The Games That Changed the Game

by Ron Jaworski

  Sunday No. 4

  1981 NFC DIVISIONAL PLAYOFF

  NEW YORK GIANTS VS. SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS

  Candlestick Park, San Francisco, California —January 3, 1982

  uring football season, NFL Films is my second home. I spend most of my work week at its Mount Laurel, New Jersey, facility, studying coaching tape in preparation for Monday Night Football telecasts and the ESPN NFL Matchup program. For a pigskin fanatic like myself, it’s like being in Disney World every day. The walls and shelves are decorated with photographs of current and former players, vintage programs, magazines, and collectibles. It is as much a football museum as it is a production company, and its most famous asset is the largest football film library in existence. The NFL Films vaults contain game footage dating from the nineteenth century all the way up through the current season. Equally vast in scope is its collection of interviews recorded over the years with football’s greatest players, coaches, writers, and historians. Here accounts and insights are catalogued, transcribed, and preserved for future generations of football fans.

  The interview archives were especially valuable to me as I began my research on Bill Walsh. He, of course, was the legendary coach of the San Francisco 49ers, winner of three Super Bowls, a man who has influenced the game’s strategic development as much as anyone in recent history. After a long battle with leukemia, Bill passed away in 2007, leaving a lasting legacy not only on the football field but also with the innovative ideas he so generously shared with others.

  Many of those innovations are discussed in exacting detail in the numerous interviews he granted to NFL Films throughout his time in pro football. He also donated to it hundreds of hours in lectures, meetings, and practice footage—all insightful lessons in the art of offensive football. As I sat watching and listening to the man deservedly nicknamed “the Genius,” I almost felt as if he were in the room with me. I feel privileged to present these pearls of wisdom anew in this chapter on the “West Coast offense"—a name he never really embraced but a strategy that is visible in every NFL game you see today.

  You know Brian Billick as an NFL head coach and TV analyst, but you may not be aware that after finishing college, he served as Walsh’s public relations assistant during Bill’s first two years in San Francisco. Billick later coached under Walsh disciple Dennis Green and is himself a strong believer in the principles of the West Coast attack. Brian later collaborated on a book with Bill and author James Peterson entitled Finding the Winning Edge. It’s a source I refer to often because it really explains the Walsh philosophy in its most basic terms.

  At the beginning of this book, I stated that the key to any team’s success in today’s NFL is exploiting favorable personnel matchups. Walsh made this a foundation of his system long before almost anyone else, and Billick was there when it happened. “Bill Walsh was at the forefront of isolating such matchups as, Who do we go after? What is our most favorable matchup? Where is our strength, and how do we manipulate that? Bill was the protagonist for a lot of things in this league: the way you practice, the way you game-plan,” added Billick. “He became a head coach right around the time there were profound rules changes that would open up NFL offenses, and Bill recognized his unique concepts could thrive under these conditions.”

  Al Saunders knew Bill for many years, going back to their shared college ties at San José State, and appreciated Walsh’s unique view of the sport: “Bill approached football as an intellectual game; a game of strategy and execution. He saw it as an art form, a thing of beauty, something to be choreographed with everything working in harmony. He thought many other coaches were narrow-minded in their views. The prevailing philosophy when he first started was how to make your team ‘tougher'—being able to pound your opponent into the ground. Walsh believed that everyone who made it to the NFL level was already tough. He wanted to magnify the mental aspects of football.”

  Former Giants quarterback Phil Simms recognized Bill’s special qualities while he was still a college senior. “Walsh worked me out before the ‘79 draft,” he recalled. “I’ll never forget that session. He was different from any other coach I can remember. He was just so polished. He’d say things like, ‘Try that a little softer,’ or ‘Make that throw a little more graceful.’ I must have thrown more than two hundred fifty passes for him that day, and he told me that no matter who he went with at quarterback that season, the guy would win the NFL passing title—and it would be me if I were picked by the 49ers.” Walsh actually had Simms rated higher than Joe Montana prior to that draft and had every intention of taking Phil in the second round. But when the Giants selected Simms as their first choice, the 49ers were forced to “settle” for Montana in the third round. I think we can safely say that everything worked out pretty well for both quarterbacks and both teams. And for what it’s worth, Walsh’s prediction wasn’t far off the mark. In 1979, Bill’s first year as an NFL head coach, he chose journeyman Steve DeBerg to be his quarterback. And although Steve wasn’t the league’s top-ranked passer, he did set an NFL record for passing attempts and completions.

