Gridiron Genius

by Michael Lombardi

  Anyway, with all that time to think and talk inside the Porsche, Walsh honed his Standard of Performance, writing down its 17 principles with those beloved pencils. (Walsh loved to teach more than anything, but a close second for him was making lists like this one.) These tenets would inform the creation and maintenance of a football dynasty:

  Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement.

  Demonstrate respect for each person in the organization.

  Be deeply committed to learning and teaching.

  Be fair.

  Demonstrate character.

  Honor the direct connection between details and improvement; relentlessly seek the latter.

  Show self-control, especially under pressure.

  Demonstrate and prize loyalty.

  Use positive language and have a positive attitude.

  Take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the result of that effort.

  Be willing to go the extra distance for the organization.

  Deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation.

  Promote internal communication that is both open and substantive.

  Seek poise in myself and those I lead.

  Put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own.

  Maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high.

  Make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.

  The Standard of Performance was Walsh’s attempt to instill a winning attitude in every member of his organization. In fact, as he admitted in his book The Score Takes Care of Itself, he was far more focused on the process of creating a culture, of establishing a foundation for sustainable success, than in drawing up the perfect game plan. His Standard of Performance wasn’t a way to define his genius; it was his genius. It was the compass that guided everything he oversaw—coaching, scouting, management—allowing him to transform the 49ers from a laughingstock to a powerhouse in fewer than 1,000 days. By accomplishing that feat, Walsh essentially used football to prove the famous dictum of another management expert, Peter Drucker: “Culture can eat strategy for lunch.” That’s why, for people inside the NFL, people in the know, Walsh’s Standard of Performance is as much a part of his lasting impact as his West Coast offense. Maybe even more.

  Because the Thomas era had been so destructive, Walsh had to rebuild every aspect of the organization—from the talent on and off the field, to the quality of the workplace, to the practice fields. No detail was too small for Walsh to consider because, to his assembly-line way of thinking, only the sum of them all could produce the organization he wanted. As he was fond of saying, if he managed to perfect the culture, the wins would take care of themselves.

  And so he went about teaching the team not just what to do but how to think. The team facility was Walsh’s classroom, and before long he had schooled everyone. He called meetings with each department, opened his notebook, and started to lecture on the essence of every job, how to act while doing each job, and, most important, how to improve the way the job was done. When he lectured on “culture” and the way champions behave, he got locked in, never looking at his watch or wondering where he needed to be next. It was a rare and refreshing change from the way every other NFL team was run, with every minute scheduled, bathroom breaks included.

  Walsh’s first student and possibly his most important was Eddie DeBartolo Jr., and the lesson he imparted was how to be an owner. DeBartolo knew he had made a mistake when he hired Thomas, giving so much authority to a man who wasn’t the coach. Upon hiring Walsh, DeBartolo let everyone know that the coach was the boss and made it clear that as the owner he would never undercut Walsh’s decision making. That authority was the key to Walsh’s system because it created a hierarchy that avoided the common organizational fissures between front office and coaches. Walsh knew that most teams in the NFL endure their share of internal strife, or as he often referred to it, “the Civil War.” Walsh, both head coach and GM, eliminated a major source of headaches and inefficiency with a single job description. There would be no infighting or backstabbing or favoritism because he was the only voice talking to DeBartolo about the overall direction of the franchise.

  Walsh turned next to the members of the scouting department. He preached to us every day about the importance of learning the whole game, of being more than typical college scouts, whom he belittled as “former bad coaches telling good coaches what to do.” Of course, this required that we go above and beyond anything we had done before. It was, however, in accordance with the first rule of his Standard of Performance: Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic. Work smarter, he said, not longer. He wanted us to see players not as a collection of data and stats but in the context of the schemes they ran. To Walsh, grading a player without understanding the role coaches were asking him to fill was not only scouting blindly, it was just plain lazy. We needed to scout “inside out, not outside in”; that is, our analysis had to be informed by a detailed understanding of each position on the field as defined by each particular organization and scheme. He demanded nuance from his scouts—and that was not typical.

  The best illustration of Walsh’s impact on the 49ers’ scouting department was the lead-up to the 1986 draft. After the retirement of Fred Dean, one of the most relentless pass rushers in NFL history and an eventual Hall of Famer, the team struggled to create any pressure on the quarterback whatsoever. Walsh wanted to find someone in the draft to replace Dean, someone who could bring constant pressure, not just sack the quarterback once in a while.

  Walsh called me into his office to discuss what he was looking for. Out came one of his famous lists. Scratching away on those 3-by-5 cards with those tiny golf pencils, Walsh had once compiled 30 specific details he believed made a great offensive lineman. Now in his hands was a list of criteria for the next great 49ers pass rusher: 6'4" with long arms, great feet, and an explosiveness off the ball. Truth be told, Walsh was not all that concerned with how this particular player defended the run or if he even had enough heft to hold up in the trenches. He had done the math—recalculated the physics, timing, and geometry of pass protection, especially in light of the wide, sluggish offensive tackles who were populating most huddles—and realized the key was leverage, reach, and quickness.

