Oklahoma State’s Air Raid doesn’t look like the Air Raid Mike Leach built, and Eric Morris knows it.
That’s part of the point.
Morris, now the head coach at Oklahoma State, came up through Leach’s coaching tree and still carries that offensive DNA with him. He played receiver for Leach, later coached wideouts at Texas Tech under Kliff Kingsbury, and brought that system with him through head coaching stops at Incarnate Word, North Texas and now Stillwater. But as Morris explained during Big 12 media days and again during fall workouts, he’s put his own stamp on it.
The biggest difference is the run game.
Last season at North Texas, Caleb Hawkins ran for 1,434 yards in Morris’ offense, even as quarterback Drew Mestemaker piled up 4,379 passing yards. Hawkins finished No. 5 nationally in rushing yards, and North Texas ranked No. 25 in the country in rushing yards per game at 194.4.
In other words, this wasn’t a case of the ground game stealing from the passing game. Both worked together.
For Morris, that’s no accident. He said he became fixated on why Texas Tech teams with Patrick Mahomes could post huge offensive numbers but never turn that production into a Big 12 title.
“I was tired of [you know] at Texas Tech multiple times being the number one offense in the nation and not having any championships that come along with it,” Morris said.
So he went looking at the teams that actually finished the job. Clemson in 2018.
LSU in 2019. Both were elite through the air, but both also ran the ball at a high level.
Clemson’s title team gained 3,723 rushing yards, an average of 248.9 per game. LSU’s championship group added 2,502 rushing yards, or 166.8 per game.
Together, those two teams threw the ball 1,075 times in those seasons and still kept defenses honest on the ground.
That was the lesson Morris took with him.
“When I went back … the people that were winning championships were rushing for about 150 to 175 yards a game,” Morris said.
He started building around that idea at Incarnate Word, and the results eventually followed. In 2018, UIW averaged 160.5 rushing yards per game and went 6-5.
In 2020, played in spring 2021, the Cardinals averaged 175.2 rushing yards and finished 3-3. Morris then returned to head coaching at North Texas in 2023, and the pattern kept taking shape: 191.2 rushing yards per game and a 5-7 record in 2023, 160.6 rushing yards and a 6-7 mark in 2024, then 194.4 rushing yards per game and a 12-2 season in 2025.
Morris isn’t claiming the numbers tell a perfect story on their own. But he’s seen enough to believe the formula works when the roster supports it.
“We applied it in our game planning at Incarnate Word and we started winning [conference] championships,” Morris said. “The same thing last year with our team [at North Texas]. We were explosive passing the ball and holistically we were also really efficient at running the ball.”
That’s the version of the Air Raid Morris is betting on now at Oklahoma State. It still wants explosive plays.
It still wants the ball in the air. But it also wants enough production on the ground to make the whole thing hum - even if Leach himself might not have signed off on every detail.
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