  Before Bill Walsh, the NFL was basically a pitch-and-catch game. Aerial attacks relied primarily on seven-step drops by the quarterback, followed by deep downfield passes. Star quarterbacks like Pittsburgh’s Terry Bradshaw rarely thought about manipulating a defense. He’d just chuck it deep to Lynn Swann and didn’t care what the coverage was, because they were both more talented than their opponents. Walsh changed all that. In Finding the Winning Edge, Bill boiled it down to the basics: “The West Coast offense is really more of a philosophy and a methodical approach to teaching than it is a set of plays or formations. While it certainly has come to mean a ball-control passing game based on timing, rhythm, and precision, it also describes an entire offensive structure from play schematics, preparation, installation, implementation, game planning, execution, and, perhaps most importantly, total attention to every detail.”

  orthern California’s Silicon Valley was a center of discovery long before the hi-tech digital computer explosion. In the 1950s, it was the launch point for many future football geniuses, and their home base was the campus of San José State College. “Bill’s coach at San José was a guy named Bob Bronzan,” recalled Saunders. “Dick Vermeil and Tom Bass were Bill’s teammates, and I also played for Bob a few years later. We all ended up coaching in the NFL. Bob was really ahead of his time. I don’t think there was anyone else—certainly on the West Coast—who was doing some of the things he did on offense, and I’m sure this had a huge impact on Bill’s own philosophy.” Those innovations included sophisticated line blocking, running the option, wider end splits, and three-receiver sets. In another great book about Walsh, entitled The Genius, Bill told author David Harris that Bronzan was “a theorist and an excellent teacher who set a standard as to the detail of everything he coached and the organization skill he set up. He coached football like it was a science, a skilled sport instead of just head bashing.”

  Bronzan wasn’t Bill’s only college mentor. Another was Bud Winter, the Spartans’ track-and-field coach. “His two star runners, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won medals at the ‘68 Olympics in Mexico,” said Saunders. “Winter’s whole philosophy was about quickness; what he called the ‘explosiveness of sport.’ Practice session durations weren’t as vital as what you did in a concentrated time period. Bill took note of that and was one of the first to vary the length and frequency of his practices. To Bill, his system was more than just its language. It was how you practiced, how you taught it, prioritizing what was important.”

  After graduation, Bill coached high school ball before future Buffalo Bills head coach Marv Levy hired him as an assistant at Cal-Berkeley. Eventually Walsh joined a Stanford staff that would include John Ralston, Jim Mora, Sr., Mike White, and my future Eagles coach, Dick Vermeil. “At an academically rigorous school like Stanford, they weren’t able to get the quality athletes other Pac Eight schools could,” explained Saunders. “So their feeling was,
‘Let’s commit to throwing the ball, then go find quarterbacks and receivers,’ with the idea they’d outscheme and outdesign the better-talented opponents. They’d have to win by turning games into shoot-outs, which would force opponents like USC and UCLA to go out of character and pass more than they were really accustomed to doing.”

  Walsh’s work at Stanford caught the eye of Oakland Raiders coach and general manager Al Davis, and he gave Bill his first pro coaching job in 1966. “Al was using Sid Gillman’s offense,” recalled Walsh. “It was the most complete and conceptually broad-based offense in the history of pro football. That same year, we were playing in San Diego. I was sitting in my hotel room and happened to catch Sid’s coaching show on TV. He had Lance Alworth as his guest, and the two of them were discussing specific pass patterns. It hit me at that moment: I recognized this man’s brilliance—he was explaining football as an art form. I was enthralled with this aspect of the game. From that point on, I always looked at football this way, and seeing that TV show was the inspiration for this way of thinking.”

