The Blind Side

by Michael Lewis

  The performance of Walsh’s quarterbacks suggested a radical thought: that in the most effective passing attack in the NFL, and on one of the most successful teams in the history of pro football, the quarterbacks were fungible. The system was the star. Walsh had imported into pro football the spirit of a Japanese auto plant—Total Quality Management. A lot of people in and around pro football were uncomfortable with the idea, and the benching of Joe Montana, for them, was the final straw. “Walsh was wanting to bench him and play his other guy,” hollered former star quarterback Terry Bradshaw, doing his best to speak for the man on the street, “because if Young can go in there and do it, then Walsh looks like another genius again. You know, he really believes that genius tag. But the genius really wears number sixteen [Montana’s number]. That’s the genius, and he [Walsh] was messing with him.”

  And yet when Young eventually took over the San Francisco 49er offense for good, he led the league in passing five out of his first six years, won a Super Bowl, and wound up with his face on a bust in the Hall of Fame. Perhaps because Young had played for other NFL teams, he appreciated better than most what Walsh had brought to the passing game. “When I was at Tampa,” Young told sports writer Glenn Dickey, after he took over the 49ers quarterback job, “the coaches told me to hold the ball until the receiver came open. By that time everybody was on top of me. Now I have a progression of receivers, and I hit the first one who’s open. It might be only a three yard gain, and maybe I could have waited and hit a receiver another ten yards down the field, but I’ve completed the pass, moved the ball, and added to the frustration of defensive linemen trying to stop me.”

  Young, like Montana, came to be viewed as a born star whose success in pro football was inevitable. But before Young arrived there were others, and no one in their right minds mistook them for first-tier NFL quarterbacks. In 1986, for instance, Jeff Kemp, Dartmouth College graduate and son of future vice-presidential candidate Jack, stepped in for the injured Montana for ten games. Kemp was five eleven and had trouble seeing over the heads of his blockers. To clear the view, Walsh had the linemen go out after the pass rushers rather than fall back, as they typically would do. The tactic was less effective in delaying the rush but it did, momentarily, create a window through which Kemp might glimpse the field. The bill for his view arrived milliseconds after he released the football, when some monster hammered him into the ground. In his career leading up to the moment he replaced Joe Montana—a career spent entirely with the Los Angeles Rams—Kemp had completed fewer than half his passes. That year in San Francisco he completed nearly 60 percent of his passes, for an impressive 7.77 yards per attempt, and posted one of the highest passer ratings in the NFL. Then Kemp, too, was injured. His replacement was a fellow named Mike Moroski, so obscure that any question concerning his NFL career would be considered out of bounds in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Moroski had been with the 49ers for exactly two weeks before he became, by default, their starting quarterback. He completed 57.5 percent of his passes.

  Eventually people must have noticed. As Walsh performed miracle after miracle with his quarterbacks, a more general trend emerged in NFL strategy: away from the run and toward the pass.* In 1978, NFL teams passed 42 percent of the time and ran the ball 58 percent of the time. Each year, right through until the mid-1990s, they passed more and ran less until the ratios were almost exactly reversed: in 1995, NFL teams passed 59 percent of the time and ran 41 percent of the time. It’s not hard to see why; the passing game was improving, and the running game was stagnant. Every year NFL teams ran the ball thousands of times, and every year the league averaged between 3.9 and 4.1 yards per carry. With just the tiniest, seemingly random variations from year to year, the yield from this mill was monotonously consistent going all the way back to 1960. Some teams did a bit better, of course, and some did a bit worse. The league as a whole, however, never figured out how to make the running game yield even a fraction of a yard more than it always had. It was possible that the running game awaited some innovative coach to figure out how to make it work more efficiently. And it could be that the steel industry is just awaiting the CEO who can find gold in its mills.

