"The most entertaining book on football this decade." —Allen Barra, The Dallas Morning News “Excellent sports history . . . an inspiring reminder that great ideas don't automatically permeate the existing ideology. Sometimes a devoted few must pursue their principles with diligence, even if they don't get the glory.” —Publishers Weekly “It is undeniable that the Air Raid, the fast passing game, and the frequency of the forward pass are now imprinted on football, especially, as Gwynne notes, on the college level though also in the NFL. That makes his subtitle all the more fitting, for undeniably, the two coaches changed the game—and brought glory to their institutions. A superb treat for all gridiron fans.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Axa0rousing tale of innovation finding success in the face of the gale-force windsxa0of convention." — Booklist "The Perfect Pass is a perfect book about football—and the transformative power of innovation. S.C. Gwynne brings the same remarkable reporting and storytelling skills he used in Empire of the Summer Moon and Rebel Yell to reveal the dramatic history behind the passing revolution that disrupted and forever changed America’s favorite sport. His portrait of Hal Mumme, the unknown underdog coach who unleashed the Air Raid offense on the modern game, is superb, at once capturing the passion and genius that made him an unsung hero of his generation." —Brian D. Sweany, editor in chief, Texas Monthly "When we played against a Hal Mumme offense, our defense had to be changed dramatically. You had to throw away everything you knew or you were going to get beat. Every offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator in football better study this book to find out why." —Jerry Glanville, former NFL and college head coach “Being a football coach who innovates against the way the game has long been played is deeply challenging. S.C. Gwynne captures perfectly how Hal Mumme's Air Raid offense helped change the landscape of college football forever. It's a great story.” —Bruce Arians, head coach,xa0Arizona Cardinals "Hal Mumme has always been a true American genius, and every year teams running his offense are among the tops in yards and points. I know, because I would've liked to have hired him. He has a brilliant football mind, and here at last is his amazing story, told in full." — Bob Stoops, head coach, University of Oklahoma "If you are a coach, a manager, an entrepreneur, an executive, an MBA student, etc. looking for a real life example of thinking way outside the box and changing your industry or field completely, then The Perfect Pass is the book for you.xa0 Read it, digest it, and then apply it to your life’s work." — Texas History Page "The tale of Hal Mumme and how he changed American football is a David and Goliath story withxa0similarities to Michael Lewis's Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game , about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its number-crunching general manager, Billy Beane. That was a different sport and era, but both Beane and Mumme found themselves in underdog positions and used creative, out-of-the-box thinking to level the playing field." — Houston Press "Along with his protégé Mike Leach, now the head coach at Washington State University, Mr. Mumme revolutionized their sport in ways that, frankly, dwarf the legacy of Billy Beane and his gang from 'Moneyball.'" — The Wall Street Journal "Informative and entertaining and a must read for anyone interested in the inner game of football strategy....If you are a football coach, football fan or simply a guy who likes a good story, S.C. Gwynne scored a touchdown." —Tony DeMeo, American Football Monthly “Gwynne masterfully reports how this eccentric offensive genius, who became college football’s youngest offensive coordinator as a 29-year-old at UTEP and who espouses heretical notions such as no weightlifting and very short practices without hitting or wind sprints, followed his own path and put passing at the forefront to runaway success. His stamp is everywhere, even in the NFL.” — Austin American-Statesman S.C. Gwynnexa0is the author of Hymns of the Republic and the New York Times bestsellers Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He spent most of his career as a journalist, including stints with Time as bureau chief, national correspondent, and senior editor, and with Texas Monthly as executive editor. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife.
Features & Highlights
A
Kirkus Reviews
Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
In the tradition of Michael Lewis’s
Moneyball
, award-winning historian S.C. Gwynne tells the incredible story of how two unknown coaches revolutionized American football at every level, from high school to the NFL.Hal Mumme is one of a handful of authentic offensive geniuses in the history of American football.