  Later on, Sid was helpful to Walsh’s career advancement in a more direct way. During the midsixties, coaching legend Paul Brown was residing in La Jolla, California, a coastal section of northern San Diego. Brown had been unceremoniously fired by the Cleveland Browns in 1963 and was living in exile, biding his time for a return to pro football. Sid and Paul were both Ohio State guys, former coaching rivals, and longtime friends, and they spent a great deal of time together in those days. In 1967, as Brown was formalizing his plans for the creation of the expansion Cincinnati Bengals, Sid told him about Walsh. He believed Bill would be a good fit for Brown’s new team and encouraged Paul to contact him.

  As Brown began assembling his staff, Walsh’s name came up again. “I was the first coach Paul Brown hired when he started the Bengals,” stated Tom Bass. “Bill and I knew each other from San José State, so we kept in touch. Cincinnati didn’t have a quarterback coach, and I knew Bill was out of work. He’d been running a semipro team called the San José Apaches after leaving the Raiders. I told Paul that Bill would be a good guy for our quarterbacks, and Paul ended up hiring him.”

  Working with Paul Brown was the dream of every aspiring football coach in America. Perhaps no one has a better understanding of Brown’s impact on the game than Bill Belichick, who knew Brown on both a personal and professional level. “My godfather, Bill Edwards, was with Paul Brown at Massillon High, Wittenberg College, Ohio State, and Cleveland, so I was going to Brown’s training camps from the time I could walk,” he explained. “I later went to the first few Bengals camps as well.

  “The way Paul conducted those training sessions was so much more professional and meticulous than any other camps I visited. Essentially, everything that Paul Brown did with those teams is what we do today. Every film breakdown, meeting, walk-through, and practice is based on Brown’s system. Every teaching progression, how plays complement each other—it all goes back to Brown. Ninety-five percent, if not more, of everything we do now comes from him. He is the father of professional football. What he did as a coach fifty years ago, everybody in the NFL is still basically doing the same thing.”

  Early on, Walsh absorbed as much knowledge from Brown as possible. “Bill just didn’t come right in and take over,” recalled Bass. “Those first few years, Paul ran the Cincinnati offense. Brown was a Hall of Fame coach and had a very successful passing game with Otto Graham at Cleveland, so he was used to throwing, and incorporated a lot of that in Cincinnati. Bill added some things, but it really wasn’t till 1970 that he started to put his stamp on the Bengals’ passing game.”

  Walsh got that opportunity in the midst of unfortunate circumstances. Cincinnati lost its star quarterback, a guy named Greg Cook, who Bill claimed had the most pure talent of any passer he ever coached. Considering that Walsh also had Montana and Steve Young, that’s quite a statement. The year before, Cook averaged 17.5 yards per completion—a rookie record that still stands. “Greg Cook could have been one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history,” stated Sam Wyche, who was Cook’s backup with the ‘69 Bengals. “He had size, the quick forearm release, and could scramble as well as throw deep. Our receivers could now lengthen their routes, and we could split guys out wider because Greg’s passes traveled so much faster and got to the target much quicker.”

  When Walsh was asked many years later what his Cincy offense would have looked like had Cook stayed healthy, Bill admitted, “It would have been totally different. Deep throws, all the time, down the field. Greg had so much confidence, and the players gravitated to him. He led the league in passing as a rookie on an expansion team, so that’s an indicator of how great he could have been. But he tore his rotator cuff, and the conventional procedure for that injury back then was extremely severe. There was no arthroscopic surgery in those days, and he never completely recovered from the operation.”

  Cook’s injury thrust a journeyman passer named Virgil Carter into the starting lineup. “Virgil was a smallish, weak-armed quarterback who really couldn’t go deep, but he was mobile,” said Billick. “He could throw quickly and made good decisions. Bill basically designed the three-and five-step quick-sprint offense around Carter.” Cincy’s running game wasn’t very consistent either, so Walsh was forced to create an offense that could function despite the Bengals’ talent limitations. “We were still essentially an expansion team,” admitted Walsh. “We knew we couldn’t score very many points. But we had to make as many first downs as possible to control the clock and get field position. We couldn’t run the ball because we didn’t have near the depth of offensive linemen or the talent in running backs. So consequently, a short passing game appeared to be the best way to control the ball.”

