Mike Leach shares how the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the movie ‘Hoosiers’ fit in the origin of the Air Raid
By Keith Farner
Published:
Mississippi State coach Mike Leach is one of the all-time best storytellers among college football coaches. But his explanation on Monday about the origin of his patented “Air Raid” offense may be one of his best ever.
Leach said he is credited with coming up with the name, but it was also during a time when several offenses had a nickname, from the “West Coast offense” to the “Run N Shoot,” to the “Fun N Gun.” But his Air Raid started when he was a coach at Iowa Wesleyan.
“When we were at Iowa Wesleyan College, some guy brought in this Air Raid siren,” Leach said at his Monday press conference. “That was fun at that time to name offenses.”
Leach credits a man named Bob Lamb for introducing him to an Air Raid siren. Leach said his offices were in the basement of a gym that was built in 1890.
“Iowa Wesleyan College is the oldest college west of the Mississippi and was actually a site for the Lincoln-Douglas debates,” Leach said. “You see the gym on ‘Hoosiers?’ Our gym was, it was more Hoosiers than that gym on Hoosiers. We were downstairs in the bowels of the basement. I was next to the kind of boiler room, which come to find out Davey Lopes, the famous baseball player for the Dodgers, that had been his room, or his apartment way back when. He actually played a little baseball at Iowa Wesleyan for a brief period of time.”
Then Leach said that Lamb came in with the siren, and turn it on.
“It’s loud as it can be, just letting it rip, right,” Leach said, and added that the attendance at the games was about 1,000 people on a high school field, maybe 3,000 with a big crowd. “Then Bob would stand in the end zone, and he would turn that thing on when we’d score. Then after a while, him and his friends had so much fun with it, they’d just blast it for anything, just randomly, whenever they felt like it. Even when the other quarterback was trying to call plays. Because we didn’t have a lot of crowd noise.”
From then, that’s when the Air Raid was officially born, as Leach said he was credited with calling it that, and it, “kind of stuck.”
Here’s Mike Leach playing a legit air horn for us to hear on today’s zoom in case anyone was curious what it sounds like —> pic.twitter.com/FQeAzkBnfJ
— Ben Portnoy (@bportnoy15) October 5, 2020
A former newspaper veteran, Keith Farner is a news manager for Saturday Down South.
