The Games That Changed the Game

by Ron Jaworski

  The pairing of Walsh and Montana became a match made in football heaven, because Bill now had the quarterback that would allow him to redefine the NFL passing game. “Bill was absolutely meticulous in his precision at practice,” recalled Billick. “Once Montana threw a little swing pass that the receiver caught right in stride—absolutely perfect. And Walsh scolded him! He said, ‘Joe, you’ve got to get it about a yard in front of him; I want him going downhill.’ And you’re thinking, Man, he’s really being unrealistic here. But it was just that attention to detail that points to his main strength.”

  Montana caught on quickly. “Learning the basics of the offense was really pretty simple,” Joe stated. “Making the actual throws to the right person in a short time was a little more difficult. But that’s why Bill had us practice these plays over and over, so that when it did happen in a game, you knew how to react. First of all, you were always attacking a specific area on the field, so you knew where to go right away. You also were aware where your receivers were. And there were always three potential targets, sometimes even four. Bill tried to get as many people out there for me as he could.”

  A critical element to the West Coast offense was the run after catch, or RAC: the ability of 49ers receivers to tack on additional yardage once they caught the ball. Bill made a statistical study of quarterbacks who’d thrown for 3,000 yards and found that half of those yards came from the flight of the ball—the rest was yardage made afterward. So he drilled constantly to make sure that 49ers receivers caught passes above the waist. This way, they’d be able to keep running after a completion. Bill understood that the RAC is as dependent upon a quarterback’s passing accuracy as a receiver’s ability to separate from defenders.

  My Monday Night Football partner Jon Gruden is a West Coast offense disciple and understands the system’s complexities, because he taught it to his quarterbacks in Philly, Green Bay, Oakland, and Tampa. “There’s a lot of volume to it: runs, passes, protection schemes,” he explained. “Many of its plays start out looking different but end up being the same. The offense has the illusion of complexity with all its different formations and personnel groupings, but it remains simple and basic in terms of the plays themselves. The core philosophy is that if the defense hasn’t seen it, they can’t prepare for it.

  “You want to use all five eligible receivers, and the main object is to complete passes,” he emphasized. “If your quarterback does this, he’ll be successful, and if he’s successful, your whole organization will be successful. One of the most important goals Walsh’s offense accomplished was keeping the quarterback safe. The number one risk you have when you throw the football is your quarterback getting killed. One hit, and he’s gone for the season, and it’s amazing how inept some teams are once their top guy goes down. With the West Coast attack, you have what’s called a progression passing system. You have the primary receiver, the companion receiver, and the outlet receiver. There’s always someone to throw to. I never met any quarterback who didn’t like this system.”

  Bill assisted everyone, not just the quarterback, by scripting the first twenty-five or so plays of every game. “It helped take a lot of the stress out of the initial stages of the game, especially with our offensive linemen,” Walsh explained. “You can set up one play to another this way, set up your play passes, your reverses, when you go deep. And you can establish specific formations that you’d like to see your opponent adapt or adjust to.” An additional benefit was that it made it hard for defenses to identify the 49ers’ tendencies, especially in normal down-and-distance situations. Bill’s play choices were often unorthodox and unpredictable, so defenders had to be ready for anything.

  As he had done in Cincinnati, Walsh called more short passes instead of running plays. Some writers referred to them as “long handoffs,” and by throwing so much, the Niners challenged slower linebackers to cover faster receivers in the underneath area. This heightened the chances for San Francisco to turn short catches into much longer gains. Bill had to do this during his first seasons with the Niners, because he didn’t have a great back or a big line to block for him. In addition, it just wasn’t what Bill wanted to do. “Teams that depended on their running game would usually get upset two or three times a year by an inferior opponent who would hit a couple of big plays, and then they couldn’t overcome that unexpected deficit,” he noted. “In a sixteen-game schedule, there’s going to be a number of times that your running game just isn’t going to get it done. That’s why it was so important for me to develop our passing game.”

