Interesting read from the Athletic:
"Simplicity has always been one of the main selling points of the Air Raid, and after one of the year’s most surprising season-opening results was engineered by a graduate transfer quarterback and a brand-new coaching staff working around the nationwide limits on spring and summer preparation brought on by COVID-19, the system has proven itself to be essentially pandemic-proof.
B.J. Symons remembers his introduction to the Air Raid when Leach took over at Texas Tech in 2000, stepping into a quarterback room that also included future Red Raiders and Arizona Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury. Symons said that for every other team he’s been on, at every level of football, he’s been given an actual physical playbook. Leach didn’t have one. He introduced his offense to his quarterbacks by drawing up three formations, which would lead to six to 10 plays, on a board. That’s what they would learn that day, taking a small number of plays to start and repping them to death.
“It was kind of like the 12 Days of Christmas,” said Symons, who threw for 5,833 yards and 52 touchdowns in 2003. “In Practice A, we’d learn those six to 10 plays. In Practice B, we may still run those six different plays, but we’d also work in another six plays. On the third day of practice, we’d do A, B and then put in a C. … I may not practice 100 plays two or three times; I’m going to practice 30 plays, like, 20 times each.”
The Texas Tech quarterbacks — and every quarterback room Leach has coached since — started with four-receiver sets. Then trips formations. Then, the quick game (three-step drops) and the 90 package (five-step drops with longer-developing downfield plays). The Mesh concept, Flood plays (including
Y-Sail and
Y-Cross) and the shallow cross also get worked in.
“(Costello) hit about four or five of those little stick routes — that’s always one of the first things that goes in,” Mumme said. “Then, the screens and the Mesh. He scored on Mesh three times. Those things are things we work on every day. The shallows go in after Four Verticals; he had two or three really big plays in the second half on shallows. … Basically, the offense splits into thirds. After three workouts, you’ve taught the whole thing. You haven’t mastered it, but you’re taught it.”
Leach estimated on Monday that it takes about 12 practices to fully install his offense, which Mumme took to mean four times through the three-day installation process. That quick turnaround helped Leach and grad transfer Gardner Minshew to a breakthrough 2018 season at Washington State, and when Leach has inherited entirely new rosters, it has helped players digest an offensive system that doesn’t look or feel remotely similar to most other systems in the country.
Leach’s debuts at past stops have been a bit of a mixed bag. He opened with four consecutive wins at Texas Tech in 2000 before losing five of seven to close out the season. At Washington State, he lost his first game to BYU, 30-6, in a 2012 season that culminated in a 3-9 record. But he also won the Apple Cup to close out the year, and that three-win season was an improvement from the year prior. His immediate success at Mississippi State certainly speaks to the talent he inherited from a program that reached bowl games in each of Joe Moorhead’s two seasons, as well as the talent he added by way of the transfer portal.
“I have to say, I’m glad this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to do that because of the shortened timeframe,” Leach said Monday. “We tried to expedite what we did and how we did it to try and make it as clear as we possibly could. I had a number of coaches that I’d worked with in the past (on my staff here), so we’re pretty familiar with how it was going to go and what we wanted to try and accomplish.”
And that worked almost immediately, even with a most unusual offseason that essentially wiped out spring ball and kept players at home and away from the practice facilities for nearly three months. Costello didn’t get to Starkville until the beginning of June. Now he’s the seventh Leach quarterback to put up a 600-yard passing performance, which only 20 players in FBS history have done, joining Symons, Cody Hodges, Graham Harrell, Connor Halliday, Luke Falk and Anthony Gordon.
“At Stanford, I felt like I was going to football school every day,”
Costello told The Athletic last week. “I’d say 95 percent of college football players don’t experience that level of teaching — we’re talking very meticulous pro-style stuff. Sometimes it takes guys two to three years to pick up the stuff we’re doing.
“Then I come here and it’s — we don’t care what you’re running (defensively), we’re gonna line up, we’re gonna go faster, we’re gonna attack space. We don’t care what your coverage is. We’ve done this so many times, we’re going to out-execute you.
“How can it be the same position? How can it be the same sport?”
As Mumme put it, coaches who run the Air Raid have to “have a great capacity for boredom.” They have to be fine doing the same three-workout rotation over and over in practice. He saw in Saturday’s game that the Mississippi State players had that capacity, too.
“A lot of coaches get bored with repetition, and they start adding,” Mumme said. “It’s easy to sit in that room and watch film and start drawing stuff on the board. It all sounds good, looks good. But then you add it to your playbook, and you don’t drop anything else. You just added another play, another concept. And then pretty soon you look up and all you’ve done is create a formula for failure.
“Players play a lot better if they understand what they’re doing all the time.”
That’s easier said than done, of course. But it’s also easier done with a simpler offense and clear expectations. On Saturday, Costello showed everyone why.
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