Q1 2020 Texas CEO Magazine

across the frozen wastes of the Midwest, talking to high school
coaches, JUCO coaches, CFL coaches, World Football League
coaches—anybody who would tell us about the pass.” They
ended up in Lindy Infante’s office in Green Bay. They ended
up in Dennis Erickson’s office in Miami. Any high school or
junior college where someone was throwing, they went.
I thought, wow, this sounds like a buddy movie, like the Lord
of the Rings—going out in search of the perfect pass. And
they found it. Iowa Wesleyan did unprecedented things. And
because they were a tiny college in the middle of nowhere,
nobody had any idea that they had done it. Mumme and Leach
then proceeded to do the same thing at Valdosta State, which
earned Hal the head coaching job at an SEC school, Kentucky.
I wanted to tell that story of Hal and Mike, but I also needed to
know how Air Raid worked. I knew I was going to depart from
most football books. I was going to do x’s and o’s, show people
how their plays actually work. One in particular, called “mesh.”
Because if you know how mesh works, you understand Air Raid.
I spent so many hours with Hal. I had a dry-erase board and a
camera setup. I would go through and ask Hal to tell me how
different passes worked. He’d draw them out, arrows here and
arrows there. I couldn’t keep up. I made him break it down
second by second. I did probably a hundred total interviews
for the book, many focused on how the black magic worked.
In order to tell their story, I also had to go back into the history of
football, and America’s weird relationship with the forward pass.
You show in the book that Hal Mumme didn’t invent anything
per se. He just integrated other things. Nobody ever invents
anything. Ever. No such thing. Not even Walter Camp [the
“Father of American Football,” who developed the system of
downs and the line of scrimmage]. And as soon as you say that,
eight people raise their hands and go, “Oh no, actually, in Abilene
in 1922 they were doing that.” Hal was a great synthesizer, as are
all great coaches. And some of his stuff was absolutely radical.
That’s often the case in business as well. It’s the integration
of different ideas, packaged up in a certain way, that’s
where the “aha” is. In this case, spacing the linemen wasn’t
revolutionary, for example. Yes. I would argue, however, that
nobody had done “hurry-up, no-huddle” since the nineteenth
century. Boomer Esiason doing a no-huddle—he was just trying
to make the defense unable to substitute. In the twentieth
century, nobody did hurry-up, no-huddle until Hal did, which
I think is a pretty significant innovation. The nineteenth
century is a long way away. Nobody knew how they did that.
They didn’t have tape back then. And they didn’t huddle,
because there was no such thing as huddle. But yes, everybody
repackages. When Emory Bellard invented the triple option,
versions of that had been around going back to the nineteenth
century. On the other hand, it was a hell of a great offense.
One of the things about this type of innovation—and this transfers
to business—is they didn’t accept the premises of the game that
everybody else did: that in a game your offense typically has
65 plays, or that the line of scrimmage is a certain prescribed
length, or that three is the number of plays you get to make a
first down before having to punt or kick. Hal and Mike didn’t
accept that the power centers of the field would be concentrated
in the middle linebacker. They spread out the power vortexes.
The time and space of the game were completely different.
For a lot of coaches, the goal of the game was time of possession.
If you controlled it, you would win. Hal and Mike didn’t care
how long they controlled the ball. They thought the concept was
irrelevant. They would score 65 points on you with 20 minutes
of possession and have fun with the rest. They had short, lighthitting
practices. No one was doing any such thing back then.
Before, there was this idea that you ran a specific play that
was mapped out precisely beforehand. It turned out that if
you have people who can adapt to what the defense shows
you, you have a huge advantage. That’s exactly true. In a lot of
ways, the most radical thing they were doing was option offense.
That meant teaching your players how to read the field on the
fly. Opposing teams did not understand this at first. A receiver
would be trained to read coverage and react in different ways,
and the quarterback was trained in the same way. Which meant
that even the offense did not know exactly what was going to
happen. Mike Leach’s great receiver at Texas Tech Wes Welker is
a perfect example of an option receiver that no one could cover.
The other management lesson here is that Hal came up
with an idea of radical simplicity in a world that was getting
phenomenally complex. Hal’s world was so simple. In a world
of telephone-directory-sized playbooks, he did not have one.
At times his teams had less than 10 plays, designed in such
a way that they looked complex. From his opponents’ point
of view, it looks like they’ve got 18 angry hornets coming at
them. Their offensive linemen had exactly two coverages. In
that era, Paul Brown was famous for his 500-page playbook.
It was a badge of honor. It was supposed to take years to
understand the complexity of the NFL, and all you ever did was
go to clinics and pick up plays. All the options were thought
out. The other teams were living in this enormously complex
world. But for Hal’s guys, the world was extremely simple.
And this was a constant fight. Several different times, the Air
Raid started to get too complex. Hal would sit down with his
coaches and just ruthlessly go through and cut out plays.
If there’s one single overriding lesson, it’s this: If
you can be simple in a complex world, you win.
It’s a great point. A key talent of the best CEOs is simplifying
the business for the team. The team’s in the middle of
the details every day and they can get lost. You have to
say, “These are the three objectives we’re chasing, not
78 Texas CEO Magazine Q1 2020