  The passing game behaved like an altogether different and more promising business. In 1960, an NFL pass netted you, on average, 4.6 yards. That was better than running the ball, but then you had to consider that a pass was still twice as likely to cost you the ball. Quarterbacks threw interceptions a bit more than 6 percent of the time while running backs fumbled the ball only about 3 percent of the time. The trade-off must have seemed unappealing to NFL coaches, as passing attempts per game actually fell a bit through the 1960s. By 1975, teams were throwing the ball, on average, just 24 times each game. Then something happened: teams began to pass more each year than they had the year before until, by the early 1990s, NFL quarterbacks were throwing the ball, on average, 34 times per game. All else being equal, this should have been a disaster for those quarterbacks. In a business with normal returns, the more you produce of a good the less you can sell it for. The passing game didn’t exhibit normal returns. From a yield of 4.6 yards each throw, the average gain climbed steadily from the late 1970s until the early 1990s, until it settled in at around 7 yards per passing attempt. Each attempt was significantly more likely to be caught by a receiver. Right through the 1960s, NFL quarterbacks hit on fewer than 50 percent of their passes. In the 1970s, quarterbacks not only began to throw more often but to complete a higher percentage of their passes. Again, the trend was gradual but relentless, until the early 2000s when, on average, NFL quarterbacks made good on 60 percent of their throws.

  The more closely you examined the passing business, the stranger it appeared. You might think, for instance, that the more the quarterback threw the ball, the less picky he’d be about where he threw it, and the more easily a defense could anticipate the pass and intercept it. Apparently not: the more often pro quarterbacks put the ball up in the air, the less likely it was to be intercepted. From the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, the interception rate fell steadily—from 6 percent all the way down to 3 percent. By 1995, a quarterback was no more likely to be intercepted than a runner was to fumble the ball. The running game was a dull, barely profitable business that exhibited little potential for growth. The passing game looked like a booming software company: the more quarterbacks produced, the bigger their profit margins. Adding to the mystery, the passing boom occurred as the number of teams in the league, and the number of games each team played, expanded. There were twice as many pro quarterbacks in 1995 as there were in 1960, and more nearly always means worse. In this peculiar instance, more meant better. In 1960, NFL quarterbacks threw 7,583 passes and completed 49.6 percent of them, while throwing 470 interceptions (6.2 percent of all passes were intercepted). In 2005, NFL quarterbacks threw 16,430 passes, completed 59.5 percent of them, and had 507 of them intercepted (only 3.1 percent of all passes were intercepted).

  An obvious reason for the boom in the passing game is the changes made to the rules of the NFL game. In 1978, NFL linemen were permitted, for the first time in history, to use their hands when they blocked. Overnight the image of the lineman with his elbows stuck out in imitation of a coat hanger became charmingly antiquated. That same year defensive backs were forbidden to make contact with receivers more than five yards beyond the line of scrimmage. Both rule changes helped the passing game along. But rule changes alone didn’t begin to explain why a system of passing created before the changes had proven so effective: they don’t explain Bill Walsh’s success with quarterbacks. What seems to have happened is that NFL offenses began to pass the ball more effectively, the new passing attacks pleased the crowds and were good for business, and so NFL rulemakers made a point of encouraging them. As Indianapolis Colts general manager Bill Polian, who sat on the committee to change the rules, puts it, “Innovation drove the rule changes rather than the other way around.”

  And the 1970s and early 1980s were a golden era for innovation in the p
assing game. The football field is usually a tightly strung ecosystem, an efficient economy: there is seldom a free lunch on it. Of course there are the weaknesses and strengths of individual players. The other team might have an inept cornerback, for instance, and the smart coach will know how to exploit him. Systematic opportunity is rare. Yet Walsh had stumbled upon a systematic opportunity. The short, precisely timed passing game might not offer an entirely free lunch, but the discount to the retail price was steep. Bill Polian remembers when he first studied the 49ers’ offense on tape, in early 1991. Then the general manager of the AFC Champion Buffalo Bills, he was waiting to see which team in the soon-to-be-played NFC Championship game he would face in the Super Bowl, the 49ers or Bill Parcells’s New York Giants. What he saw on the tape persuaded him that Bill Walsh’s passing game would change football. “That was the Eureka moment for me,” he said.

