TMB Book Club: The Perfect Pass (and College Football 25)
Another entry in our offseason reading series.
Welcome back to TMB Book Club, a summer reading series where I read something and talk about it! This week: The Perfect Pass by S.C. Gwynne, and also some discussion of College Football 25).
NCAA College Football 25 finally came out a few weeks ago. You can easily point to that fact if you’re wondering why this review is coming out later than I stated (and also that I went to the mountains with no internet for a few weeks, but that’s neither here nor there). But there’s a reason the game delayed the review: I was spending so much time putting what I was learning from The Perfect Pass into use while I was reading it.
Let’s start with a simple statement: The Perfect Pass is a history book about the rise of the Air Raid offense. Ostensibly, it is also a story about Hal Mumme, the original architect of the offense, and his eventual partnership with Mike Leach. But that is just the hook for what S.C. Gwynne actually wants to talk about, which is how offensive football changed rapidly in the 2000s. So much of the book is set in the late 1980s and 1990s, and Mumme is for sure the central character of the book, but Gwynne is more interested in tracing the evolution of the forward pass in football and how Mumme took the innovations of the 80s (such as Air Croylle and the West Coast offense) and synthesized them with his ideas to create the system we know today.
That’s one of the more fascinating aspects of the book because I assume most readers who have a decent understanding of modern football are familiar with the Air Raid. UCLA fans in particular got to watch Mike Leach ply his craft for years while he was at Washington State, and anyone watching the NFL these days is likely familiar with the boatload of quarterbacks who got their start in Air Raid systems, chief among them Patrick Mahomes. I have a basic understanding of the Air Raid; I have heard concepts like Mesh and Y-Cross multiple times and often heard about the wide splits on the offense line. This is why I enjoyed the book, because as much as the book is about Mumme, it also traces the evolution of his offensive system, taking deep dives into the various changes that were implemented. Gwynne traces how the previous offensive breakthroughs such as LaVell Edwards at BYU, and goes in-depth on how those concepts worked.
The chapter that sold me on this book the most comes about halfway through the book when Gwynne finally explains the Mesh play and how it works. Again, this was a play I was familiar with; the play’s trademark crossing pattern, where the two receivers come so close to each other that they would often high-five, was something that was run often as a core passing concept under Chip Kelly. But Gwynne goes into more detail on why the play works, and I learned so much from it. For example, one of the things I learned right at the beginning is that the crossing receivers are the third read in the progression - the first read is done right at the snap and involves the outside receiver, while the second read is the tailback in the backfield, who gets to occupy a free space created by the first receiver. I also learned why Mesh works, and how it was designed to destroy the middle linebackers that had come to dominate defenses in the late 1980s.
Here is where the video game comes in. As I was working my way through The Perfect Pass, I wanted to try and put these new concepts to use. Thankfully, College Football 25 came out and gave me the perfect playground to do just that.
If you want a quick and dirty review of the game, then I will simply state that this is a game made for college football fans. The developers at EA have gotten a bad reputation over the years (deservedly so, in my opinion) but the group behind this game is made up of fans of the sport. There is a ton of little details thrown in the game; “Neck” is played in Death Valley, the tunnel walk at Lincoln is featured in the pregame when you play at Nebraska, and so on. The diversity of playbooks available is staggering, and the various modes like Dynasty and Road to Glory provide a ton of diversity to how you approach the game.
The gameplay itself is pretty darn good too. I am not someone who religiously plays sports games - I will play the occasional FIFA match at a friend’s house, and will usually play a little bit of MLB The Show whenever that comes out. The last football game I played before this was NCAA Football 2008, which has a hallowed place in my family but also speaks to how long it’s been. Yet it did not take me long to figure out what I was doing, and while there is a host of buttons available that I’m sure more advanced players are optimizing the usage of those abilities as I speak, it wasn’t necessary for me to dig deep into that aspect in order to have fun with the game and do what I wanted to do.
One feature you’re able to use is the option to turn on a “coach mode”, so to speak. This allows you to call the plays and any audibles, but once the play is called, you can simply let go of the controller and let the game run the play for you. This is my preferred method for playing Dynasty mode, and was how I started to put the ideas discussed in The Perfect Pass into practice.
I fired up a Dynasty (Tulane, because I wanted a challenge but not a gigantic uphill climb like a Texas State would have been), changed the playbook to an Air Raid, and went to work. I felt like a mad scientist calling plays, hitting teams with Y-Cross and Smash then throwing in a run to keep the opposing defense honest. When I needed a play to work, we ran Mesh. It was exhilarating, exactly what I remember when watching those Mike Leach Texas Tech teams for the first time. I also understood what it must have been like to be a defensive coach when the Air Raid blew up in popularity because when you have things humming the offense is impossible to stop.
You don’t see many pure Air Raid offenses anymore, but the modern game owes much to Hal Mumme and Mike Leach. The reigning Super Bowl MVP is a former Air Raid quarterback who played at one of the breeding grounds of the offense. Coaches with Air Raid influences litter the ranks of college and the pros. Even noted offensive genius Chip Kelly utilized the passing concepts of the Air Raid in his offense; Mesh was a staple passing concept in his offense both at Oregon and at UCLA. A Perfect Pass paints a picture of a system that should not have existed but for the stubborn insistence of its creators. That insistence lives on in the hearts and minds of every football fan. The Air Raid finally put a rock back in David’s sling, and it meant that Goliath would forever have to look over its shoulder.
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