HAL MUMME, THE not-quite-forgotten genius of college football's modern era, wants to show me the spot where William Travis died defending the north wall of the Alamo in 1836.
"I'm going to give you the nickel tour," Mumme says, grinning like he's granted me membership into his private club. Here, he shows me, is the spot where Davy Crockett might have -- depending on which historian you read -- killed 16 enemy soldiers before finally being struck down with a knife in one hand, rifle in the other. Over here, in the center of the mission, he reflects on the courage it took for Travis to vow, in a letter asking for reinforcements, that he and his men would fight until "victory or death."
It's just about 9 a.m. on a humid summer day in San Antonio, and Mumme, the head coach of tiny Belhaven University football in Jackson, Mississippi, is hosting a coaching clinic just up the street at the Menger Hotel. Curious football minds have come from all across the region to scribble down his secrets. In the insular world of college football, Mumme is the Yoda of the air raid passing attack. For $75, this 62-year-old Jimmy Buffett obsessive and prostate cancer survivor will give an off-the-cuff speech, tell a few stories and most definitely help you put points on the board.
Who is the best college football coach of the past two decades? It's clearly Alabama's Nick Saban -- defensive guru, deadpan disciplinarian and, oh, by the way, winner of four BCS championships. But the most influential coach of the past 20 years? That'd be Hal Mumme. He wasn't the only one to drag college football out of its ground-and-pound dark ages. But as Kentucky's coach in the late 1990s, he is the one who brought video game offenses to the SEC, the game's motherland. And it was there that football changed forever. If Cam Newton or Johnny Manziel ever did something that made you jump off your couch, you have Mumme to thank. "Hal was really one of the trailblazers for throwing the ball," says Art Briles, whose Baylor team led the FBS in offense last year. "Without question, Hal was instrumental in the game being what it is today."
It's hard to capture just how dramatically offenses have changed in the 38 years since Mumme began coaching at Foy H. Moody High School in Corpus Christi, Texas. But consider this fact: In NCAA history, there have been 79 times a quarterback has thrown for at least 4,000 yards in a season; 65 of them have come since 2000. Mumme-influenced offenses are so pervasive, in fact, that Auburn defensive coordinator Ellis Johnson says, "It's to the point now where the three or four teams we play a year that line up in two tight ends and a fullback are harder to prepare for. That sometimes confuses players now more than the spread does, because most teams have three and four wideouts just like we do."
All of this raises a rather obvious question: Why the heck did a godfather of modern college football coaching, a man with a career record of 137-118-1 through Week 2, just take a gig at an NAIA school that went 3-8 last year and plays its home games in a high school stadium? The answer doesn't seem to matter much to Mumme. He just wants to show me the Alamo -- his sacred ground.
Mumme grew up in San Antonio, and he says that knowing his reverence of this place is the best way to understand him. At least, that is, before I see him drawing up pass plays on an overhead projector in a dimly lit hotel ballroom. "Every team I've ever had, I've brought them here," Mumme says to me. "I'd tell the players, 'Put yourself in these guys' place. They didn't have to stay. They could have easily run. But they vowed to be the tip of the sword.'"
Few speeches in sports are more tone-deaf than those that compare football to combat. But Mumme is well aware of the dissonance. In his mind, bringing his players to the birthplace of Texas isn't about hyping them into believing they're fighting for a greater cause. It's a lesson in perspective. To know the history of the Alamo is to know how silly it is to treat football like a matter of life and death.
"How many football coaches have you heard say, 'This is war! This is hard work!'" Mumme says. "Guess what. Football isn't work. I've never worked a day in my life. This isn't rocket science! This isn't cancer! It's fun! And when I die, I want that on my tombstone: 'Hal Mumme: His players had fun.'"
So that's what Mumme is doing serving as his own AD at a school viewed as a hell on earth from the heights of the glittering football programs he helped bring to life: having fun.
"The coaches who think Belhaven is beneath them? They're idiots," Mumme says. "I just feel sorry for them because this is like the best deal in the world. Small colleges are a lot better than big-time football. The kids are getting educated, which you can't say at a lot of places, and they're having fun. How do you beat that?"
LIKE COUNTLESS TEXAS boys before and since, Mumme grew up enamored with football in the Lone Star State. In 1979, after an uneventful college career at Tarleton State and three years as an assistant coach at Moody High School, he interviewed for his first head-coaching job at Aransas Pass High. While Texas football coaches were donning fedoras and ties to look like Tom Landry and Bear Bryant, Mumme exuded a different kind of swagger. "I put on my best leisure suit, which was baby blue," Mumme says. "Hell, it was the '70s."
He wasn't the most experienced candidate. He didn't have a prepared speech or even a playbook. But he did have the ability to sell himself as an agent of change. He told Aransas and every team that would interview him that he had no use for three yards and a cloud of dust. His team was going to be fun to watch. It would throw the ball all over the field and get off plays as fast as possible. "Football coaches as a whole tend to be ultraconservative people," Mumme says. "I couldn't live like that. Some people are artists and some people are mechanics. I always wanted to be more on the side of the artists."
After just a year, Mumme left Aransas Pass to be a passing coach at West Texas State. By 1982, he had climbed another rung up the coaching ladder when he joined UTEP as offensive coordinator at the age of just 29. It was there that the artist found his canvas. The downside was that coach Bill Yung's teams were so short on talent that UTEP won just seven games in the four years Mumme was there. The upside was that UTEP was in the Western Athletic Conference with Brigham Young and had access to the Cougars' game films. "They were splitting three and four wide receivers out on every play," Mumme says. "I didn't know what LaVell Edwards was doing, but I knew I wanted to do that."
Mumme still isn't sure why Edwards' innovative, spread-the-field attack didn't prove more influential at the time. Maybe other coaches assumed BYU's system was too hard to teach, or that it succeeded only because the Cougars were using older, more mature kids back from Mormon missions, Mumme says.
In any event, when the entire UTEP staff was fired in 1985, Mumme decided to head back to the high school ranks, convinced it was where he'd finally have the freedom to build on what he'd learned watching BYU. He got a head-coaching job at Copperas Cove (Texas) High, a school that would one day produce a Heisman-winning quarterback named Robert Griffin III. But back in 1985, Copperas Cove had won only 10 games total in the six seasons before Mumme's arrival. Of the five kids who he estimated were the best athletes in the school, zero played football. When Mumme asked them why, they told him football wasn't fun.
"Some people are artists and some are mechanics. I wanted to be on the side of the artists."
- Hal Mumme
"We were losing kids," Mumme says. "A few of us realized that if you don't do something entertaining, the kids are going to play basketball or soccer. Not everybody had to change, but some of us sure did."
He broke out his BYU film and promised the kids at Copperas Cove that "we were going to take what LaVell was doing and put it on steroids." First he put his best athletes at quarterback and wide receiver. Then he drastically widened the splits of his offensive line -- a radical idea at the time. Practices were short. No Oklahoma drills, ever. And he might call the same play (one of only three the team would learn) 50 times in a row, mixing up only the formations. He believed artistry would emerge naturally from the simplicity, not the complexity, of his playbook. "There are a ton of great ideas," Mumme says. "And as a coach, you spend all your time thinking about them. But kids? They're thinking about three things, and I promise you none of them are football."
It worked. His first season, the team became an offensive juggernaut and knocked off two of central Texas' powerhouse football programs, Killeen Ellison and Austin Westlake.
September 19, 2014