  Having received my orders, I headed down to my “office” in the team meeting room and began to comb through scouting reports our staff had filed from the field. I eliminated players because they were too short or too slow or because their arms didn’t stack up, which is to say just about every single player available. When I was done, just two collegiate footballers remained. The first was Romel Andrews, a defensive end from the University of Tennessee at Martin. The other was an outside linebacker who had been converted to inside linebacker at tiny James Madison University. Some guy named Charles Haley.

  I called both schools to have the players’ film (we used actual 16-millimeter reels and projectors back then) sent to our offices. When they arrived, I called in Walsh to watch with me. The lights dimmed, the projector flickered to life, and there was the 6'5", 255-pound Haley, a former high school basketball player with an explosive first move to match. Haley was also a tight end in high school, so he had giant strong hands, which he pistoned into defenders to create separation. His reach and his stride were so long that after two steps upfield and a dip of his inside shoulder, he had the quarterback in a bear hug. On the first play we watched, Georgia Southern’s excellent running quarterback Tracy Ham began an option play toward the side of the field away from Haley, leaving Haley several yards behind the ball right after the snap. At that point most defenders give up, saving their energy for another down. Instead, we watched in slack-jawed awe as Haley raced toward Ha
m, somehow closing the gap on one of the quickest QBs in college. Just as Ham felt Haley on his back, though, he pitched the ball to the running back. Again, in normal circumstances, a trailing outside linebacker would be left in the dust. Haley quickly and instinctively slingshotted himself off Ham, engulfing the running back in his long arms for a four-yard loss.

  Walsh reached over, turned off the projector, and asked, “Do we need to see any more?” He had his guy. We took Haley in the fourth round—our patience reflecting a certainty that no other team understood Haley’s value the way we did—and he registered 12 sacks as a rookie. (Haley, though, was only one highlight of that 1986 draft, but more on that in Chapter 3.) Until Tom Brady, he was the only player in NFL history to win five Super Bowls—two with the 49ers, three in Dallas—and he finished his career with 100 sacks and a bust in the Hall of Fame.

  The year before we drafted Haley, some of us traveled to the first-ever NFL Scouting Combine in Tempe, Arizona, to watch potential draft prospects work out in front of representatives of all the teams. On the practice field of Arizona State University, a long hot day extended deep into the night. An exhausted Walsh had no desire to sit through more, and so he summoned me to get the car to drive him back to our hotel. Once we were on the road, I could sense Walsh wasn’t at all happy—he was neither doodling nor making a list—so I casually asked him what was wrong. Honestly, noting his mood, I figured my question would be ignored. To my surprise, he went on a tirade about our quarterbacks coach Paul Hackett, who was thinking of leaving.

  Walsh used the same incredible feel that found game-changing players such as Haley to build his coaching staff. But just because he put such an emphasis on loyalty, growth, and, above all, obedience to his standard, it didn’t mean that everyone else in his mercenary profession did. Unfortunately, Walsh took what others might consider normal job movement personally. In this case, it went beyond the prospect of losing a vital conduit of our West Coast offense. Walsh considered Hackett’s solicitation of another job to be disloyal, and that was far more damaging to team culture than any setback in strategy. Hackett had always claimed that his lifelong ambition was to learn at the right hand of Walsh. Was that all a lie? Had Walsh fallen short of his expectations? What about the standards he’d set? Walsh was furious, and for the 20 miles back to the hotel, I heard all about it.

  Hackett ended up staying one more season before heading to Dallas in 1986 to become the offensive coordinator and heir apparent to Cowboys head coach Tom Landry. After he left, we began to look for two men to replace him. One would coach the quarterbacks, and the other would handle tight ends and wide receivers. Once again, Walsh gave me a specific list of criteria for what he wanted in potential candidates.

  I headed downstairs to where the 49ers stored all the college media guides. This was an era of college football in which the run-heavy option was the preferred offense, but Walsh needed someone who was comfortable throwing the ball. My task was simple: I had to find bios of the few top passing offensive coordinators in the NCAA, cut them out, and glue them onto a piece of paper. The work was important, but it was not glamorous, and it wasn’t long before I realized it wasn’t so simple, either. In many cases the college offensive coordinator was actually not the guy most responsible for the air attack. Brigham Young University, for example, was one of the best passing schools at the time, but its coordinator by title was actually the offensive line coach, Roger French. I knew he would hold no interest for Walsh. I clipped French’s bio just in case, but I also clipped the quarterback coach, Mike Holmgren.

  Holmgren looked promising: He was a San Francisco native, a former college quarterback at the University of Southern California, and an eighth-round pick of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1970 draft. After his pro career fizzled, he spent a year as the offensive coordinator and quarterback coach at San Francisco State before moving to BYU. Under the direction of head coach LaVell Edwards, the school overcame its small size to become a dominant force by breaking with the game’s norms, throwing the ball all over the field. This was the kind of thinking Walsh loved. And just as had happened when we scouted Haley, Walsh took one look at Holmgren’s bio and knew he had found his next right-hand man. I picked up Holmgren at the San Francisco airport twice: once for his interview and again to bring him to his new house after he took the job.