  My first reaction to the West Coast offense was one of exasperation. In Philadelphia, when we studied film of an upcoming opponent who’d just played the 49ers, I wanted to switch off the projector because I felt I was wasting my time. San Francisco’s formations, splits, and motions were the very antithesis of our Eagles offense. What the Niners did was so different that opposing defenses were responding to stuff that had absolutely no relation to our offense. And the more I watched, the more irritated I became.

  It seemed as if it didn’t take much of a quarterback to run their offense. Nothing was going on downfield, there were no deep drops, just a lot of dinks and dunks. I just didn’t buy into it. I felt like their receivers didn’t run precise routes to get open. Instead they needed other players to help them get free with “picks” and “rubs,” which are crossing routes by teammates that got in the way of defenders. I also got angry at what I perceived to be a lack of effort on certain pass routes. A lot of times, you’d simply see receivers eliminated from the play, and that burned me up. After the snap, the back-side receiver did little more than jog into his pattern, because the play simply wasn’t designed to go to him. In the early years of Walsh’s West Coast schemes, all the effort on each play went toward getting just one receiver open. Whereas most offenses were full-field reads—seeking to find voids throughout an entire defense—Walsh believed in half-field or area reads, spotting individual locations to exploit a defense. I didn’t appreciate the effectiveness of this approach until much later. All I could think of in those days was that with the Gillman offense we ran with Philly, each receiver had better be busting his ass on every route, because he could be the primary target.

  Gradually though, the West Coast offense began to grow on me. For one thing, the 49ers began winning big, and did it with average talent. They didn’t have burners like Jerry Rice, John Taylor, or Roger Craig on their roster yet, so if people were going to get open, the offense’s design was going to have to spring them loose. Something else caught my eye, too: Montana was completing almost 65 percent of his passes, a ridiculous number for that time. When I was league MVP in 1980, I made good on only 57 percent of my throws. And this wasn’t simply because Joe was so good. His percentages improved because Walsh’s system had reduced many of the risk factors in the passing game with shorter drops, quick releases, and high-percentage throws.

  On-field success led to growing confidence for Bill’s players. They also came to realize something Paul Brown never did: that this distinguished looking, white-haired guy could also bring the hammer down when it was called for. “You looked at him and think, ‘He looks like a professor,’ ” receiver Dwight Clark observed. “Maybe that’s how he appeared, but he was a hard-nosed guy, and when he needed to, he could be really tough on people. He could really chew you out when you made stupid mistakes. You couldn’t be a ‘dumb jock’ in Bill’s offense because of all the adjustments; all the plays that were installed in such a quick period of time. There was a lot of memorization. You really had to be on the ball.”

  The team tripled its previous win total in 1980 as Montana took over the offense, but San Francisco still wasn’t considered a contender entering the ‘81 season. The 49ers had some solid players, including veteran receivers Clark, Freddie Solomon, and tight end Charle Young, and an undersized but athletic offensive line. Still, it didn’t seem like that would be enough to make a difference, and most NFL people, myself included, were unconvince
d there’d be much improvement. Walsh himself had only modest expectations. “At the start of the 1981 season,” he said, “I just wanted our team to be competitive and start gaining some respect around the NFL, because we had lost for so long. People liked watching us play because we were interesting, but then we also began winning—a lot—because we played more fiercely than anyone in the league. We beat some of the best teams that year strictly on our intensity.”

  The 49ers rolled to a 13-3 record, the most regular-season wins in franchise history, earning their first trip to the playoffs since 1972. California football fans dreamed of a possible intrastate Super Bowl showdown between the two most pass-proficient teams in the league: San Francisco and the wildly explosive Air Coryell attack of the San Diego Chargers. “Both Walsh and Coryell lived by the pass, viewing the running game as a growth off the passing game,” noted Al Saunders. “The biggest difference between the two was that Bill’s offense was as much lateral as it was vertical. Hooks and slant patterns in the zones as the basis of a controlled passing game, occupying defenders. He liked big receivers catching the ball inside, looking for windows to sit in.