The Perfect Pass
is the story of how he irreverently destroyed and re-created the game. Mumme spent fourteen mostly losing seasons coaching football before inventing a potent passing offense that would soon shock players, delight fans, and terrify opposing coaches. The revolution he fomented began at a tiny, overlooked college called Iowa Wesleyan, where Mumme was head coach and Mike Leach, a lawyer who had never played college football, was hired as his offensive line coach. In the cornfields of Iowa, while scribbling plays on paper napkins, these two mad inventors, drawn together by a shared disregard for conventionalism and a love for Jimmy Buffett, began to engineer the purest, most extreme passing game in the 145-year history of football. Implementing their “Air Raid” offense, their teams—at Iowa Wesleyan and later at Valdosta State and the University of Kentucky—played blazingly fast—faster than any team ever had before, and they routinely beat teams with far more talented athletes. And Mumme and Leach did it all without even a playbook. Their quarterback once completed sixty-one of eighty-six passes, both collegiate records. In
The Perfect Pass
, S.C. Gwynne explores Mumme’s leading role in changing football from a run-dominated sport to a pass-dominated one, the game that tens of millions of Americans now watch every fall weekend. Whether you’re a casual or ravenous football fan, this is a truly compelling story of American ingenuity and how a set of revolutionary ideas made their way from the margins into the hot center of the game we celebrate today.
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Most Helpful Reviews
★★★★★
4.0
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Coach
It may as well have been called "portrait of the artist as a young coach," because that's what Hal Mumme is: an artist whose medium is football. His likes to win, but more than winning, he is a man who once had a vision of football transforming football from a brutal scrum and into a passionate display of arial perfection and commitment and, after years of toil and study, he achieved his vision. Along the way he and his teams bucked orthodoxies at every turn, sometimes apparently just for the sake of being different, and also broke nearly every passing record possible, and revolutionized the game even while he was exiled from the big time himself.
More than just the story of Mumme, though, Gwynne delves deep into the history of the forward pass in football, from its legalization (and disdain) in the early 20th century and its evolution through famous figures like Bill Walsh, LaVell Edwards, and Mouse Davis to more obscure names like Jack Neumeier, Red Faught, and Dutch Meyer. He traces the evolution and slow uptick in passing throughout the decades, even as the pioneers who aired it faced constant skepticism from purists who thought their approach wasn't merely unsound strategy, but also faintly immoral.
We see the young Mumme giving up a lucrative sales job as a young man to embark on his personal odyssey in coaching, paying his dues through a string of hard-won but precarious jobs that paid next to nothing, as he met and studied the works of those masters who'd came before. All of it to pursue a vision that began as both a passion and a vague notion: to throw the football and throw it more often and better than anyone had ever done before. This book tells the story of Mumme toiling in obscurity, constantly studying and criss-crossing the country to learn and refine his system, putting in the time in the woodshed like all great artists do.
This is a good read for anyone interested in studying the history of the passing game. Gwynne's style is crisp and a fun read, but don't expect a lot of memorable turns of phrase here. Some of the history that Gwynne cites in regards to Mumme also seems to be fudged a bit, and with little knowledge of his subject before he began writing this book, Gwynne seems to heap a bit too much praise and credit onto Mumme, delving into constant hyperbole while glossing over the man's faults and failings (which would make him a more interesting subject of a biography) and ending, oddly, on Mumme's high point as a coach: his first Kentucky team's 1997 upset of Alabama (which was in the middle of one of its worst seasons in years, it turns out, but Gwynne doesn't tell you that, either) that came in the midst of a 5-7 season.
That's odd because the next 19 years of Mumme's career, which was a spectacular fall from grade that is probably a compelling book in its own right, gets glossed over in a brief epilogue at the end, such as when he says that Kentucky team in 2001 had lost a lot of talent the year before (justifying the 2-9 record), but he fails to mention that Mumme brought much of that on himself by running off players and, inexplicably, benching his returning All SEC QB Dustin Bonner in favor of 300lb freshman interception machine Jared Lorenzen. Hal Mumme is a brilliant, fascinating, transformative figure in football history whose career has been tragically defined by his own hubris and apparent inability to get out of his own way, but Gwynne doesn't even touch upon that angle here, leaving this book a shell of what it could have been.
Gwynne also fails to delve into the reasons why the Air Raid offense, which has traditionally had a pretty mediocre record in terms of winning percentage, continued to spread and grow ever more popular even as Mumme's star fell further and further. The lack of any mention of Tony Franklin, an assistant coach who was a big part of Mumme's downfall at Kentucky and later popularized the offense by packaging and selling it to high school and college coaches eager to learn "the system" also seems like a glaring omission.
Still, if you want to learn how the passing game evolved into the wide open offenses we see everywhere today or come to a better understanding of how art and football intersect, you will definitely want to read this book.
