This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Dana Holgorsen once was so unimpressed with his hometown college's football program that he turned down a chance to leave his high school class and meet Iowa Wesleyan's new coach.
"Not because I liked English," he clarified Monday.
Holgorsen just was eager to depart tiny Mount Pleasant, Iowa — and he did so, enrolling at St. Ambrose University. Yet the story of how Holgorsen's West Virginia team will use key elements of BYU's historic passing game against the Cougars in Saturday's game began a year later, when he transferred home to Iowa Wesleyan as a receiver in the scheme implemented by Hal Mumme and Mike Leach in the NAIA program in the early 1990s.
"We still to this day have some stuff in our playbook that goes back to the BYU days," Holgorsen said. "Those principles … we took 'em and stole 'em and use 'em to this day."
Ty Detmer was quarterbacking the Cougars in those days. A quarter-century later, he's now a first-year offensive coordinator in Provo, where BYU ranks 105th in total offense and averages 17 points — with the disclaimer of having played three Power 5 opponents.
Mumme, 64, was a high school coach in Texas when he first visited BYU. He kept coming back year after year, while coaching at Iowa Wesleyan and Valdosta (Ga.) State, where Holgorsen joined him and Leach to launch his coaching career. LaVell Edwards and his coaching staff gave Mumme extensive research opportunities because he "posed no threat to them," author S.C. Gwynne writes in a new book.
"The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football" recognizes Mumme, who now coaches at a small school in Mississippi, as the developer of the Air Raid offense (Leach is credited with the nickname). The blend of the BYU, Run-and-Shoot and West Coast schemes is being used in every conference of college football. West Virginia, Oklahoma, TCU, California and Washington State, where Leach coaches, are among the foremost practitioners. And it all stemmed from Mumme's learning in Provo that a commitment to the passing game was just as important as the scheme itself.
"To play like BYU, you had to fully dedicate yourself to the pass, to being better at it than anyone else," Gwynne writes. "The secret to BYU's passing offense, Hal realized, lay in simple execution. … Hal also loved the Cougars' arrogance, the belief among the players that they could not be stopped."
The Detmer-coordinated offense is not unstoppable, hardly functioning like the Detmer-quarterbacked offense of the old days. Even so, the passing philosophy that Mumme and Leach embraced is working nicely elsewhere — including West Virginia, under Holgorsen.
In a 2012 Salt Lake Tribune interview, Mumme said he hired Leach at Iowa Wesleyan "because he had BYU on his resume" as a graduate of the school, although didn't play college football. Holgorsen later would work with Leach for eight seasons at Texas Tech, then enjoy offensive success at Houston and Oklahoma State before joining the Mountaineers.
Mumme's career arc is a story in itself. Amid his offensive exploits at Kentucky in the Southeastern Conference, he was derailed by NCAA sanctions attributed mainly to the illegal recruiting tactics of assistant Claude Bassett — a former BYU defensive coach who had become friends with Mumme.
Since then, Mumme has coached at various schools and now works at Belhaven University, an NCAA Division III school in Jackson, Miss. But his influence is evident at big programs around the country, all because he kept coming to Provo every spring. While searching for offensive solutions of their own this week, the Cougars will have to face a scheme of BYU's own creation.
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