Extra Points: Don't Blink

By Lee Pace

Phil Longo was the head coach at Parsippany Hills High in New Jersey in 1997 when he saw the evolution of Kentucky QB Tim Couch throwing for nearly 4,000 yards and racking up points like a pinball machine. Wanting to learn more of what coaches Hal Mumme and Mike Leach were doing, Longo drove 11 hours to Lexington, Ky., in his Toyota 4-Runner in the spring of 1998, eating Moon Pies for sustenance and sleeping in his vehicle to hear Leach, the Wildcats' quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator, speak at a clinic about the "Air Raid" offense he and Mumme had developed at Iowa Wesleyan and Valdosta State.

"I had just enough money for gas," Longo says. "They let me in the football building when no one was looking so I could take a shower. I wanted to ask Mike a few questions afterward, but so did 30 other guys. I was the last one to leave the room. But it was a great trip. I came away very enlightened. I left there knowing I'd found my offense. It made sense to me. I adopted that philosophy and have been adapting it ever since."

The roots of the Air Raid offense that Longo and Coach Mack Brown are installing this spring for the Tar Heels extend to Coach LaVell Edwards at Brigham Young in the 1970s and '80s, when he was running three- and four-wide sets while everyone else in college football was wielding the option or power-I. Mumme was an assistant coach at Texas-El Paso and played BYU every year and was fascinated with the idea. He thought when he took a head job at Iowa Wesleyan in 1989 that having multiple receivers, throwing the ball a high percentage of snaps and going fast would be a way to overcome talent and numbers deficiencies. Leach was his offensive coordinator.

"We started out not sure if it would work, but by the time we finished 10-2 and had the only playoff spot in school history, we were pretty sure it would work," Mumme remembers.

The "Air Raid" was so named because of its early aerial leanings and the fact that Leach, a history buff, thought the "air raid" concept of the German zeppelins over England in World War I was an apt metaphor. The idea worked when they moved to Valdosta State and also when they leapt into ground-oriented Southeastern Conference at Kentucky in 1997. The year before Mumme and Leach arrived, Couch passed for 967 yards. The next two years, Couch threw for 3,884 and 4,275 yards, respectively.

After Kentucky, Leach moved to Oklahoma as offensive coordinator for a single season in 1999; that year the Sooners went from 101st to eighth in the country in offensive scoring. Texas Tech then hired him as its head coach and Leach further escalated the Air Raid franchise and spawned a coaching tree that today includes Mark Mangino, Sonny Dykes, Art Briles, Dino Babers, Seth Littrell, Tony Franklin, Kliff Kingsbury, Lincoln Riley and Dana Holgorsen, among others.

"If you watch a Big XII football game today versus 10 years ago, it's a completely different event," author Michael Lewis wrote in 2005 in profile of Leach for The New York Times. "Everyone's watching Mike Leach's offense."

The Air Raid has many themes and components, among them its relative simplicity, its modest playbook, its reliance on players' instincts, its catch-phrase of "chasing grass."

One of the system's bedrock plays is a "four-verticals" call that has receivers running downfield in four parallel lanes, breaking off depending on how the defense reacts, and Leach during his Texas Tech days sometimes conducted an entire practice running nothing but four-vertical calls. Mumme likes to talk about running the "mesh play"— another Air Raid staple with two inside receivers running crossing routes over the middle and rubbing each other closely enough they could high-five one another—53 times in one game. But no one in the stands or holding a microphone knew it because they came out of multiple formations and the ball went to different receivers.

Leach from the early days prided himself on having a skinny playbook.

"There's two ways to make it more complex for the defense," he says. "One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that's no good because then the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays and run it out of lots of different formations."

That's one of the elements to the Air Raid that attracted Longo two decades ago.

"We have about 28 pieces to the offense," he says. "Everyone automatically thinks that's 28 straight plays and we have nothing outside that, but that's not the case at all. We can take any two or three of them and put them together. We have thousands of combinations and we use them all. We have three formations we're teaching, five tags and three motions, and we can hit over 1,200 looks. I'd rather them have to know those 11 things to get to 1,200 looks than trying to master hundreds of different plays."

Ted Schlafke played quarterback for Longo at Minnesota-Duluth and later coached under him at Southern Illinois. Today he's the offensive coordinator at South Dakota State.

"The most unique part of this offense is probably that they don't run a million different plays," Schlafke says. "They're going to run fewer plays at a more efficient level than anyone else. They're going to become more confident than anyone else in it."

Matt Baker, a Tar Heel quarterback in the John Bunting era of the mid-2000s and the 2005 starter, is one of dozens of former players who've visited spring practice the last month. He met Longo and the team's three quarterbacks—Cade Fortin, Jace Ruder and Sam Howell—and spent considerable time talking football.

"One of the themes seems to be, 'Simplify the offense,' and for the quarterback that makes it easy," Baker says. "There is less worry about checks and reads and when people bring pressures, sight-adjusts and blitzes. That's a lot of stuff on a quarterback, especially a college quarterback, not to mention that's a big curve for the wide receivers to learn. In this offense, everything is kind of built-in. Whatever the defense brings, there are options built into the play already."

Tight end Jake Bargas says the Tar Heels essentially learned the offense during "install meetings" during the winter and in the first couple of practices. From there they've added layers onto the basics as they work toward the spring game April 13.

"This offense is definitely simple, but there is so much you can do out of it," Bargas says. "You can learn it quickly, but we can do a thousand different things out of it. The formations and what we can do are endless. It's really impressive."

Longo cites great athletes who never found their niche because they were handcuffed by structure and coaching overkill. He believes in framework and organization—but to a point far less than most coaches.

