Longo Explains Air Raid

CHAPEL HILL – Mack Brown’s staff was made available to the media for the first time for a series of press conferences for each position coach Wednesday at the Kenan Football Center.

THI will run each press conference over the next couple of days, leading off with offensive coordinator Phil Longo.

Longo runs what is called the Air Raid offense, something he learned initially from Mike Leach and later some things from Kliff Kingsbury. But Longo has tweaked and changed things to his own over the course of time, and the results have been prolific offenses with a healthy pass/run balance whether at the FCS level or the Power 5 level.

Here are some snippets from what Longo had to say:

*What attracted Longo to the Air Raid and how it’s different under him?

“The first five years of my career, I studied a couple of offenses and I drew from what I did in college because that’s all you knew… In my case, I was permitted to run the passing game my first year in coaching. And of course, you think you have all the answers and you don’t have any of them, but you don’t know that.

“For five years, I studied BYU with Lavell Edwards and I got a lot of stuff from Joe Tiller, who was at Purdue at the time. You’re searching for an identity. I knew I wanted to be an offensive coordinator and a head coach, and you’re searching for an identity and you’re searching for a system and you’re just trying to learn the game.

“An then in 1997, I drove down to Kentucky and went to see Mike Leach (an assistant under Hal Mumme at the time) whom I’d never met at the time. I had no idea at the time that was the system I felt was the right system. I went down there and I listened to it and we talked for a long time about his stuff, and I drove away from the University of Kentucky knowing this was the system. And the reason was it made sense to me, I knew that I could do it as a player, I knew it would help players play because it was simple, the instinct of doing it, and I’ve come to realize over the years that’s the number one benefit of being in that system.

“And so I adopted it that day and tried to perfect it. And to answer the second question, I would say there are a number of different coaches that implement the Air Raid system, and Mike is the purest. And when I go visit with him, I always leave there and am reminded that the simplicity is really the genius of the whole thing…

“So when I visit with Kliff Kingsbury, and in my opinion he’s touchdown or prolific-play game planner that I know in college football, and now you’re going to see him do his thing with the Arizona Cardinals. He would put X amount of wrinkles in, probably more than I would, and they’re the prolific plays in a game. They’re the touchdown plays in the game. And he does it at a higher percentage and better than most in my opinion, that’s why I sought him out early on…

“The area that we are falling right now is more where (head coach) Lincoln (Riley) is at Oklahoma, where the philosophy is Air Raid, we throw the ball but there’s going to be a downhill, power run element to the offense that we think is very important.”

*Longo said the run/pass distribution will be determined by what defenses give them. The staff won’t go into a game scripting 50 percent runs and 50 percent passes, set out to achieve balance in that manner. Instead, it will be about the defense, what it does, what it gives and how the offense can take advantage of that space.

And with the offense relying heavily instead of just scripted pass routes, it’s designed to force defenses to constantly adjust.

“It allows athletes to go be athletes. They’re not confined by the drawing of a post route in a playbook, they’re given the opportunity to – I always use this example: If you’re running a post route, which is just an in-cut, and the safety bails and gives up a lot of grass underneath, you may run the post route exactly the way somebody might draw it up in a playbook. If that safety comes down into the box, that post may be more vertical and he may chase the grass behind the safety.

“The angle of that post is going to change, it’s a decision made by the receiver and he’s doing it athletically and he’s doing it on the fly. And he’s really doing it without having to think, it’s instinctively reacting to where the grass is.

“And the quarterback is always throwing to the guy that’s in space. We don’t have as many contested catches for throws if this offense because of the nature that we allow receivers to run routes.

“The philosophy is to stay simple, spread teams out, horizontally pre-snap, vertically post-snap, and it really displace 11 defenders throughout the field as much as we possibly can.”

*The run game is an important element to the offense. Balance is key, Longo said, but not in snap distribution but in being able to do both well to be better situated to take advantage of various defenses.

“I think it’s necessary. When you’re able to run the football it helps the passing game, when you’re able to throw the football and stretch the field it helps the run game. It’s very difficult to defend the field and to defend the box. Typically, most defensive coordinators are going to emphasize one or the other.

“The old school way of thinking is defend the box, stop the run game, force a team to throw the football, play great defense and that wins championships. That’s the traditional way of thinking. It’s being proven it can be done a lot differently. It doesn’t mean that’s wrong or right, there are a lot of different ways to win championships.

“I think with the way the game is going right now, being one dimensional helps the defense, and when you’re able to run the ball and throw the football. And then there’s a third aspect to the offense, and that’s the screen game that I think kind of marries both of them together because you can throw screens off the run game, you can throw screens off the pass game and we have both. And I think that’s the third element that’s usually not talked about offensively. All three are big factors in this system.”