How Miami offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson emerged from nowhere

AS MIAMI PUNCTUATED a gritty 15-play, 75-yard touchdown drive to beat Ole Miss in the closing seconds of the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl, Hal Mumme sat on his couch in Shreveport, Louisiana, watching and celebrating like a proud father.

The Hurricanes have taken the hard way back to the mountaintop, beating Texas A&M in College Station, Ohio State -- the defending national champs -- in the Cotton Bowl and an Ole Miss team that was playing inspired football. Watching Carson Beck scramble into the end zone to beat Ole Miss and return The U to a national championship game for the first time in 23 years, all Mumme could think about was when he first saw Shannon Dawson's moxie against the Arkansas-Monticello Boll Weevils.

Mumme, the 73-year-old inventor of the Air Raid offense, says Miami's rough road has mirrored the path Dawson has taken to help get them there.

Dawson first proved himself to Mumme in 2003 at Southeastern Louisiana. Dawson was in his first game as a part-timer making about $500 a month. His job was to chart plays, to let Mumme know how many times he had made a specific call.

Southeastern Louisiana had just resurrected football and was playing its first game in 18 years. They'd had had a parade and a pep rally that week, and fans were amped for the return of football to Hammond, Louisiana. An overflow crowd of 9,708 packed Strawberry Stadium (capacity: 7,400).

Mumme desperately wanted to win to kick off this new era. Late in the fourth quarter, the offense had struggled, with the defense scoring the only touchdown, and the team trailed 17-16. After recovering a fumble at the Weevils' 22 with about six minutes left, Dawson stuck his head in the huddle and suggested a play.

"If we just throw Fox," he said, code for faking a screen and throwing deep, "we can score if we throw it to the right."

Mumme couldn't believe the audacity of the kid. The head coach started to rip the restricted earnings coach and remind him to know his place, then caught himself and realized he had been paying attention. And that he was right.

"That's a good idea," Mumme said. "We called it, hit our little slot receiver, Choni Francis, for a touchdown and won the game, thanks to the courage of Shannon Dawson."

JUST SIX YEARS before, Dawson was an option quarterback from Clinton, Louisiana, who signed to play at Mississippi College in Clinton, Mississippi, a Division III non-scholarship school. He was a biology major, set on a medical career after breaking his ankle in high school.

"I was going to be an orthopedic surgeon," Dawson said. "My fallback plan was to become a physical therapist."

At his first practice, he took a shotgun snap for the first time under Choctaws offensive coordinator Dana Holgorsen, then a young coach who had played for Mumme at Iowa Wesleyan and served as an assistant for him at Valdosta State. He spent his freshman year in the coaching booth communicating defensive formations down to Holgorsen on the sideline. The two developed a close relationship, and suddenly, Dawson's plans changed.

"Dana made football fun," Dawson said. He wanted to do this. So he called his parents and told them he was determined to become a college football coach.

"You're going to starve to death," his grandfather told him. "I'd be an accountant."

But the siren song of the Air Raid lured him in, as it did for other outsiders in that era who had no pedigree and never dreamed of a future in major college football, such as Mike Leach, the Pepperdine lawyer, or Sonny Dykes, the Texas Tech baseball player or Lincoln Riley, the walk-on quarterback from Muleshoe, Texas, who became a volunteer coach for Leach and ascended to Oklahoma and USC. Or Holgorsen, the iconoclastic wild-haired, Red Bull-swilling coach who just happened to live in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, when Mumme showed up in town to try out his new wide-open offense at Iowa Wesleyan and is now the offensive coordinator at Nebraska.

So two years later, when Holgorsen landed a job coaching quarterbacks and wide receivers at Wingate in North Carolina, Dawson transferred with him. After Holgorsen left to join Mike Leach's first Texas Tech staff in 2000, Dawson moved to receiver in 2001 and was the Bulldogs' leading pass catcher, grabbing 43 passes for 584 yards and 7 touchdowns. He impressed head coach Joe Reich enough that Reich named him the receivers coach the very next year.

But in 2002, Southeastern Louisiana hired Mumme, who had resigned amid an NCAA investigation for recruiting violations at Kentucky in 2000. The offices were mostly barren, staffers found surplus furniture on campus and made do. And there was a skeleton staff, mostly just Mumme's assistant Amber. He needed to build a new staff and one of his first calls came from Holgorsen, imploring him to hire Dawson. Mumme said he wrote down the name and number on a Post-it note and put it on his desk. Almost immediately, it got lost in all the papers on his desk.

Not long after, a Southeastern booster and former player showed up and suggested that his son might be a good fit for the new staff. This was the last thing Mumme needed, a booster who's played there 30 years before, trying to shake him down to hire his kid. He told him to send his son over just to humor him and get him out of his office. In walked Dawson.

When he arrived, Mumme had forgotten about Holgorsen's recommendation. He tried to make the job sound as unappealing as possible.

"He sits in front of me for like an hour, and I totally ripped his ass," Mumme said. "I told him, 'You're going to have the s---tiest job in this deal. I'm not going to pay you anything for six months. You're gonna have to be my driver. If I want something videoed, you gotta be the video guy. If we need the laundry done, you gotta be the laundry guy.' I thought of every job in football that sucks."

"When can I start?" Dawson replied.

Mumme said he was hard on Dawson even after he started. Then a month later, Amber cleaned off his desk and found the note. She brought it to Mumme asking if he needed it.

"Hell, that's the guy I just hired," he said, laughing. "So I started being nicer to him."