  “Coryell was all about ‘running through windows,’ attacking vertically,” he pointed out. “Walsh’s receivers were physical guys like Dwight Clark. Coryell’s receivers were little guys like Charlie Joiner and John Jefferson. For Coryell, the key word in his attack was seams. In Bill’s, it was angles: short throws to get long gains. Bill was patient. Don was all about getting huge chunks, quick strikes.” When later asked to compare his offense with San Diego’s, Walsh said, “Coryell’s offense had lower completion percentages but a much higher return if the play was successful. One main difference between us is that we managed to move the ball with less talent than our opponents. Air Coryell required more talented players, a passer who could get the ball there, and men who can really run—a lot of them. Our offense was devised and developed out of necessity until we could get the right players in place. Don already had the talent and used it brilliantly.”

  There was also a philosophical connection between Sid Gillman and Walsh. Both Bill’s scheme and Sid’s depended on timing and rhythm. There was also a great deal of emphasis placed on three essential quarterback attributes: (1) quick feet in gaining clearance from the center, (2) downfield focus in the face of pressure, and (3) touch and accuracy to deliver catchable balls. Both were creative men who saw football as an intellectual exercise. But they were also sticklers for practice and repetition, demanding that their players succeed thanks to what they were taught, as opposed to raw talent or improvisation. Walsh often said, “Coaches that depend on the athletic ability of the athletes are strictly at their mercy, because they can’t be sure of any continuity or efficiency in what they do.” That’s why his West Coast offense was so successful no matter which players were in it—and why whichever team San Francisco was to face in the ‘81 postseason would certainly have its hands full.

  ere’s a quick trivia question: During his Hall of Fame career, what quarterback did Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor sack more times than any other? Don’t bother looking it up—I’m the poor soul who holds that dubious distinction. I literally have firsthand knowledge of how good a player L.T. was.

  In an NFL Films career retrospective produced after his retirement, Taylor also let me have it verbally. “Of the twenty-eight quarterbacks who played at that time, Jaworski may have been the slowest,” L.T. said with a chuckle. “Ron wasn’t going to do a whole lot of running. He always liked to throw to his right, and I always came from the left, so whenever I hit him, it was a blindside shot. If I had another twenty-seven Ron Jaworskis in the league, I wouldn’t have had to retire for fifty years! He sent me to my first couple of Pro Bowls.”

  And he went to a bunch of them, while also collecting a pair of Super Bowl rings and a bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Dick Vermeil claimed, “Taylor and Reggie White are the two finest defensive players that ever played the game. Lawrence forced teams to change the way they blocked. You could never go back to the old ways after Taylor came to the NFL.” Broadcaster and Cardinals Hall of Fame tackle Dan Dierdorf confessed, “In my entire career, Taylor was the only guy that, when we broke the huddle, we knew exactly where he was. You better believe we game-planned for Lawrence Taylor, every snap of every game.”

  L.T. was a terror from the day he signed his first professional contract in 1981. “I remember the first time I saw Lawrence in practice,” said Phil Simms. “On the first six plays, Taylor sacked the quarterback six times. The coaches were all yelling at the offensive linemen—I’d never seen anything like it.” Defensive teammate Harry Carson noted, “We changed to a 3–4 defense because of Taylor. Bill Parcells used him as an unconventional outside linebacker, pressuring the quarterback. If Lawrence had been a more traditional player, he would have dropped back into pass coverage and would have been good at that. But because they utilized him as they did, he made history.”

  Taylor’s talent was simply too great to stay shackled within the defined parameters of the position. “When I got to New York, a linebacker was just a linebacker,” Taylor remarked. “He played the run, dropped back into coverage, and that was it. Coach Parcells allowed me to do some new things. He did this because I made too many mistakes in pass defense, where I’d drop when I wasn’t supposed to. My answer for all that was, if you forget what to do—or don’t even know what to do—just rush the quarterback and see what happens.” What happened was a first-year performance that got his team to the playoffs, earned him a trip to the Pro Bowl, and handed him the NFL Rookie of the Year Award.