"It's essential they play instinctively, and the less a player is thinking on the field, the faster he's going to be and the better he's going to be," Longo says. "The guys who have that pure athletic talent, go let them display it. Never restrict them and handcuff them mentally. I hate to see a kid confined by as many rules and checks and things to think about as you find so many places.

"If a player is playing instinctively, he owns that play. If he only has 28 of them, he should be playing instinctively and doing it without thinking or slowing down."

Robert Gillespie first learned the Air Raid coaching for Holgorsen at West Virginia from 2011-12. He worked the 2018 season under Larry Fedora and was retained by Brown and Longo to coach running backs.

"The more you think, the more you tie your feet up," Gillespie says. "This offense is simple enough you can learn it quickly and let your athletic ability take over."

Longo's version of the Air Raid has certainly chased, and found, acres and acres of green grass, most recently at Sam Houston State in the Southland Conference and then Ole Miss in the SEC. At SHS from 2014-16, Longo's offense shattered multiple school records, the 2016 team boasted the nation's No. 1 total offense at nearly 550 yards a game. Ole Miss was a top-20 attack in both 2017-18, and the '17 team was the nation's fastest-scoring team with an average of 99 seconds per scoring drive.

Over time, though, Longo and fellow Air Raid disciples like Lincoln Riley, the head coach at Oklahoma, have veered the philosophy away from its pass-happy roots to make it a more efficient running threat. Longo's offense at Sam Houston State rushed for just over 3,800 yards in 2014 and '15. And you have to be good on the ground to put up the kind of red-zone numbers the '17 Rebel offense did with a 95.3 percent conversion rate inside the 20 yard-line.

"There is a time and a place in the game where you have to be able to run the ball," Longo says. "We're always going to have that physical component in our offense. Always."

"The term 'Air Raid' makes you think you throw it every time, and you don't," Brown adds. "It offers a good balance, and you can do either. A lot of it is taking what's there."

Carolina has a quality running back corps this spring with seniors Antonio Williams and Jordon Brown, junior Michael Carter and sophomore Javonte Williams. All have shown flashes of big-play ability this spring in the new offense.

"There's a misunderstanding about Air Raid," Gillespie says. "It's all about numbers. You have to make a defense defend an entire field. The safeties aren't as worried about run-fits. They have to do a great job defending the entire field with RPOs, and that opens up a lot of running lanes. You take an extra defender out of the box, and the running back is running to space. A lot of the runs we've had so far have been big gains."

"One of the strengths on this team is our running back group, so why not run the ball and take advantage of that?" Carter adds. "That's how you win games. You establish the run and everything builds off that."

Longo's office on the fourth floor of Kenan Football Center speaks to the efficiency with which he runs an offense. There is hardly a playbook or notebook in sight, no extraneous clutter. And looming behind his desk across one wall is close-up photo of receiver Dazz Newsome running the football, his eyes sharply focused on the grass ahead. In super-size letters to the right are the words "Don't Blink."

"Don't blink—go to the next play," Longo said after practice one day last week. "We had a couple plays today, bad plays and couldn't get them out of our heads and let it affect the next play. It also speaks to our tempo. The play's over, get your eyes back, get the signal and let's roll again. We talk a lot about having thick skin, we need you to forget the last play. We're not going to sit there in a game and yell at you. Move on to the next one."

"You don't have time to blink," adds Carter. "We're going to go fast. If you make a mistake or blow an assignment, you can't blink and let it affect the next one."

Brown considers where offensive football was the first time he coached at Carolina in the 1990s—two backs, one tight end and two wideouts a majority of the time with a plan of blending power running, option and downfield passing.

And he remembers watching the Air Raid evolve over first decade of the 2000s as his Texas Longhorns faced Leach and Texas Tech every fall. The biggest play in Texas Tech history, in fact, was a four-verticals on the last play of the Tech-UT game in 2008, when QB Graham Harrell hit Michael Crabtree with the game-winning touchdown to upset the No. 1 ranked Longhorns. Texas defensive coordinator Will Muschamp dialed up a coverage to double-team Crabtree and had two defenders in the area, but inexplicably neither could make the stop and Crabtree scored a 28-yard touchdown.

"He threw to the wrong guy," Brown says ruefully. "But Crabtree was their best player, so in that sense he made the right throw. The Air Raid spreads the field better than anything I've seen. Then you pop a big run in the seam they've left open. Meanwhile, your big guys on defense are gassed because they're chasing the quarterback all day.

"I really like what I've seen with our offense—a lot of moving parts that make it difficult to defend."

Matt Baker considers what he saw on his visit to Chapel Hill and thinks the Longo version of the Air Raid would be quite a rush for a young quarterback.

"Don't think too much, play with your football instincts and let the player you've always been come out," he says. "Once you know your offense inside and out, you can play with reckless abandon and get the ball out confidently."

Brown says the coaches won't name a starting quarterback from their trio of two red-shirt freshmen and a true freshman until closer to the season-opener next August against South Carolina.

"It wouldn't be fair," he says. "These young guys have a lot to learn, and running this offense has to become instinctive. Working with the receivers on their own this summer will be very important."

There's that word again, instinctive. Place it alongside don't blink and chasing grass as maxims we'll hear frequently in the coming years around Tar Heel football. And as Phil Longo says of two-decades plus of taking Mike Leach's ideas and tweaking them with his own, "Let kids out of the gate."

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace has been covering Tar Heel football with his "Extra Points" column since 1990 and in 2016 published the definitive history of Kenan Stadium, "Football in a Forest." Follow him @LeePaceTweet and write him at leepace7@gmail.com

Players Mentioned

Jake Bargas

Jordon Brown

Michael Carter

Dazz Newsome

Jace Ruder

Antonio Williams

Javonte Williams

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