Son of the air raid — How Matt Mumme has taken his father's infamous offense and made it his own

FORT COLLINS — The man tasked with helping manage the offensive side of things for Colorado State football is not your average coordinator. 

Matt Mumme, CSU’s associate head coach/quarterbacks coach, was hired to be Jay Norvell’s right hand man and co-pilot in bringing Nevada’s explosive approach to Canvas Stadium. 

The son of Hal Mumme, the founder of the air raid offense, Matt Mumme essentially grew up with the principles of the aggressive passing attack. He said on Thursday that he has been running the concepts since he was in the fourth grade. It’s really all he’s ever known. And that’s why when he originally interviewed to join Norvell’s staff at UNR, Mumme was honest about what he’s most qualified to do, run the air raid. 

“My dad started this offense in the early 80s,” Mumme said. “You know, a lot of our concepts come from what Lavelle Edwards and those guys did at BYU for a long time. “My dad always says, hey, you know, I didn’t create all this, I just packaged it like I did. And that’s where the air raid came into effect. A lot of this stuff was West Coast concepts, that we just shrunk the verbiage down and put it into a simplistic system and went out and played fast.”

He joked that while he respects the triple-option offense that Air Force runs, it’s not something that he would be able to coordinate as a coach. It’s not a system Mumme would have wanted to play in either.

“I never really understood why, as a quarterback, you want to take one step back and run down the line of scrimmage at the defensive end, make him really mad and then pitch it,” Mumme said. “I get it and my hat’s off to Air Force and what they do. Those guys are really good at what they do and they’re tough to play. But as a quarterback that’s just not what I wanted to do.”

Mumme was once called the “the world’s first air raid quarterback” by Theo Lawson of the Spokesman Review. When his father, Hal, was coaching at Valdosta State from 1992-96, Matt was a star quarterback for Valdosta High School in Georgia at the same time. He then was a quarterback at the University of Kentucky from 1997-99, where he played for his father and then-QB coach Mike Leach. 

Leach, along with Hal Mumme, is credited with helping develop the offense at the collegiate level at Iowa Wesleyan and Valdosta State in the late 80s/early 90s. They then took it to the next level with the Wildcats in the SEC at the end of the century, before Leach ultimately popularized the offense at Texas Tech and Washington State as a head coach in the 2000s. Leach had the following to say of Matt Mumme becoming a successful coach like his father back in 2017: 

“He was always around the office, always watching a lot of film. Hal always watched a ton of film, so you know that Matt didn’t have any choice on the subject. As a kid, if Hal was watching film at the house, he’s going to drag Matt in and make him watch it. You know, ‘Hey Matt, what do you think of this, what do you think of that?’ Matt says, ‘Hey, I think I want to go to bed,’ and Hal says, ‘Well too bad, we’re going to go ahead and talk about this stick route, so what do you think we do it like this and motion to this?’”

Matt Mumme’s first couple of coaching gigs were all with father, starting with Southeastern Louisiana (2003-04), continuing at New Mexico State (2005-08) and then McMurry (2009-10). It was at NMSU in the WAC where he first started to get a good look at the infamous pistol offense that has been synonymous with the University of Nevada since the days of Chris Ault. 

“It was ironic… we had to go up against coach Ault and we hated it,” Mumme said. “We hated hearing about the pistol offense probably as much as they hated hearing about the air raid. Years later, after I separated from my father, I found the advantage of using the pistol in our offense.”

While serving as the head coach at LaGrange College from 2013-16, Mumme ran the air raid out of the pistol formation and “fell in love with it” in the process. So when Norvell brought him over to Nevada, a place that had always run the pistol offense, it was pretty much a match made in heaven. 

“It’s like a dream come true,” Mumme said. “I’ve learned the air raid from my dad, now I get to go learn the pistol from the guy, coach Ault. So Jay and I kind of sat down and said, okay, how do we really marry this thing up and make it what we want it to be?”

Originally called the ‘pack attack’, the benefit according to Mumme, was that it really improved the downhill running game without losing anything from the passing offense. And that’s why they will continue to run the system at CSU. 