  The Bills subsequently borrowed liberally from Walsh, as did the Colts once Polian moved there. As did many other teams, covertly. An astonishing number of Walsh’s assistants—Andy Reid, Mike Sherman, Steve Mariucci, George Seifert, John Gruden, Mike Shanahan, Denny Green, Gary Kubiak—left to become NFL head coaches. When, in the mid-1990s, Brett Favre of the Green Bay Packers stepped onto center stage and took over the role of God’s gift to the quarterbacking position, a Walsh disciple (Packer head coach and former Walsh assistant Mike Holmgren) stood behind the curtain pulling the strings. The story wasn’t quite as simple as Bill Walsh created this offense—which came to be called “the West Coast offense”*—and everyone else ripped it off. But it was close: by the late 1990s, every NFL team had a rhythm passing game. “In that sense,” says Bill Polian of the Indianapolis Colts, “everyone in the NFL today runs Bill Walsh’s offense. Because the rhythm passing game is all Walsh.”

  This single strand of the history of the game—the strand that would become the rope tied around Michael Oher’s waist and haul him up in the world—is clearer than most. Over time, the statistics of NFL quarterbacks, on average, came to resemble the statistics of Bill Walsh’s quarterbacks—because other coaches borrowed heavily from Walsh. The passing game was transformed from a risky business with returns not all that much greater than the running game to a clearly superior way to move the football down the field. As a result, the players most important to the passing game became, relatively, a great deal more valuable. The force that pulled on the rope around Michael Oher’s waist was the mind of Bill Walsh.

  But on the afternoon of January 3, 1982, that mind had not been fully appreciated. It hadn’t infected anything except a few quarterbacks. Football strategy has no inevitable path it must follow. Walsh still had no sense that his ideas were likely to be pilfered, or that they were even recognized as ideas. The drift of the game was in his favor—“The rule changes played right into our hands,” he said—but hardly inexorable. The only proof of any concept in the NFL was a championship ring. Walsh knew he couldn’t win with offense alone any more than a defensive-minded coach could win with defense alone. And defense, to Walsh’s mind, was not a strategic challenge but a matter of finding better players. That was something that he hadn’t been able to do. Toward the end of the 1980 season, after yet another close loss, in which his team had scored a surprising number of points, Walsh had made up his mind to quit. “I spent the five hour flight home sitting by myself,” he later wrote. “I looked out the window so no one could see me break down. It was too much for anyone. I was emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted. I decided I would resign as soon as the season ended; I believed I had done as much as I could do and the job was just too much for me.”

  He had lasted into the 1981 season, just, but a successful regular season wasn’t enough. He was still at risk of winding up a cliché of free market capitalism: the inventor whose brainchild would lead to profit for others and nothing for himself. For fifteen seasons he had performed miracles with quarterbacks. He had just done something truly extraordinary: take the worst offense in the NFL and, in two years, turn it into the seventh best. And still no one knew. “If I had stopped then,” he said, “it [his passing game] would have been discarded. There wasn’t anyone else. Everyone was just watching to see how we would do. If it worked, nobody said anything. If it didn’t work, everyone said, ‘Look, that shows this stuff doesn’t work.’”* He’d brought to the NFL passing game the precision and efficiency of a Japanese auto factory. And now, at the very moment he was ready to export to America, Godzilla had arrived to tear the factory apart.

  Inside football, the argument between brains and brawn never has been settled, and probably never will be. The argument less and less found its way into words off the field, but on the field it reprised itself in action and strategy, over and over again. And on the chilly wet afternoon in Candlestick Park, it was about to play out in an extreme form, with Walsh as the brains and Bill Parcells as the brawn. Parcells was deeply suspicious of the overt use of intellect on a football sideline. He knew that Walsh claimed to script the first 25 plays of every game in advance, but later said “that scripting was a bunch of bullshit. They never got past number eight.” And Parcells’s influence in football, as measured by the number of his assistants who would go on to coach other teams, was nearly as great as Walsh’s: Bill Belichick, Al Groh, Tom Coughlin, Sean Payton. (By 2006, two thirds of the teams in the NFL had been run by a coaching descendant of Walsh or Parcells.) After Parcells later won his first Super Bowl, in 1986, he said his style of football “never had anything to prove. It’s the fancy-pants stuff that needs to prove itself.” Walsh was the latest embodiment of fancy-pants. In 1981, people were starting to take notice of his new and improved little passing game, but Parcells had something new and improved, too: a passing game destructomatic called Lawrence Taylor. Just as Walsh was lowering the risk of throwing the ball, Parcells was raising the risk to the men who threw it.