  What he ended up with was a short passing game that relied heavily on hooks, slants, screens, and underneath crossing routes. It achieved positive results almost immediately, as the Bengals enjoyed their first winning season in 1970, only their third season. The West Coast offense was up and running—although it certainly wasn’t known by that name at the time. In fact, it didn’t even have a name! Given its lineage, it really should be called the “Ohio River” or “Midwest” offense. As Bill wrote in Finding the Winning Edge, “We had no idea that we were creating a template for the future of offense in the NFL. We did what we did just to stay competitive, then expanded on it as we continued to have success.”

  With Carter under center, running this controlled passing scheme, the Bengals won the AFC Central. It ranks among Paul Brown’s greatest coaching achievements. “It was a privilege to be around Paul,” said Walsh. “He was a legend, an icon. He controlled everything initially, but in those later years he leaned more on his management skills and handling of people, leaving the strategy and tactics of the game to people like myself. It was a tremendous opportunity to develop my ideas.”

  Eventually Cincinnati’s personnel improved, and so did its record, with the addition of weapons like quarterback Ken Anderson and receivers Charlie Joiner and Isaac Curtis. But when Brown retired at the end of the ‘75 season, his successor would not be Walsh. “We had an excellent offensive line coach named Bill ‘Tiger’ Johnson, who was strong and sturdy,” Walsh remembered. “I think Paul thought that this was the form of command you needed to have to be an NFL head coach, so he picked Johnson over me.” Brown may have believed that Walsh wasn’t tough enough to run the team, an idea that would haunt Bill for years. Deeply hurt and disappointed, Walsh resigned from the Bengals and headed west.

  y the time I left Cincinnati, that offensive system had been really refined,” said Walsh. “We were doing things that people hadn’t seen since the days when Clark Shaughnessy was coaching those explosive Rams offenses of the fifties. So I signed on with the Chargers as offensive coordinator and installed it there with Dan Fouts. From there I became head coach at Stanford, which was a great place for me to be. The Stanford athlete could pick up my system so easily—much more readily than many pro athletes. An
d we did very well at that level. That was important, because had I not been successful there, I would never have gotten the opportunity to be an NFL head coach.”

  That opportunity came in 1979 from the San Francisco 49ers, arguably the NFL’s worst franchise. With a roster of aging or untested players, and with few draft choices available, Walsh took a deep breath, dug out his old Bengals playbook, and put the same offense into practice in San Francisco. The immediate results weren’t pretty. “After his first year in San Francisco, when he went 2-14, Bill had real misgivings about whether this was the right approach and was ready to get out of pro football,” revealed Saunders. I actually remember sitting in Dick Vermeil’s office one day after practice, overhearing a phone conversation he was having with Walsh. Because they were close friends, Bill was very candid with Vermeil about his problems. Dick really had to talk Bill off the cliff, and, of course, things did get better in San Francisco. One big reason for that improvement was the emergence of Joe Montana as the Niners’ quarterback.

  Joe didn’t fit the NFL mold for star quarterbacks of that era, but that was fine with Walsh. “Bill didn’t want the prototype passer that everyone was drafting in the seventies,” explained Vermeil. “Big guys with strong arms wasn’t what he was looking for. He felt that some of the prospects with those tools lacked the proper footwork. And he felt that the game never slowed down enough for them; that they had trouble reading defenses quickly enough.”

  Montana was different, and Bill recognized it almost immediately. “The quick, decisive movement of his feet, his agility and balance, and his rhythm in throwing the ball were something to see,” Walsh recalled. “I’d never worked with anyone as quick and mobile as this man. He was very accurate with his arm, had an excellent passing touch, and his passes were thrown in areas where receivers could do something with them.” Montana also proved to be a quick study, as his 49ers position coach Sam Wyche could attest: “When I taught Joe, he would lean in when you started talking to him—almost like he was going to eat the last word off your tongue if you didn’t hurry up and finish the sentence.”