16 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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Superb education in how we have the football we have today
Everything is here if you want to understand modern football
How the pass evolved; what specific structures (run and shoot, etc.) evolved to exploit the pass; what defenses did to try and counter the pass; what has to happen in order for a team to actually run the so-called "hurry up" offense for an entire game; what kind of talent is needed to actually get it done. Modern football is, indeed, pass-dependent, and Gwynne explains how Mumme synthesized all the various various approaches (at BYU, San Diego, etc.) to create the Air Raid along with Mike Leach. The strategic benefit of the Mumme plan was that it could be executed with marginally-talented players (as if these execute perfectly, they beat the defense)..The fatal flaw in the Mumme plan was that it wasn't comprehensive -- Mumme cared little for defense whatsoever, and his teams could get slaughtered by the other side just running conventional football. Yes, Gwynne explains how the modern game arose and appropriately puts Mumme at the center of it. Mumme never became a lasting "great" coach -- as a head coach -- because he couldn't get defense to work. This obscures the record and make others criticise his value to the game. His value to game is what Gwynne tells you it is -- modern offense.
Finally, any coach who can contrive to beat Alabama is a great coach. Ask anyone.
3 people found this helpful
★★★★★
4.0
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Gwynne studies the rise of one man's vision of how football should be played
THE PERFECT PASS by SC Gwynne is the story of a man, Hal Mumme, with a vision of how football should be played, not how football was stuck in the "if it works, don't change it" approach. Gwynne chronicles Hal's rise from a tiny school where his radical ideas are forming, all the way to his short stay in Division 1-A football at University of Kentucky.
Hal Mumme's theory of pass first, pass a lot, and then pass some more was a hard concept for the sports world to understand at first. Gwynne does a good job of explaining that Mumme's vision, coupled with the near constant job he had of taking a nothing and/or a joke football program and turning them around. Along the way, Gwynne diagrams and educates the reader on Mumme's theories while not making it overwhelming or complicated. Gwynne also made clear that while the new way Mumme coaches football is different and rather successful and changed football on all levels, that is still was always getting tweaks and always could get better. The name of the book, THE PERFECT PASS, really is what Mumme and all of football was and is trying to achieve, but while Mumme got close, I felt like this book indicated that perhaps that isn't possible.
Any football fan would enjoy this book. It's well balanced between education on process and the narrative on Mumme and it was a pleasure to read.
Thank you to Scribner, S.C. Gwynne, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for a honest review!
3 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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Great football read
I give out very few 5 stars to books, but that's what I'm giving here. This was simply a great read. If you're old enough to have followed football for a few decades, you know the passing game has somehow grown from an afterthought to the dominant mode of play, making football more exciting than ever (and if you don't believe me about the exciting part, just watch some 1960s college game on ESPN Classic and prepare for a nice snooze). I recall in the 1990s arguing that the passing game was really taking off and a friend actually argued against me. Well I was right but I wish I had known then all the details I know now, having read this book. It tells a lot of the story about how that happened and the personalities driving the change. And it might just make you want to run to the nearest Division III stadium to see what's up at the scrappiest level of play.
2 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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The unlikely prophet...
Hal Mumme is an American Original. And leave it to S.C. to chronicle his story as only S.C. can. This book is nothing short of incredible. What Hal and Mike Leach did in an Iowa cornfield is college football's version of what Ben Franklin did with electricity or Albert Einstein did with time and space. It literally changed the whole sport as we knew it. As a sports journalist who got to cover Hal his entire career, there is one thing that always stood out to me. It wasn't how he engineered a West Texas State offense to upset Jimmy Johnson and Oklahoma State. It wasn't how he engineered a UTEP offense to defeat a BYU team thought to be untouchable. It wasn't leading Kentucky to a stunning upset of Alabama. It was the SEC pre-season press meetings in Birmingham. Coaches like Gene Stallings or Steve Spurrier or Phil Fulmer used to show up in $1,500 tailor-made three piece suits. Hal would show up in a $45 polo shirt and clearly wasn't on hand to try to disingenuously impress anyone. That's who he was and he wasn't going to go out of his way to try to be something else. He has to be the most unpretentious person I ever covered. His story needed to be told, and I thank S.C. for having the intuition to do it.
2 people found this helpful
★★★★★
1.0
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Football's Dark Ages
Certainly did work well for Mike Leach and TT, but the Big 12 isn't doing so hot, is it? Besides, that stuff's not football any more than flag is. I miss the runners, the Wishbone, and Woody's "3-yards and a cloud of dust." Today's football might just as well be pinball, and Leach and his buddy the pinball wizards. But whatever it is, it ain't football.