  Holmgren and I became good friends. He called me “Scooper” because I was so tuned in to what was going on around the NFL. Once in a while, though, I still remind him that with one slice of my scissors, Roger French could have been working for the 49ers instead.

  The thing is, hiring coaches like Holmgren was a convoluted path to building a staff. It required Walsh to spend lots of time and energy coaching his coaches. But he lived for that kind of challenge. That was why he hired guys who were intelligent before they were anything else, guys who were not typical products of the football industry. His special teams coach Fred von Appen may still be the only coach in NFL history who read Sylvia Plath every day before heading out to the practice field. (Maybe the violence of her poetry helped prepare him for the carnage of kickoff coverage.)

  Whether they came from a Mormon university or were fans of morbid imagery, Walsh wanted men he could mold and develop. He firmly believed that coaches with too much experience in other systems would have a hard time clearing their heads of old ideas to make room for new ones. Over time philosophies become rigid. Methods and styles take root in one’s DNA, making it harder to change direction or adapt to another way. Walsh was constructing something different in San Francisco, something revolutionary even, and he knew it would be very unlikely that a fully indoctrinated coach would be able to contribute to the new 49ers culture. Therefore, Walsh opted for less experienced men who shared his curiosity and displayed a willingness to learn his system and methods.

  I still didn’t quite understand this when, several weeks after Holmgren came on board, I asked Walsh during another Carpool Karaoke session why he hadn’t hired an experienced pro coach. In particular, I knew that our vice president of player personnel, John McVay, had pushed for Lindy Infante, a veteran NFL assistant who had been the head coach of the upstart United States Football League’s Jacksonville Bulls until that league folded. Infante interviewed with us, and though he seemed to have all the qualifications, he left Walsh unimpressed. “My system of offense is in place,” Walsh said to me. “I’m not interested in other ideas outside the boundaries of this offense. I’d rather teach someone my system, then let their creativity take over.”

  This sounded familiar, and I soon realized why. Walsh was a big believer in the business and leadership philosophies of Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, whom the author Tom Peters often referenced in his speeches. “The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind,” Hock said. “But how to get old ones out.”

  Walsh’s ideas about hiring and culture were so far ahead of their time that even decades later the best minds in the business still struggle mightily to implement their own version of the Standard of Performance. Many have tried to copycat Walsh’s offense by hiring his former assistants and associates or anyone else who could lay claim to the West Coast lineage, believing that simply employing someone to run the scheme is enough to create the kind of success Walsh had with it. But the reason there are so many failed Walsh disciples—Ray Rhodes in Philadelphia and Green Bay, Marty Mornhinweg in Detroit, Mike White in Oakland, and George Seifert in Carolina, to name a few—is that Walsh installed way more than an offense.

  Seifert’s career is the most explicit example of this misunderstanding. After taking over for Walsh in San Francisco, Seifert was 98–30 in eight seasons, winning two more Super Bowls for the 49ers. Clearly, though, Seifert benefited greatly from the culture already etched in stone by Walsh. The further away the team moved from Walsh’s leadership, the less success it had. Since losing their connection to Walsh, the 49ers, with only one Super Bowl appearance
in the last two-plus decades, have not been the same. Neither was Seifert.

  Seifert resigned from the Niners after the 1996 season. He went 16–32 as the Panthers head coach and was fired after a disastrous 1–15 record in 2001. Seifert, you might say, knew Walsh’s recipes—he had a complete understanding of the West Coast offense—he just didn’t understand the most important ingredient: culture.

  Another example: Before University of Alabama head coach Nick Saban could become one of the greatest coaches in college football history, he had to learn the same lesson. After grinding away in the profession for almost 20 years, he got his first big break in 1991, when he was named defensive coordinator of the Browns under Bill Belichick, himself an indirect Walsh disciple. When Saban moved on to head coaching stops of his own at Michigan State and LSU, he implemented the program made famous by Walsh and Belichick. You could see it in the way he scouted players, coached his coaches, and developed the talents of each employee. And what worked for Walsh and Belichick worked for Saban.

  Saban failed only once, after returning to the NFL to coach the Miami Dolphins in 2005. The Dolphins at that time were still very much Don Shula’s franchise. And why not? Sure, Don Shula had been retired for a decade, but the team had been one of the best in the NFL for a generation under his rule. As a result, though, Saban met with internal resistance as he tried to embed his own culture. There was zero buy-in to the new system, with players and executives alike balking at what they perceived to be a radical transformation. The final straw for Saban was the situation surrounding free agent quarterback Drew Brees. Saban knew the potential of the former Charger, but he was not allowed to sign Brees and his surgically reconstructed throwing shoulder. Brees signed with New Orleans instead, where that shoulder has thrown more than 58,000 yards. After missing out on Brees, Saban understood that he would never be able to get the Dolphins to do things his way, and after going 6–10 in 2006, still his only losing season as a head coach, Saban jumped to Alabama. There he had the freedom to build the organization from the ground up. All he’s done is win five national championships in less than a decade. (The man he took over for in Tuscaloosa? Don’s son Mike.)