  At the end of the 1981 season Taylor was for Parcells still a shiny new toy with a complicated control panel that he was figuring out how to use. No matter what Parcells told his rookie linebacker to do, Taylor’s instinct was to find the quarterback and kill him. Later in his career Taylor enjoyed letting people think he had a gift for freelancing, but during his rookie year, at least, he often didn’t know what he was meant to do—and so, unable to think up a better idea, he just went after the passer. The sixth game of that season, against the St. Louis Cardinals, was a case in point. “The deal was,” said Parcells, “that whichever side the tight end lined up on, the linebacker facing him was supposed to drop back into pass coverage. Usually the tight end lined up on the right side, and Lawrence blitzed. But early in the game they moved the tight end over to the left, to deal with Lawrence. He rushes anyway, and sacks the quarterback. I went over and said, ‘Lawrence, they got the tight end on your side, you need to be back in coverage.’ He says, ‘Oh yeah, Coach, oh yeah.’ I said, ‘Watch out, ’cause they gonna do that again.’ ‘Yeah, yeah, Coach, okay. I’m ready.’ Third quarter they do it again, they put the tight end on his side…and Lawrence blitzes again. This time he hits the quarterback, knocks the ball out of his hands, and [defensive end] George Martin picks it up and runs for a touchdown. Everyone’s jumping on top of each other in the end zone and I’m pissed. I went and found him on the bench and he sees me and says, ‘I didn’t do it again, did I?’ I said, ‘Lawrence, we don’t even have what you’re doing.’ And he says, ‘Well, we better put it in on Monday, Coach, ’cause it works!’”

  And Parcells loved it! “I’m a little Neanderthal,” Parcells said. “I think defense is the key to any sport. That was my intent when I started coaching. That’s what I wanted to coach. Not football. Football defense. It’s not glamorous to those who are into what’s aesthetically pleasing. But it’s glamorous to me. ’Cause I think defense is the key to the game.” It went without saying that the key to defense was passion and violence.

  Walsh’s temperament—and his football interests—couldn’t have been more different. He preferred offense
because offense was strategic. “There’s just so much to offense that a coach really does have control of,” he said. “Defense is just a matter of having the personnel.” As a rookie NFL head coach, Bill Walsh was able to stand on the sideline in the pose of a man before a fire with a glass of port in one hand and a volume of Matthew Arnold’s essays in the other. He kept about him a degree of calm that led Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray to write of him, “you half expect his headset is playing Mozart.” Parcells lived out his emotional life inside the game; Walsh aimed to cleanse himself of emotion before the game ever started. The effort was immense, as he had a great deal of emotion to dispose of, and after some games he could be seen brushing tears from his eyes. But once “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play, he said, “I’d tell myself, ‘Here you go. Start pulling away, start computerizing. You must think clearly and remove yourself’….It was like watching a game through a window.”

  Lawrence Taylor was a problem new to Walsh. Lawrence Taylor smashed the window. Walsh’s system enabled Joe Montana to get rid of the ball faster than anyone in football, and normally that was fast enough. Now it wasn’t. “Taylor was so quick,” said Walsh, “that no matter how quickly we executed, he could still get there.” To leave some running back or tight end to deal with Taylor was out of the question: Walsh needed his tight ends out spreading the field, and Taylor ate running backs for breakfast. The next most obvious candidate to block Taylor was the left tackle, as he lined up closest to the point where Taylor crossed the line of scrimmage. But the 49ers’ left tackle, Dan Audick, was six two, 250 pounds, and even less well designed to handle Taylor than the Eagles’ Stan Walters. “It’s when I started to play left tackle,” Audick said, “that the coaches were just starting to discover that they needed their best lineman at left tackle. I think they just wanted me to play the position as a kind of final experiment to verify their hypothesis” (Audick might not have been big or fast, but he was charming).