This article is therefore less about the blood and tissue of the Air Raid’s story - the personal stories of the men like Mumme and Leach who shaped the offense, though there is some of that too - but is instead about its bones: the history and evolution of the actual formations, plays, concepts, and gameplans that made up what you saw on some random Saturday a decade ago and make up what you will see on Saturdays this fall. And thus the principles underlying the Air Raid exist externally from the many coaches who have taught it: a diligent, many-reps approach to practice a pass-first and spread the wealth philosophy and, above all else, a willingness to live in the extremes, to do things just a bit differently, to be willing, in a game where conformity is king, to be just a little bit weird.
The wishbone and the Wing-T were playbooks, Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense a meticulous method of gameplanning, but the Air Raid is something more akin to an idea, or at least several related ones: that to get an advantage in modern football you need to be particularly good at something, and to be good at something you have to commit to that something, and if you’re going to commit to something it might as well be different. The offense, however, remains, both shaped by these coaches and their players and somehow shaping each of them in the process. Indeed, the coaches who’ve taught and learned the Air Raid have changed, the players and formations have changed, and even the plays themselves have changed. To paraphrase Holmes, a playbook is but a crystal, transparent and unchanged it cannot express the pressures and influences leading to its existing or give any indication as how it will continue to be shaped and reshaped over time.
But the Air Raid’s evolution over time has been even more fascinating than the playbook at any one moment.