THE PERFECT PASS

New York Times bestselling, award-winning historian S.C. Gwynne turns his keen eye to the incredible story of two unknown coaches who revolutionized American football in the 1990s. They changed the way the game is played at every level, from high school to the NFL.

The Perfect Pass is meant to be a history of a moment in American football when the game changed fundamentally, when it transformed itself into what tens of millions of Americans now watch on television every weekend. At its core this book is about innovation, about a set of revolutionary ideas and how they made their way into the mainstream of American sports culture.

The book tells the story of Hal Mumme, a football coach who spent fourteen seasons mostly losing before inventing a passing offense that would—along with the work of a handful of other coaches—reinvent the game. That transformation took place at a tiny college on the windy plains of southwestern Iowa with 430 students called Iowa Wesleyan.
It was there that Mumme invented the purest and most extreme passing game in the 145-year history of football, where his quarterback once completed 61 of 86 passes (both national records), where his team never huddled, rarely punted on fourth down, and routinely clobbered teams with ten or twenty times Iowa Wesleyan’s students. He did it all with average athletes and without even a playbook.

The book not only explores Mumme’s genius and the stunning performance of his teams, but his leading role in changing football from a run-dominated sport to a pass-dominated sport, but also his place in American football history. Readers will learn of the origins of the forward pass in the early 1900s, its development under such legendary coaches as Pop Warner, Knute Rockne, Sid Gillman and Bill Walsh, such unknowns as Mouse Davis and Tiger Ellison, and such quarterbacks as Sammy Baugh and Joe Montana.

The Perfect Pass also tells the story of the “little team that could,” a hopelessly underfunded football program with ancient and dilapidated facilities, a weed-choked practice field, and pathetically substandard equipment, that in the 1980s lit up the world of football on the Great Plains. Here too the reader will find the story of what Mumme did later at Valdosta State University in Georgia—setting more national records and continuing the stunning work he had begun at Iowa Wesleyan.

Hal Mumme is one of a handful of authentic offensive geniuses in the history of American football. In 2015 ESPN Magazine, the nation’s leading sports magazine, called him, without qualification, the single most influential football coach in the last quarter century. This is his story.

S.C. Gwynne is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Empire of the Summer Moon, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Rebel Yell, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He spent most of his career as a journalist, including stints with Time as bureau chief, national correspondent, and senior editor and with Texas Monthly as executive editor.