Turbocharge Your Business With Lessons From The NFL’s 2-Minute, Hurry-Up Offense

What can entrepreneurs learn from a largely unknown, junior college coach who created the NFL’s Air Raid offense? According to S. C. Gwynne, author of The Perfect Pass, the insights are numerous. Per Mr. Gwynne, “By 2015, it was getting hard to find any team that did not have at least one Air Raid play in its playbook.” That’s any team, at any level of play, from high school, college and the NFL.

As I noted in Lessons From The Comanche’s Rapid Absorption Of Horse Technology, (also based on a book by Mr. Gwynne) the author cites the Comanche’s adoption of horse husbandry as one of the most rapid societal transformations in recorded history. In contrast, the refinement of football’s forward pass was an excruciatingly slow process, taking over 100 years. The answers as to why it took so long and how a junior college coach eventually overcame extreme inertia and revolutionized the sport, offer intriguing insights for entrepreneurs seeking to change their corner of the world.

Innovations Arise From Copying, Combining And Transforming

Mr. Gwynne describes the Air Raid offense as a classic example of, “American entrepreneurial technology” that defied the status quo. The game-changing tactics arose from an unlikely source, two obscure risk takers: Head Coach Hal Mumme (pronounced “Mummy”) and his Assistant Coach Mike Leach. Like many entrepreneurial advancements, the Air Raid wasn’t widely adopted by football’s dominate incumbents until it proved to be overwhelmingly more effective than the run-centric offense which had dominated football for over a century.  

Some of the startup lessons entrepreneurs can derive from Coaches Mumme and Leach include:

Borrow From Everyone

Like most innovations, all the components that made up the Air Raid offense were obvious to anyone looking for them. As is often the case, it took outsiders, with little to lose, to identify the pieces and to summon the courage to implement an untested, unconventional strategy.

In the off season, Mumme traveled across the country, picking up tips from anyone who was doing anything innovative with their passing game. Anyone, irrespective of whether they coached at the NFL, college or high school level. Hal realized that innovations were a function of a coach’s ingenuity, rather than their notoriety.  

Mumme and Leach also drew upon a variety of historical sources to create the Air Raid offense, including: Granada Hills High School’s 1980’s pass-centric offense, Lavell Edward’s offensive playbook at BYU, Bill Walsh’s West Coast Offense and Mouse Davis’ 1970’s Run and Shoot playbook. They shamelessly and openly borrowed from everyone who had a good idea.

Entrepreneurial Lesson: According to Steve Jobs, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

Change The Rules Of The Game

Harvard Professor Michael Porter notes in, “What Is Strategy?,” that entrepreneurs should strive to create a sustainable competitive advantage by “…performing different activities from rivals’ or performing similar activities in different ways” (italics from original text). This contrasts with the approach taken by most incumbent organizations, which often strive to perform the same activities as their rivals, albeit more effectively.

Some of the ways in which Mumme and Leach changed the rules of football include:

Expanded The Field’s Width – Plays often moved the ball from one sideline to the other, rather than always focusing on directly advancing the ball forward. This zig-zag approach tired out the opposition’s defense, as evidenced by the significant number of points Mumme’s teams typically scored during the second half of their games.

Changed The Offensive Line – Linemen stood behind the line of scrimmage, spread several feet apart, semi-erect with hands on their knees. This facilitated protecting the quarterback, while the large spaces between the linemen facilitated an effective running game.

Made Practice Fun – Practice was shortened to 90-minutes, by eliminating stretching, excessive running, hard-contact hitting, etc. The coaches demonstrated that the archaic methodology of screaming in players’ faces and making them run until they puked was counter productive to achieving a player’s top performance on game day.

Increased The Game’s Pace – Mumme’s quarterbacks executed a no-huddle, two-minute, hurry up offense from the shotgun formation on every play. This further contributed to fatiguing his opposition, as they had little time to catch their breath between plays.

Entrepreneurial Lesson: Startups often out-maneuver their larger rivals by changing the key parameters upon which competition has historically been based. Rather than trying to do the same things better than their competitors, savvy entrepreneurs identify new ways to create and deliver value to their customers, which often result in sustainable competitive advantages.

Entrepreneurs Do Not Fear Losing

The tenure of the average professional football coach is about 4.3 seasons. This reality makes most coaches extremely risk adverse. For 100-years, this cautious approach caused them to believe, “there are three things that can happen when you pass the ball, and two of them are bad.”

Mumme proved that even mediocre quarterbacks and receivers could routinely complete over 70% of their pass attempts. Suddenly, the likelihood of an interception became equivalent to a fumble occurring during a running play.

Entrepreneurial Lesson: Incumbents have assets, reputations, and brands that they seek to protect. This often causes them to be risk adverse and cling to conventional practices. In contrast, entrepreneurs are free to experiment with new approaches, free of the fear of loss.

Asking The Right Question Can Be 90% Of The Solution

Before the Air Raid offense was established as the industry standard, one of football’s longest-standing mantras was, “The pass sets up the run.” Mumme simply asked, “Why can’t the run set up the pass?

Entrepreneurial Lesson: Question Conventional Wisdom. Impactful business models often arise from taking the road less traveled. Remain watchful for transformative innovations which will allow you to prove Conventional Wisdom wrong.

Keep It Simple

Mumme’s offense was comprised of less than a dozen plays. He reduced his playbook fifty percent by eliminating left and right version of his plays. Mumme allowed his quarterback and the receivers to call audibles which made the offense appear to be extremely complicated. The various options associated with each play caused his opposition to believe he was running a complex playbook.

As Mr. Gwynne notes, football coaches are paid to write thick playbooks. Prior to the adoption of the Air Raid, most NFL playbooks were comprised of hundreds of plays. The believe was that the more plays a team could call upon, the more they could confuse their opposition. Ironically, Mumme’s simplicity befuddled his competition, as they were looking for complexity where none existed.

In addition, Mumme realized that simplicity made it easier to perfect his plays in practice. Running through a handful of plays over and over proved far more effective than practicing dozens of plays a few times each during practice.

Entrepreneurial Lesson: Practice = proficiency. Focus on doing fewer things better, not more things mediocrely.  

Process Not Players

At the collegiate level, team rosters are fluid. Students graduate, become injured, transfer to other schools, etc. The constant turnover of college players forced Mumme to create an offense that wasn’t player dependent. In addition, during much of his career, he coached at lower-division colleges that frankly could not recruit super star athletes. Mumme turned this deficiency into an inherent advantage.

The Air Raid system reduced reliance on superstar athletes and made proficient passers and receivers league leaders. Most of Mumme’s pass plays required throws of less than fifteen yards, which significantly increased the population of quarterbacks who could effectively execute his offense.

Entrepreneurial Lesson: Savvy entrepreneurs realize they must eventually develop processes and systems that will transcend themselves and their star employees. Thus, at the appropriate point in a startup’s maturation, entrepreneurs must invest in the institutional infrastructure required to ensure their ventures are not dependent on the talent of a handful of high-performing individuals, including themselves.

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