Connections are everywhere now. You can see them, zagging from Bill Walsh to all around the NFL. Men hoisting Super Bowl trophies. Men spouting change. They are members of the loyal army, preaching the word of the “49er Way” and this thing known as the “West Coast offense.”
Only they say it while dressed in Seahawks blue and Carolina silver, and they never actually call this the “49er Way” or the “West Coast offense.” It is merely “The System.”
But it is Bill Walsh’s system. And because of it, the phone never stops ringing in the Niner offices. “He’s become the spokesman for the league,” the team’s publicity man murmurs.
“The System” is very much alive.
Walk into the house that Walsh built, through the doors of the team complex erected before the team’s third Super Bowl title. Go past the 120-seat theater, up the swirling staircase and down the corridors of football power. Step to the right, under the doorway and into the giant office with floor-to-ceiling windows, a sweeping view of the Diablo Mountains and, off to the side, the master’s private washroom.
Come in, Bill Walsh has a story to tell.
The night before, in the hour before an exhibition game between the Seahawks and the Niners, Walsh had been sitting in the press box, watching the pregame warmups, when he was struck by an amazing irony.
The teams on the field were doing exactly the same thing.
More Top Picks Best Laptop Stands
It was like watching a mirror image of the other. And Walsh laughed, because these were his men on the field below him. Mike Holmgren and Steve Mariucci. Two more disciples clutching the holy book of the “49er Way,” running the very practice Walsh himself designed some 20 years before.
They do it his way, just like the other 13 current head coaches in the NFL who also hail from “The System.”
“When I left here, George Seifert kept everything identical,” Walsh says. “I look at our practices now, and they’re identical to what we did before. I would have revamped or changed things a little, but. . .”
His words trail off because there’s nothing else to say. The point is clear: His blueprint is the most popular method in a league short on good ideas. Its proponents have won the past three Super Bowls and four of the past five. What could you possibly change?
Look at the men who have been captured by his spell. The men like Holmgren, the Seahawks coach, who took Green Bay to the Super Bowl in consecutive seasons. The men like Mike Shanahan of the Denver Broncos, winner of the past two Super Bowls.
Walsh has another story. He thinks this is funny too. It’s about the time Shanahan showed a printed copy of a lecture he had been giving to a 49er employee. The employee looked at the words and said, “Wait a minute,” then rifled through his desk before pulling out an old speech given by Walsh.
The two were the same.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Walsh said. “I’ve gotten past that. These things you take pride in.”
There are lots of these tales. Walsh cherishes his legacy grown out of control, and he wants to remind you he is the mastermind of the great 49er system–the vaunted West Coast offense–just in case you might have forgotten. His detractors say this is his worst fault — his ego. Others shrug. They insist it is just part of the package that comes with the greatest football coach of the end of the century.
If Walsh hears the criticism, he doesn’t seem to notice. He just pushes on. The 49ers are in the midst of chaos in their ownership, the salary cap has run out of control in the time after he left the organization. There is a growing sense that, after two decades, the San Francisco dynasty is starting to crumble. He has been brought back to repair the damage.
Perhaps he is the right man for the job. After all, half the league is now doing the same thing Walsh did here 20 years ago. All around the NFL, they are building and rebuilding in the 49er image.
“Mike Holmgren is probably closest to my system of any of my guys,” said Walsh, leaning back in his chair. “Our intensity, our personalities are really very similar. Mike is extremely intelligent. I actually wanted to hire another person over him (as quarterbacks coach in 1986), but when we went through the interview process, he was clearly the man we wanted. Then when (offensive coordinator) Denny Green left in the middle of the season, Mike took over his role too.
“He’s a lot like me in that he has humor along with a hard-hitting attitude. But the reason people follow Mike is that he’s got a good football mind. He’s a teacher who’s not real abrasive.”
And this has been the key to the Walsh system, to teach the other coaches. He controlled his teams with ironclad rules, but he still gave his assistants tremendous leeway. He let them make decisions. He asked for their input. There is a fine line between fostering a respectful relationship and allowing assistants too much freedom. Somehow, Walsh has managed it well.
“Bill knows how to help people, he knows how to allow them responsibility,” said former Raiders coach Mike White, one of Walsh’s closest friends. “The people around him have a lot that has been put in their hands. A guy like (Vince) Lombardi was always cold to his assistants. He never allowed them freedom.”
Here they are, the men of Walsh: Holmgren, Shanahan, Seifert, Mariucci, Green, Tony Dungy, Bruce Coslett, Ray Rhodes, Brian Billick, Jon Gruden, Pete Carroll, Jeff Fisher and Andy Reid.
