The Genius -- Autobiography of Bill Walsh

[Auggie]

I have really enjoyed reading this book. Though Bill hated the "genius" label, his innovations in coaching, play calling and game and personnel management set a standard in the NFL still emulated today. An excerpt:

CHAPTER 12

The game as commonly practiced in the 1979 NFL was without much in the way of subtlety and was infinitely predictable. Ball control was the prime offensive object and that domination was considered a by product of the running game and only the running game. Despite the pioneering work of coaches like Sid Gilman and Paul Brown, the pass was largely an afterthought, utilized only when the running game came up short. The adage in wide use was that when you passed the ball, three things could happen and two of them were bad. Teams ran on first down, ran on second down, and only then, faced with a third down and long yardage, would they pass. The other use of the pass was always late in the game, when trailing. And the passing game itself was conceived of almost exclusively in vertical terms. The object was to go downfield, often as far as possible. The pass patterns run by receivers involved a minimum of deception and the strategy directing them was largely devoid of complexity. Many teams just sent their receivers out and told the quarterback to throw the ball to whichever one he thought was open. A fifty percent completion rate was the established standard of quarterback excellence. “Smash mouth” was the game’s favorite expression and the frontal assault was not just a strategy but almost a matter of honor. “Men were men,” one NFL veteran of the time observed, “and if you didn’t run over people, you weren’t playing football.”

The transformation Walsh was about to bring to the game was aided enormously by two rule changes recently instituted by the NFL. The first limited the amount of contact a defensive back could make with an offensive pass receiver. Heretofore, the defense could shove and jostle the men they were guarding all the way down the field until the ball was actually in the air, making precise disciplined routes extremely difficult to run. Limiting that kind of activity to within five yards of the line of scrimmage opened up enormous possibilities of which Walsh would take great advantage. The second rule change concerned the way the offensive line was allowed to block. Previously, any use of the hands was considered holding and drew a ten yard penalty. In theory, blocking was to be done with the shoulders alone and the hands were to be kept against the offensive lineman’s body. Now, the hands could be used, even extended to the front and pressed against the opponent, as long as they stayed inside the blocker’s shoulders and didn’t actually grasp the man being blocked. This made pass protection blocking far easier than it had been, again opening up increased opportunities for the passing game.

And the passing game Walsh brought was unlike anything else in use. First developed in Cincinnati, then enlarged and installed in San Diego, further enlarged and reinstalled at Stanford, and now enlarged even further and installed again at his Santa Clara training camp, it was sophisticated, complex, and imaginative—favoring maneuver and deception over confrontation, choreography over blunt force. His playbook—two and a half inches thick, ten plays to the page, with names like “Double Wing Left Near, F Short, Roll Right H.B. Sail” or “Brown Right Tight Zoom, A Left 76 X Shallow Cross”—was three times the size of any his players had ever seen before and grew almost daily. To multiply the offense’s deception, all plays could be run out of as many as a half dozen different formations so they looked completely different to the defense trying to thwart them. Rather than simplify his approach until his team caught on, Bill had introduced the full system that summer, knowing full well it would take far more than one season for them to come close to mastering it.

The offense’s essential premise was that the passing game could be used for ball control even more effectively than running had been. Walsh never had fewer than three receivers in patterns on any given play, often as many as five, utilizing not only the two wide receivers and the tight end but both running backs as well. All the patterns were coordinated so that covering one or two would always leave another one open. Much of the passing was for less than ten yards and all of it designed to create mismatches, overload zones, or find and exploit the holes in coverage. Rather than just vertical, he added a horizontal dimension as well, spreading the field with crossing patterns underneath the linebackers and forcing the defense to defend its entire width. Passes were thrown on timing, as the quarterback read through a progression of options, each designed to come open in a designed succession, and often the ball was released before the intended recipient even looked back at the quarterback. The patterns were designed to get the ball to a receiver quicker than the defense could respond and cover him. All routes were adjusted to the defensive coverage, then run to precise spots to which the quarterback threw. And passes were thrown on first down or second down as well as third, early in the game even more than
late.

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