The one star rating is for both the book and the concept.
1 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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Exciting insights into coaching techniques and a very readable account.
S.C. Gwynne. The most powerful writer producing today. His Empire of the Southern Moon was an amazing description and full appreciation for the Commanche culture. Here in the Perfect Pass, Mr. Gwynne candidly explains and traces The Perfect Pass. Thrilling revelations in every chapter. I can't wait for his next book.
1 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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The development of the Air Raid offense in college football....
I'll keep it short...if you love college football and the passing game this book is a MUST READ! Not only does it trace how the passing game has developed over the years but it credits a little known coach, Hal Mumme, with developing the latest variation of the offense, the air raid attack, which enables quarterback to put up some astounding numbers. You'll understand the offense better after reading this book and be amazed at how it has
transformed the game. Mumme is an interesting guy too!
1 people found this helpful
★★★★★
4.0
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A long-gainer
Football fans probably have noticed a trend in their favorite game during the past several years: some teams are throwing the ball constantly.
Quarterbacks have smashed records for completions and yardage on all levels of the game. The days when a coach worships the concepts of time of possession and establishing the run are dying. Offenses love to cram as many plays as possible into four quarters. It's no wonder college games can last over four hours.
Every once in a while, it's important to ask "How did we get here?" about such transformational developments in any part of life. That's essentially what S.C. Gwynne has done in his book "The Perfect Pass." He has discovered the key to this underreported story, and it's more charming than you'd think.
We like our geniuses to be a little eccentric at times, and that certainly describes Hal Mumme. He loved football, loved to play it in high school and college, and loved to think about it the rest of the time. Mumme worked his way up the coaching ladder when he finished his playing career, becoming an offensive coordinator in Texas El Paso.
That's where he got fired in 1986. So Mumme started over, at Copperas Cove High School in Texas, and tried to do it all over again. But this time, he was going to do it his way - by throwing the football around. And throwing it some more.
Mumme had seen other teams emphasize passing, such as Brigham Young University and Bill Walsh's San Francisco 49ers. The high school coach took some ideas from both places, and added a few wrinkles of his own. Suddenly, Copperas Cove - a traditional doormat - was competitive for the first time in years despite playing bigger schools with better athletes.
That eventually led to a stop at Iowa Wesleyan College of Mount Pleasant, Iowa. If it wasn't the worst football program in America at that point, it was close to it. Mumme took the head coaching job and found a kindred spirit in Mike Leach, who had a number of interests headed by coaching football. Mumme recruited a bunch of players who generally weren't wanted elsewhere, stopped ordering stretching and sprints during practices, and installed his offensive system. Again, Mumme's team won more games than they had any right to win.
Eventually, Iowa Wesleyan got tired of Mumme and his ambition for a bigger and better program, and the coach was told to be on his way. The road led to Valdosta State, where his offense put up astounding passing numbers and his teams could stay with almost any opponent. He stayed five years, and then moved up to Kentucky - a traditional bottom-feeder in the Southeastern Conference. But after some reasonable success, Mumme had a bad season partly due to graduation losses in 2000, and the athletic director who hired him retired. Some recruiting violations by staff members led to Mumme's firing in 2001. He's had other stops at small colleges since then, and went on to coach at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi.
Author S.C. Gwynne obviously has plenty of writing talent, having been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He sticks to people and their personalities here for the most part, which is an excellent idea. There are some X's and O's along the way, which may intimidate a few but are probably necessary to tell the story adequately. Besides, most people who pick up a book like this in the first place will handle the technical matters smoothly. The pages go by very quickly, a good sign.
Mumme always has carried a conviction that football should be simple and fun, resembling a touch football game in the backyard. According to Gwynne, it sounds like Mumme's professional problems usually have popped up when he's dealt with others who think more conventionally - on and off the field. Mumme is much more at home with a blackboard or paper, charting the next play.
Football offenses always have tried to get one step of defenses, only to be reeled in eventually. We'll have to see if Mumme's work continues to catch on in the years to come. In the meantime, "The Perfect Pass" is an excellent way to find out where this latest wave of strategy came from, and where the sport might be going.
★★★★★
5.0
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Great seller!
Great price and in very good condition. Received the book quickly and have been very pleased with my purchase