Those are just the descendants who are now NFL head coaches.
Yet even as the coaching tree blossoms behind Walsh, there remains a distance between him and the men who learned under him. Shanahan is quick to say he is a product of many different influences, not just San Francisco’s. Holmgren may have his players warm up in a manner that is very similar to the way Walsh had his warm up with the Niners, but Holmgren makes it clear he has designed his own practice system.
“Of course they want their own offense,” Walsh said. “I don’t blame them a bit. Everybody wants to create their own offense.”
They run it all by his rules, though.
Oh yes, the Bill Walsh rules:
– Head coaches must have complete control.
– Everybody must be loyal.
– Never drink alcohol when negotiating with agents.
The list goes on and on and on.
There’s a solution for every situation. A role for every job. A plan for every moment of the day.
He gave it all to the 49ers as a rookie head coach in 1979, introduced it at a meeting where he stood before the team and said, “I’ll be honest. We’ll do it my way.”
Three years later, when San Francisco had gone from being one of the worst teams in the league to Super Bowl contenders, the word started to live. Suddenly Walsh’s system was in vogue. All over the league teams began hiring his prized assistants, handing them millions of dollars and authority in hopes of creating a little San Francisco in places like Green Bay and Minnesota. The descendants were everyplace. And they were all running the same West Coast offense.
So what if “The System” was developed out of a desperation to survive in the early days.
“We had a good offensive line, but we didn’t have a running back,” saids former Niner Randy Cross, now a CBS broadcaster. “We had to emulate the running offense. Hence, the dinks and the dunks (from the quarterback).”
Hence, the West Coast offense.
Fact is, nobody ever has stopped it.
All of this desire to be the best came because his heart was once broken when the Cincinnati Bengals passed over Walsh for their head-coaching job in 1978. He had been a loyal assistant to team founder Paul Brown for seven years, and when Brown retired, the Bengals gave his job to a man named Bill “Tiger” Johnson. Heck, Johnson didn’t even last two years as the Bengals coach.
Don’t think Walsh has ever forgotten.
More Top Picks Best Cribs
“It sticks in his craw,” Cross said.
So when the chance finally came with the 49ers, Walsh was ready.
“The amazing thing to me is how he grew in the job in San Francisco,” White said. “He grew on his own instincts and preparation and his own reactions to situations. After a while, it just became a blueprint for success.”
You must remember, too, that the blueprint isn’t all Walsh’s. For there are also the men who made Walsh himself. The men like Paul Brown and Sid Gillman at San Diego and John Ralston at Stanford. But the person who might have had the most impact, the man who might have done more to send the Walsh legacy spiraling through the NFL was Walsh’s college coach at San Jose State.
Bob Bronzan was a man of lists, a man who had a plan for every moment of the day. And his young quarterback, fresh from San Mateo Community College, absorbed everything.
“He had an amazing attention to detail,” Walsh said. “He had a lot to do with the way I organize things now.”
And yet Walsh’s own insistence on detail is legendary. Upon hiring Bobb McKittrick as his offensive line coach, he made McKittrick produce a list of some 30 different blocking techniques he would use.
“He has an unyielding attention to detail,” White said, sounding an awful lot like Walsh talking about Bronzan. “It’s just amazing.”
Recently, Walsh decided to put this all on paper. He sat down and wrote a 550-page book of all his philosophies called “Finding the Winning Edge.” He is not completely satisfied with the book. He fears he rushed it, and he knows it will never make much money. But that wasn’t really the point.
“I knew I needed to do my work,” he said. “There hasn’t been a good football book that just explains how to win. I wanted to do one. I wanted to get my ideas out there.”
When the book hit the shelves last year, current Chargers coach Mike Riley, then at Oregon State, bought a copy, read the chapters on practices, photocopied the pages and installed the entire routine in his practices with the Beavers.
Walsh would be proud.
There is a knock at the door. A secretary bursts in clutching a white 49ers jersey. Walsh has to leave to attend a rally for team employees. Loyalty. Everybody must show loyalty. He is going to make every person who works at the house he built wear a team jersey on the Fridays before games. Today he will go first.
As he starts to pull on his shirt, he is asked if he believes his legacy can last forever in the NFL. He quickly shakes his head.
“Oh no,” he said. “Everything runs its course. Someday so will this.”
But for now, the man who is the mentor to half of the NFL takes one last look at the Diablo Mountains before heading toward the rally. A crowd is gathering in the theater, each person wearing a 49ers jersey.
They are calling for Bill Walsh. Yes, they are.
They are calling, just like everybody else.