  The Giants liked to put Taylor in one-on-one situations, looking to create mismatches. There was no one else like L.T. at the time, a guy his size with 4.4 speed, and he revolutionized the game, altering the way quarterbacks had to think. He changed the way teams designed their protection. It was Taylor who forced Joe Gibbs to switch to a two-tight-end offense in Washington because Joe didn’t want L.T. to have a shortened corner to rush from the blind side. In Philadelphia, I always asked for a tight end next to the tackle to move Taylor away from me. Judging by his sack numbers on ol’ no. 7, that bright idea didn’t always work.

  Taylor wasn’t “L.T.” right away. That first year, he wasn’t initially a force you had to build your game plan around. But he was a load even then. Our Eagles teams tried blocking him with running backs, and both Louie Giammona and Wilbert Montgomery gave it their best shot, but L.T. just tossed them aside. Lucky for me, in those early years, New York mistakenly put him in pass coverage, where he was only an average player. I was much happier seeing him out there in the middle zone, far away from me. The Giants finally realized that Lawrence was best suited to rushing the passer. They turned him loose the same way the Raiders did with their Hall of Fame linebacker Ted Hendricks. That meant letting Taylor line up all over the defense, with the freedom to read and go.

  Taylor’s arrival in ‘81 was a major reason why New York went 9–7, its first winning season in ten years. Up till then, the Eagles had beaten New York in a dozen straight, going back to 1975. As reigning NFC champions, we played Big Blue on opening day in ‘81 and won again. That was L.T.'s first NFL game, and it wasn’t very memorable: a business-as-usual 24–10 victory for us. But in the rematch a few months later, the Giants beat Philadelphia, 20–10, then shocked the football world when they upset us at home in the wild-card playoff round. In this game, the Eagles’ coaches made the decision to put our All-Pro left tackle, Stan Walters, on Lawrence instead of a back or tight end. Stan was one of the best linemen I ever played with—physical, tough, and tremendously bright. Stan tried his best that day to control him, but Taylor tore him apart. He sacked me once and must have hit or knocked me down at least another six or seven times. No doubt the coaching film from that loss was played in heavy rotation by the 49ers a day later, because the Giants’ next playoff stop was Candlestick Park for a date with Bill Walsh’s 49ers.

  espite posting the best
regular-season record in football, the Niners were still looked upon as somewhat of a freak show—a team that had sneaked up on its opponents, winning with gimmicks rather than by the accepted strategies of power football. League traditionalists viewed Walsh’s strategies as sissy stuff and were confident that its delicate design would be shredded in the pressure cooker of the postseason.

  Walsh wasn’t surprised at such smug opinions from the NFL establishment. But he was supremely confident in his young team—and the game plan he had drawn up. “We had forty-something runs and maybe a hundred pass plays available for the Giants game,” recalled Randy Cross. “Walsh took the time to design and diagram them. You learned that they were very special to him, and that if he was taking this much time to go over them, you knew damn well we’d be running those plays in that game. At your job, did you ever go into a meeting when you knew something the other people didn’t know? That was our attitude against the Giants. No matter how prepared they thought they were, there were things we were going to do that they had never seen; things they had no idea were coming.”

  Allow me to flash forward for a moment for an interesting sidebar connected to this game. The highest-grossing sports movie of all time is 2009's The Blind Side, which won Sandra Bullock an Oscar for Best Actress. It’s the true story of a white southern family that adopts a homeless African American teen named Michael Oher. With their support, Oher is able to piece his life back together and go on to become the top draft choice of the Baltimore Ravens. The movie is based on Michael Lewis’s best-selling book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. In the book, Lewis also devotes an entire chapter to the ‘81 Giants-49ers playoff and the unsung hero who was instrumental in neutralizing Lawrence Taylor.