Bob Stoops has hired Hal Mumme, architect of the Air Raid offense, to be his first offensive coordinator of the Dallas XFL team.
Mumme’s pass-happy offense, which he developed at a high school in Copperas Cove, Texas, has spread across football, most famously practiced by Mike Leach at Washington State and Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma, which produced the past two Heisman Trophy winners and No. 1 overall NFL draft picks, Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray.
Mumme, 67, and Leach worked together at Iowa Wesleyan, Valdosta State and finally at Kentucky, where, in 1997 under Mumme, the Wildcats beat Alabama for the first time in 74 years.
Stoops was an early adopter of the Air Raid philosophy. In 1999, in his first season at Oklahoma, he hired Leach to be his offensive coordinator, helping to quickly turn around the Sooners. Leach became the head coach at Texas Tech following the season, but Stoops and the Sooners won a national championship in 2000 using the same offense.
The mercurial Mumme, meanwhile, has toiled in the lower levels of college football after resigning amid NCAA violations by his recruiting coordinator at Kentucky in 2001. He was a head coach at Southeastern Louisiana, New Mexico State, McMurry (in Abilene, Texas) and Belhaven (in Jackson, Mississippi). He resigned after three games as offensive coordinator at Jackson State in Mississippi in 2018 and split from the Alliance of American Football’s Memphis Express under Mike Singletary after less than two weeks as offensive coordinator last November. He was 142-152-1 as a head coach in 26 years as a head coach.
Stoops returned Oklahoma to the Air Raid in 2015, hiring Riley, who played for Leach at Texas Tech and who quickly revitalized the Sooners’ offense before becoming head coach upon Stoops’ retirement.
At the time, he reinforced his belief in the offense and credited Mumme.
“I believe in the principles and the disciplines of [the Air Raid], and I’ve seen it have success consistently, not just last year but on and on and on. I wanted to get back to it, and Lincoln is a guy that has great experience in it,” Stoops said at a 2015 news conference. “He came up with one of the guys, Mike Leach, that I believe in and is one of the founders of it with Hal Mumme at Kentucky, which is where it really began.”