The next year, in their first game, Dawson repaid his leap of faith with the call in the Arkansas-Monticello game.

"From that day on, I started listening to Shannon Dawson," Mumme said.

Dawson made a believer of Mumme. But he was no overnight success story.

In 2005, Mumme, a New Mexico native, was hired by New Mexico State, considered one of the toughest jobs in college football. Mumme couldn't resist the challenge and brought Dawson along.

The Aggies finished 0-12 in their first season and Mason Miller, a longtime offensive line coach for Leach and Mumme who was Dawson's roommate, recalled how bleak that season felt and how impossible the job seemed in Las Cruces.

"It's not hell," he said. "But you can see it from there."

But he got a merciful break from Mumme when Mike Dubose, the Alabama coach whom Mumme had beaten at Kentucky in 1997, got the head coach job at Millsaps in Jackson, Mississippi, in 2006, called Mumme, told him he wanted to run his offense and asked for recommendations. Mumme said he needed to hire Dawson, who had never been a playcaller before, to run his offense.

His star started to shine. The Majors improved from 2-7 to 7-4 and made the Division III playoffs for the first time since 1975. He moved up to FCS at Stephen F. Austin in East Texas in 2008 and became the offensive coordinator for the Lumberjacks, who were coming off an 0-11 season. SFA also became a playoff team and its quarterback, Jeremy Moses was a two-time All-American and won the Walter Payton award as the FCS National Player of the Year. He still holds the FCS record with 1,184 pass completions.

So when Holgorsen was hired at West Virginia in 2011, he hired Dawson as his receivers coach. Under him, Tavon Austin and Stedman Bailey were each named All-Americans and combined to tie or break 26 school records.

"Shannon was his first call," said Jake Spavital, the Baylor offensive coordinator who was a graduate assistant on that staff. "He absolutely crushed it."

MARIO CRISTOBAL, A former offensive lineman at Miami under Jimmy Johnson, is an exceptional recruiter who can land the type of talent most Air Raid coaches have never had, other than perhaps Riley.

So when Cristobal and Miami called Dawson after a 12-2 season under Holgorsen at Houston, Dawson went out on his own again. The last time he had left Holgorsen, he became Mark Stoops' offensive coordinator at Kentucky. The offense struggled, the Wildcats went 5-7, and Dawson was dismissed after one season. This would be a similar setup: An old-school coach wanting to run a wide-open offense, but with a hard-nosed edge.

Miller and Spavital said they've appreciated Dawson's evolution, noting the offense might look different than what fans consider Air Raid offenses, but they still see the hallmarks in the screen game and the route trees.

Last year, Dawson helped Cam Ward set four school records, breaking several of Bernie Kosar's marks from when The U was the standard for passing offenses. This year, he has got a big, bruising offensive line and power backs, built in Cristobal's image, and so Dawson has leaned in.

He admits the offense's performance hasn't always been a work of art, such as in the 10-3 win over Texas A&M. But he has said he's willing to settle in and do whatever is necessary to win, such as when Carson Beck came to him and suggested they just start leaning on the inside run in the second half of that game. Dawson has had a career filling stat sheets with gaudy numbers. Now he's just fine with doing whatever it takes to win.

"I've been a coordinator now for 17, 18 years," Dawson said. "The one thing that I've learned is to swallow my ego."

In the fourth quarter against the Aggies, Mark Fletcher ripped off a 56-yard run and finished with 17 carries for 172 yards. The Hurricanes survived and advanced.

"Those are the games that we've never won," Dawson said. "That's the beauty of who we are: We can fall back on hammering you because we're so physical."

Spavital jokes that he saw Dawson hand the ball off on fourth-and-2 against Ole Miss, which he's not sure he has ever done before. Dawson, though, says it still all derives from Mumme's philosophy. He and Leach were both infatuated with Emory Bellard's wishbone and Paul Johnson's flexbone triple option. The Air Raid isn't about simply throwing the ball, it's about exploiting matchups and getting the ball into playmakers' hands. This year, that happens to be a stable of backs behind one of the best offensive lines in football.

All four CFP semifinal coaches were former Nick Saban assistants, part of one of the greatest coaching lineages in college football history, with the blessings of a dynasty bestowed upon them. But Miller said Dawson is a great product of another type of coaching tree, where Mumme's acolytes had to propagate from meager roots. Amid Indiana's historic season, the Hurricanes are still underdogs by more than a touchdown, even playing in their home stadium in Miami Gardens. It's a suitable scenario for "the scrappy insurgency of the Air Raid," as Miller called it.

Dykes reached the national championship game in the 2022 season with a band of overachievers, beating Michigan in the Fiesta Bowl, but ran into a buzzsaw in Georgia. Mumme said Miami was always one of the places he and Leach long dreamed of seeing their offense with the type of athletes they could attract. Leach wanted the Hurricanes job but could never land it. Dawson got there, with a team loaded with five-star recruits and elite Florida talent such as Malachi Toney.

"This is what we always wanted," Mumme said. "None of us ever got the opportunity."

But now, there's another generation with a new chance. Mumme saw this taking shape at Strawberry Field against the Boll Weevils. And on Monday, against No. 1 Indiana, Dawson will take the field with the same offense, taught with the same drills he learned back on those Division III fields in Mississippi and Louisiana. And Mumme thinks we would be wise not to underestimate him.

"Shannon Dawson's the salt of the earth," Mumme said. "I would bet on him in anything."