Although we haven’t been around Matt Mumme much yet, Thursday was the first time the media had a chance to pick his brain — based on his resume and the way that he’s previously operated — Ram Nation should be intrigued by his willingness to adapt and evolve. Considering his background, it really wouldn’t be that surprising if Mumme walked around with a sense of arrogance. After all, his dad literally invented this offense. If you look across the landscape of college football as a whole, though, there are a lot of different coaches and styles that establish success. The common link amongst all of the best coaches is flexibility. When guys like Nick Saban are willing to evolve their style it should be a glarding indicator that all coaches should be trying to do the same. And it seems like Mumme really understands the importance of that. 

Whether it’s the schemes that the offense is running or the roles that the coaches are having the players fill individually, Mumme said one of the things that he feels he and Norvell have done well is taking the players they recruit and then catering to their skills to make them successful. When Ty Gangi was starting at QB for the Wolf Pack at the beginning of their Nevada tenure, Mumme and Norvell ran the ‘pack attack’ and stretched the field vertically as they always do, but they also leaned on Gangi’s dual-threat abilities. In his three seasons as a starter Gangi rushed for 543 yards and 10 touchdowns in addition to his 7,378 passing yards and 56 passing touchdowns. Carson Strong, however, was better suited to stay in the pocket and pick apart defenses with his accuracy. So that’s obviously what the coaches leaned on with their play calling. Mumme wants to be similarly flexible at CSU and find ways to maximize the skills of his players. 

“We’ll look at David Bailey (RB), we’ll look at A’Jon Vivens (RB) and those guys, and we’ll see how they fit in,” Mumme said. “And let’s see how we can put them in a position to be successful.”

One of the changes that CSU fans expect next season is wide receiver Dante Wright playing more in the slot than he did under ‘Daz’. 

“He’s a guy that has experience, so that’s huge,” Mumme said. “And you can build off experience. Put him out in the slot and let him move around and try and put him in positions to be successful is what our job is, you know, and I think he’ll take to it. The thing that I’ve loved so far being here is, these guys have been energetic. They’ve been coming in, pounding on the doors and saying, coach, when can we start learning? When can you start teaching the offense? So it’s always easier when you’ve got guys doing that.”

When it comes to the quarterback situation at CSU, Mumme is eager to begin working with the guys in his room. It took Mumme and Norvell three years to get the QB room right at Nevada, but they’ll be starting in a better spot at CSU with Clay Millen transferring over from the Wolf Pack and a couple of highly touted prep prospects signing with the Green & Gold. Mumme recently spoke with Millen, Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi, Jackson Stratton and the few quarterbacks that remained from the Addazio era, and he layed out where the direction of the offense is going to go. 

What’s really important, according to Mumme, is that all of the quarterbacks on the roster are competing hard but still there for each other as teammates. In 2021 they had seven quarterbacks at UNR, all of which were different, but Mumme said they all pulled for each other. That’s what he wants at CSU as well. Nobody is going to be handed a thing, so the expectation is for everyone to work their tail off. At the end of the day, though, the love needs to be present for it to be a winning atmosphere. 

Things are changing quickly in Fort Collins. A new era of Rams football is here, one defined by explosive plays and electric offense. The process won’t happen overnight, Mumme said himself that while the offense is predicated on fundamentals and repetition, the implementation will take some getting used to. The benefit that CSU has is that the entire offense can be installed in 15 days, or spring ball. And the Rams will also be able to rely on some of the Nevada transfers to help serve as extra instructors as the players learn. 

“My dad built that in the 80s, based off of spring practice, which is 15 practices. So you do the math, you get to go through the rotation five times, you know, and that’s a big deal for young guys, when they’re getting those reps. They’re gonna get pretty successful at it pretty quick.”

It might not be perfect from the start, after watching the Wolf Pack hang 52 on CSU in the 2021 season finale, though, Ram Nation should breathe a little easier with Norvell, Mumme and Co. now on our sidelines. Mumme reflected a little bit on that and how surreal it was to go out and beat CSU, then turn around an accept a job there a few weeks later.

“I’m just so excited to get to work,” Mumme said. “I’m very blessed with the opportunity.”

Ram fans will get their first taste of the air raid when CSU travels to Michigan to open up the 2022 season. The Wolverines were one of the best defenses in the country last fall, so the matchup should be intriguing with CSU’s hopefully-explosive offense coming to town. I, for one, cannot wait.