Tim Couch was talked out of Transferring to Tennessee by Hal Mumme and Learned the Air Raid at Hooters

The legend of Tim Couch at the University of Kentucky almost never happened. Thanks to a coaching change and one fateful afternoon at a Hooters, the Wildcats forever changed college football.

Couch was the No. 1 ranked high school football player in America after the Leslie County gunslinger broke every national high school passing record. He initially wanted to play for Phil Fulmer and the Tennessee Volunteers, but his father talked him into representing his home state school.

As a true freshman, Billy Curry had Tim Couch running the option. It was, as you might expect, a disaster. Couch was ready to pack his bags and go to Knoxville, until he had a conversation with C.M. Newton. He shared that story with friend of the program, Connor O’Gara, on the Saturday Down South Podcast.

“C.M. Newton, our athletic director, came to me and said, ‘Listen, if you’ll just go through this process with us before you decide to transfer, let’s just show you the coach that we’re going to bring in. If you decide to stay, at least you went through the process and you can feel better about it.’ I said, sure. I’ll go through the process with you,” Couch said.

“A week or two later he comes in and says, ‘I got a guy, his name is Hal Mumme and he’s from Valdosta State.’ I was like, I’ve never heard of Hal Mumme. I’ve never heard of Valdosta State. I had no idea who this guy was.

“My first meeting with Hal I walk into his office and he literally says, ‘You’re my starting quarterback and we’re going to throw it 50 times a game. How’s that sound?’ All right, I think I’ll reconsider transferring at this point.”

Learning the Air Raid at Hooters

After meeting Mumme, Tim Couch was excited to learn this new, innovative pass-heavy offense. The Deuce made a call to Chris Hatcher, the new quarterback coach and former Valdosta State quarterback. The two arranged a lunch meeting to go over the Air Raid playbook at a Hooters. There was only one problem: Hal Mumme didn’t have a playbook.

“We get to Hooters and we sat down and Hatcher goes, ‘Well here’s the deal. We don’t have a playbook.’ He takes these napkins at Hooters and he starts drawing the Air Raid up on these Hooters napkins and that’s how I learned the Air Raid. He drew up the base four plays and formations, stuff like that,” said Couch.

In total there were about 10-15 plays, but when ran out of various formations, it looked like 5x as many plays for opposing defenses to scout. The results were record-breaking. Tim Couch was an All-American and a Heisman finalist. Since then the offense has spread across the country to all levels of football, a point of pride for Tim Couch.

“I had no idea it would be so prevalent around college football and now it’s even made its way to the NFL,” said Couch. “It’s really cool to see that we were on the ground floor of breaking that system into major college football and where it is today.”