field, circumscribed by its traditional ideas of offense and defense, Hal’s team would play simultaneously on a much larger pitch, stretched vertically and horizontally.” The Air Raid’s passing game and quick screens flipped everything everyone thought about how we “should” play football on its head.
By building an offense that attacked from the top down and used all 53 1/3 yards, Mumme forced defenses to create new solutions for defending offenses. By speeding up the game play, Mumme forced defenses to adjust how they communicated play calls and got lined up. By teaching his quarterbacks and receivers to “find grass,” Mumme forced the defenses to develop new ways to defend space.
Simply put, Mumme’s teams were not playing the same game as their opponents.
My favorite example of this is Mumme’s approach to fourth down.
By using the fourth down as an offensive play rather than a special teams play, Mumme’s offenses made it so that “the defense had entirely inappropriate and unrealistic expectations of which plays their opponents might be calling.” The rejection of this “conservative” approach to football, once again, gave his team a competitive advantage by increasing the number of opportunities for them to score points.
But perhaps the most revolutionary part of Mumme’s thinking his particular focus on simplifying everything in the pursuit of perfect execution.
How Mastering Execution Drove Everything
There is only so much time in the day and only so much effort in the day to get things done. So as you traverse through a day, you must prioritize your efforts so that you are productive and do not waste time.
The brilliance in Mumme’s thinking did not rest in the plays themselves. Instead, the brilliance was in his team’s ideas about how you should go about practicing football.
Those ideas centered around the idea that you should only focus on the things that matter.
Gwynne says that “much of the effort Hal put into his offense was meant to simplify it, to make it so easy that no one would ever need a playbook and the players could play fast and instinctively.” By focusing on enabling the players’ ability to execute, the theory follows that you don’t need to worry about having a robust playbook.
Why? Because having a lot of plays does not matter more than your players’ ability to execute those plays.
And this philosophy has a great respect for doing what mattered and eliminating everything that didn’t matter. Mumme notoriously disrespected the hard-nosed attitude of traditional football practices. His teams practiced for only 1 hour and 45 minutes and they didn’t practice on Mondays or Fridays.
How could they do that and still find success?
Because they had an extreme dedication to figuring out what matters and then only doing those things.
I first learned of this The Perfect Pass when I read Tony Holler’s article in Headsets called “Hal Mumme and Me” (warning: do not read that article or anything else by Holler unless you want all your ideas about how you should practice football challenged).
At its core, the thinking follows that you should spend time figuring out what factors are important and then having an incredible dedication to improving those factors with a particular focus.
“We don’t practice mediocrity.”
Hal and Leach had come up with a list of training fundamentals for each offensive position. Practices would be devoted only to what was absolutely necessary to playing and winning.
Mumme and his teams didn’t practice for an hour and 45 minutes because they wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. Instead, that’s all the time they needed to get the job done.
Seeing this type of thinking articulated and practiced is inspiring because we are limited in what we can do. There are tons of great ideas about how we should coach our players, and there are tons of great ideas about the cool schematic things we can do. The difficult part, however, is disregarding what we want to do or what we think we ought to and instead do the work in figuring out what really matters.
Final thoughts
As Holler noted in his article, there is no other sport that “is more traditional, more (continued from previous page) patriotic, and more religious than football.”
And as I’ve said before, football is a complex game. But as I further think about that thought, it seems to be that football is complex not just because of the game itself, but because a big part of football are those traditional ways of thinking about the game.
And that’s not to say those traditions are bad or wrong because of the fact that they are traditions. But it is to say that we should always ask “why do we do it that way?” in everything we encounter. Without the active engagement with the practices we are a part of, we will be mindlessly moving in no real direction simply because “that’s the ways we’ve always done things.”
But because there is too much information out there, you must ruthlessly filter everything you encounter. You must file things away into two categories: things that matter and things that don’t matter. Then you must focus on improving those things that do matter and eliminating those things that don’t matter.
There is not enough time to do everything. You must be selective and then passionately follow your selection.
Do you focus on the things that matter?
Until next time —