David Hunter
Mike Leach is one of the proponents of the Air Raid Offense and this season has been a significant culture shock to the way the play on the field is being presented. Many times in year’s past it has been not altogether uncommon and even accepted that a triple option style offense will run the ball upwards of 85% of their snaps with a couple handful of passing attempts over the course of a game. On the flip side, even with the extremism of the Air Raid and Run and Shoot offenses, there has been a general acknowledgement that they still need to run the football to keep defenses honest in defending both phases of the game.
Mike Leach is currently performing a scientific experiment on the field with the Washington Cougars in the early portion of the 2014 college football season, something that has been unprecedented in collegiate football even with the rise of passing offenses and increased fine tuning to allow quarterbacks easier completions and to make smarter decisions by reading the opposing defense.
Quarterback Connor Halliday has been quoted as saying that Leach always sends in a pass play and that he changes 40-45% of plays. Washington State has thrown the ball 371 times and ran the ball just 122 times. That gives Washington State a pass:run ratio of 3:1 with the Cougars throwing the ball almost 75% of the time.
As an example of how extreme this ratio is, I’ll present similar offenses and their final year end pass percentages.
1990 Houston: 73.5% with David Klingler throwing for over 5,100 yards with 54 TD.
2003 Texas Tech: 71.7% with B.J. Symons throwing for over 5,800 yards with 52 TD.
2006 Hawaii: 67.9% with Colt Brennan throwing for over 5,500 yards with 58 TD.
2008 Texas Tech: 67.7% with Graham Harrell throwing for over 5,100 yards with 45 TD.
2011 Houston: 62.6% with Case Keenum throwing for over 5,600 yards with 48 TD.
If this pace continues, Mike Leach and Connor Halliday have a chance to turning the football landscape on its head with how extreme the shift to throwing the ball has become. Washington State is currently 2-4 and halfway through their collegiate season (almost 3-3 except for a missed field goal against California, a game in which Halliday threw for 734 yards on 70 pass attempts). Halliday’s numbers are already mind boggling as he’s surpassed the 3,000 yards mark and thrown 26 touchdown passes, statistics that players at other schools may not even reach over the course of a 12 or 13 game full season.
The biggest factor is Halliday’s efficiency at the quarterback position. He’s thrown: 56, 57, 62, 63, 61, and 70 pass attempts in his games this year but has completed at least 63.9% of his throws in every single game as well. The ratios were impressively skewed almost right out of the gate…
vs. Rutgers (41-38 loss): 56 Pass Attempts vs. 8 Rush Attempts
@ Nevada (24-13 loss): 57 Pass Attempts vs. 10 Rush Attempts
vs. Portland State (59-21 win): 64 Pass Attempts vs. 22 Rush Attempts
vs. Oregon (38-31 loss): 63 Pass Attempts vs. 16 Rush Attempts
@ Utah (28-27 win): 61 Pass Attempts vs. 19 Rush Attempts
vs. California (60-59 loss): 70 Pass Attempts vs. 21 Rush Attempts
What is arguably making this even more impressive is that Leach and quarterback Connor Halliday are, as usual for an Air Raid offense, not focusing on just one or two targets in the passing game and to Leach’s credit he’s even split up the carries between his two running backs: Jamal Morrow has 49 carries and Gerard Wicks has 46 carries.
They have utilized 3 wide receivers with 43 catches or more: Vince Mayle, River Cracraft, and Isiah Myers. Also he has 3 players with 20 to 24 catches in Dom Williams, Ricky Galvin, and Jamal Morrow. Another player, Robert Lewis has 18 catches himself. As a result of spreading the ball in the passing distribution it allows the offense to maintain its ability to ridiculously lean towards the passing proponent of the offense along with being aided by Halliday’s offensive talent. This also helps force defenses from being able to take out a single receiver and allows Halliday to gain more yards through the air, 12.45 yards per completion, than they otherwise would achieve through the ground game, 2.78 yards per carry.
Barry Switzer, the mastermind behind the Wishbone offense that also preached a balanced distribution has said that the Air Raid is the passing equivalent and Mike Leach is proving that this season in Washington State. With a deadly, balanced distribution through the air Leach has managed to further stand out in the midst of Air Raid offenses by showing the extremity he is willing to go while also applying his awareness that the passing game is the most effective way to attack opposing defenses.
With a tough slate ahead of them including Stanford on Friday at 9:00 PM ET/6:00 PM PT along with games against Arizona, USC, and Arizona State it remains to be seen whether Leach and Halliday can not only continue the extreme ratio of passing to running the ball but also whether it wins games for them and becomes a possible blueprint for lower tier teams struggling to win games who are thinking of adopting the Air Raid and going as extreme as Leach has gone.
From a great Michael Lewis article on Texas Tech, it seems quite fitting to end with this quote, “I’ve thought about going a whole season without calling a single running play,’ Leach says, only half-joking.”
Credit to www.al.com for feature image
