Friday, October 5, 2012

College Football's Most Powerful Weapon

College Football's Most Powerful Weapon, There really isn't anything in the game to compare with this man running the "Air Raid" offense. Geno Smith becomes Air Raid's greatest disciple – and college football's most powerful weapon, Twenty years ago, Dana Holgorsen was an underwhelming wide receiver at an undersized school (Iowa Wesleyan), playing for a man with an oversized imagination.

That man was Hal Mumme, the unlikely progenitor of an offensive style that has outgrown its inventor and become the most powerful weapon in college football. The offense is the Air Raid, built on the BYU notion that throwing the ball all over the yard can equalize a talent deficit. Like most revolutionaries, Mumme started small: He nurtured his project amid the tumbleweeds of Texas on the high-school level, then got his break in college coaching at Iowa Wesleyan in the late 1980s. That's where Holgorsen came under his wing.

An unabashed contrarian and certified know-it-all, Mumme would ultimately ride his offensive scheme to the Southeastern Conference, where he made perennial punching bag Kentucky respectable. Then it would all crash down amid an NCAA scandal that helped return him to the small-school level from which he came. But his colorful colony of True Believers would continue to spread the word and the style, tweaking it along the way, with the scoreboard rewarding their faith in a counter-culture approach.

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