USC OC Graham Harrell explains his own touch on the Air Raid
The "Air Raid" offense has been the talk of the offseason for USC, starting when the Trojans initially hired one Mike Leach disciple in Kliff Kingsbury and restarting when they rebounded from his abrupt exit to the NFL by landing another in Graham Harrell.
But not all former Texas Tech quarterbacks are identical, and not all Leach protégées run Leach's same offense.
That's the first point Harrell sought to clarify in his much-anticipated introductory news conference Monday morning.
“I don’t mind people calling it the Air Raid if they want to call it the Air Raid, but to me more than anything, if you look at anyone that’s come from Coach Leach that gets kind of tagged with an Air Raid offense, none of us are the same," Harrell said. "It’s kind of like the West Coast [offense] -- the West Coast can be a 22-personnel offense or it can be a spread offense. The Air Raid offense is more of a philosophy than an actual Xs and Os."
And the philosophy is simple -- or rather, that is the philosophy.
"The philosophy is keep it easy and let the guys go play and put your guys in position to go be successful," Harrell continued. "It’s an execution-based offense. You’re not going to sit there and try to out-scheme people. It’s an identity. It gives you an identity and says this is who we are and we’re going to be good at what we do. So that’s kind of the approach we take.”
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There's one key area where Harrell differs the most from Leach, who was his head coach at Texas Tech before finding success anew the last seven seasons at Washington State, and Kingsbury, who spent about a month as USC's OC before becoming head coach of the Arizona Cardinals.
He embraces the run game more, perhaps as a result of his time working under another Leach disciple in former Oklahoma running back and later Texas Tech RBs coach Seth Littrell the last three years as offensive coordinator at North Texas.
The Mean Green enjoyed an offensive resurgence under Littrell and Harrell, who inherited a unit that ranked near the bottom of the FBS in 2015 before their arrivals at 15.2 points and 320.1 yards per game. They improved to 24.8 PPG in 2016, 35.5 in 2017 and then 34.6 this past fall, producing offenses that ranked No. 24 (455.1 YPG) and No. 20 (460.5) nationally those last two seasons, respectively.
They did it with a prolific passing attack, sure, as quarterback Mason Fine ranked 10th in the country this fall with 3,793 passing yards. But they also remained committed to the rushing attack, rushing for a respectable 1,999 yards in 13 games (more than USC's 1,602 in 12 games).
Leach's Washington State team, for comparison, ranked 128th out of 129 FBS teams at 77.7 rushing yards per game (1,010 total in 13 games) and Kingsbury's Texas Tech team ranked 108th (1,591 yards in 12 games).
“A lot of [my offense] comes from coach Leach, but we just have a lot more run game that goes with it," Harrell said. "That’s where we varied from Coach Leach the most at North Texas and where we’ll continue to vary from him is we believe in running the football and understand to win games, especially at a high level, you’ve got to run the football successfully.
"So again, I don’t mind being tagged with the Air Raid, but we’re not exactly what Leach is and no one is exactly what Leach is, so if you want the true Air Raid you’ve got to find Mike Leach. But I do think his philosophy and his style of offense, his touch has kind of been on all of us.”
USC head coach Clay Helton reiterated in his own comments about Harrell's hiring that the rushing attack would remain a key component of the offense, and that was relayed to recruits as well with the whirlwind of uncertainty that engulfed the program through this wild offseason -- from Kingsbury's high-profile hiring to his even higher-profile departure, to the wait to see who would replace him to the even longer wait to finally hear from Harrell publicly.
Now that he's gotten the chance to speak for himself -- three and a half weeks after USC announced his hiring -- it does indeed sound like that commitment to the rushing attack is a shared priority and not a forced decree from Helton, as some wondered.
But the potential for the dynamic passing attack is still the headlining component of Harrell's hiring.
He got his first full-time assistant coaching position under Leach at Washington State coaching the outside receivers from 2014-15, but as he acknowledged he was never going to become the QBs coach or OC on that staff.
So he took the opportunity at North Texas and proved himself as a quarterback developer and play-caller in his own right. (As he noted, Littrell worked with him on the run game components of the game plan early in their time together, but he was given play-calling duties from the start).
Harrell turned the offense over to Fine as a true freshman and helped him improve from a 59.4 completion percentage and 1,572 passing yards, 6 TDs and 5 INTs to 63.4, 4,052, 31-15 in 2017 and 64.6, 3,793, 27-5 in 2018.
His philosophy with QBs is, again, literally simple.
“If the quarterback’s overthinking then I’m not doing my job well," Harrell said. “... As a quarterback, I think the learning curve is sped up tremendously because we’re going to say, ‘Hey, don’t think, play. We’re going to keep it as simple as we can for you.’”
The key tenets of his offense from a passing standpoint are to focus on the plays his players run best, to allow them to play quick and free of thought rather than overcomplicating the game plan, to get the playmakers in space and let them work and, ultimately, to give the QB trust to adjust as he sees fit.
“We call plays, for sure. As they get comfortable, I’ll let them do about what they want," Harrell said of his QBs. "Coach Leach always told me this, and I don’t ever tell my quarterbacks this, but what he said was, ‘What I’m giving you is a suggestion — you can call whatever you want.’ That’s kind of his philosophy. Now I will let my quarterbacks, ‘If you see something, check what you want. It’s not like you’ve got this or that. If you see a way you can attack them and you feel good about it, get us into it and let’s roll.’ So we’re going to let those guys play. …
“As they really get comfortable in it, there’s times they’ll call a totally different play and I don’t care. Just make it work — that’s my philosophy. If it didn’t work, I’ll tell them that was a dumb idea.”
Harrell was the most successful of all Leach's prolific Texas Tech quarterbacks, passing for 15,793 yards, 134 TDs and 34 INTs from 2005-08 while finishing fourth in the Heisman Trophy voting as senior.
He got a taste of the NFL, alternating between the practice squad and active roster with the Green Bay Packers from 2010 through the summer of 2013. While that was a stark deviation from his time in Lubbock, Texas, it only served to reaffirm the "Air Raid" principles he still embraces.
“The best thing about my time in Green Bay is I got to see it done a different way, I got to see it called a different way and I think it just really strengthened my belief in the way we do things here," he said. "There, it’s West Coast offense and the playbook is [very thick] and every play call feels like a paragraph. …
"I used to tell them all the time, ‘If you pay me enough money, I’ll simplify this whole thing for you and make it a lot easier.’ They didn’t like that. It was like a badge of honor that they could remember a paragraph. I’m like, ‘Well, it’s great that you can remember the paragraph, but I can’t remember the paragraph and neither can anyone in here. So you’re not doing us any favors.’ It was a great experience, I got to learn a lot of great things, but more than anything is just restrengthening the way I thought was the best way to do things."
Harrell projects a laid-back confidence that should connect well with the players, and it doesn't sound like the transition to his system will be all that jarring for a USC offense stacked with top recruits and a proven corps of receivers.
Near the end of his 26-minute media session Monday, he was asked about Leach being known as a quirky fellow and what he took away from his approach.
Harrell went back to his previous points -- "keep things simple" and "be loose and have fun."
“I think a lot of that comes from Coach Leach. He’s different so there’s some things that you don’t want to take, but those two things are things that I definitely try to take," he joked. "We’re going to be simple in what we do, we’re going to just be good in what we do, have an identity and we’re going to have fun doing it.”