The Blind Side (13 page)

By its very nature the enterprise demanded tedious repetition: for ball and receiver to arrive on a patch of turf the size of a welcome mat at the same moment, their timing had to be precise, and to be precise it had to be second nature. At first Walsh had a problem finding the extraordinary amount of time he needed to practice with his quarterbacks and receivers. “Paul Brown didn’t want us out on the field so long,” he said, “so I’d sneak out with them during lunch.” It was more like a handoff on the other side of the line of scrimmage than an aerial attack, and his players at first found it strange. “He’d show up every Monday with this high school play he’d thought up and we’d laugh at it all week,” said Bengals receiver Chip Myers. “That Sunday, it’d work three times.”

Walsh’s father had been a talented auto mechanic and he had expected his son to join him in the family business. Walsh moved on, but something of his father lingered in him. His offense felt engineered. The virtues it exalted above all others were precision, consistency, and predictability. Walsh had created the contraption to compensate for the deficiencies of his quarterback, but an offense based on a lot of short, well-timed passes turned out to offer surprising inherent advantages. First, it delivered the ball into a runner’s hands on the other side of the line of scrimmage, thus removing the biggest defensive beasts from the space between him and the goal line. The pass had always been viewed as a complement to the run, but it could apparently function as a substitute as well.

Next, by shortening—and timing—the passing game, Walsh reduced its two biggest risks: interceptions and incompletion. “Our argument was that the chance of a completion drops dramatically over twelve yards,” said Walsh. “So, we would throw a ten-yard pass. Our formula was that we should get at least half our passing yardage from the run after the catch.”

Finally, the Walsh plan addressed the football coach’s visceral fear of an offense based on the passing game. For such an offense to be viable, lots of people need to go out for a pass. Walsh did not usually feel that five receivers was necessary, but he needed, at a minimum, three. But the more people who go out for a pass, the fewer who remain to block for the quarterback. The defense, alert to the pass, already is more than usually intent on killing the quarterback. By reducing the amount of time the quarterback held the ball, Walsh had minimized the risk that they would succeed. He had infused the passing game with two new qualities: dullness and safety. “People made fun of it,” Walsh said. “They thought if you weren’t throwing the ball twenty yards downfield, you weren’t throwing the ball. They called it a nickel-and-dime offense.”

In 1971, Virgil Carter, who had never completed as many as half of his passes, somehow led the entire league in completion percentage (62.2) and bumped his yards per attempt from 5.9 to 7.3. The Bengals surprised everyone and won their division. The next year Carter gave way to Ken Anderson, a little known passer out of even less well known Augustana College, who hadn’t completed even half his passes in college. In Walsh’s offense, Kenny Anderson did even better than Virgil Carter. When he saw Anderson play, Walsh later said, he realized that the offense he had designed to compensate for a weak-armed quarterback had a more general effectiveness; this passing game of his could survive on very little talent, but it could also exploit better material. In 1974, Anderson led the league in completion percentage and total yards and yards per attempt (8.13). After the Mad Stork ended the 1975 season, and Paul Brown retired, Walsh expected to take over as head coach. Brown had several times refused other NFL teams permission to interview Walsh for their head coaching jobs, without bothering to mention their interest to Walsh. Instead, Brown had told Walsh that he didn’t think he’d ever make a good NFL head coach. Now Brown did his part to make his prediction come true, by arranging for another coach to replace him. “The selection of head coaches in the NFL always has been a mystery to me,” said Walsh not long afterwards. “I expect to be a head coach. I want to be a head coach. He really is the game. Everybody else are production people in his show.”

Walsh left Cincinnati in anger, to run the offense for the San Diego Chargers. There he inherited a struggling quarterback named Dan Fouts. In Walsh’s passing system, Fouts went on to lead the league in completion percentage. Walsh himself quickly moved on to become a head football coach at Stanford University. He coached the Cardinals for two seasons, 1977 and 1978. In 1977, Stanford quarterback Guy Benjamin led the nation in passing and won the Sammy Baugh Award given to the nation’s top college passer. In 1978, his replacement, Steve Dils, did the same. In 1979, Walsh, now forty-nine years old, finally was named an NFL head coach, of the team with the league’s lowest payroll and the league’s worst record, the San Francisco 49ers.

The 49ers also had, by most statistical measures, one of the NFL’s worst quarterbacks, Steve Deberg. The year before Walsh arrived, Deberg, a recent tenth-round draft choice, had engineered the lowest scoring offense in the entire NFL. In leading his team to a 2–14 record, Deberg threw 302 passes and completed 137 of them, or 45.4 percent, not counting the 22 he delivered into the hands of the opposing team. The next year, in Bill Walsh’s system of well-timed passes, the seemingly inept Deberg threw more passes (578) than any quarterback in the history of the NFL. His completion rate rose to an astonishing 60 percent, and he also completed more passes than any quarterback in the history of the NFL. Deberg also cut his interception rate in half and threw for more than an extra yard on each passing attempt (5.2 to 6.32). The transformation of Steve Deberg—and the 49er offense—amounted to a football miracle. But if anyone noticed, Walshdidn’t hear about it.

In a pattern now familiar in Walsh’s offenses, a quarterback who seemed to deserve a raise was instead handed a pink slip. Walsh replaced Deberg in 1980 with a quarterback drafted in the third round who everyone said was too small and had too weak an arm to play in the NFL: Joe Montana. The next two years, Montana led the NFL in completion percentage (64.5 and 63.7) and also in avoiding interceptions. He would become, by general consensus, the finest quarterback ever to play the game. How good was he really? That’s hard to know, because his coach held a magic wand, and every quarterback over whose head that wand passed instantly looked better than he’d ever been. When Joe Montana’s play became sloppy during the 1987 season, Walsh replaced him, temporarily, with Steve Young—whose sensational performance caused a lot of 49er fans to wonder, and to feel guilty for wondering, if maybe Steve Young was even better than Joe Montana.

The performance of Walsh’s quarterbacks suggested a radical thought: that in the most effective passing attack in the NFL, and on one of the most successful teams in the history of pro football, the quarterbacks were fungible. The system was the star. Walsh had imported into pro football the spirit of a Japanese auto plant—Total Quality Management. A lot of people in and around pro football were uncomfortable with the idea, and the benching of Joe Montana, for them, was the final straw. “Walsh was wanting to bench him and play his other guy,” hollered former star quarterback Terry Bradshaw, doing his best to speak for the man on the street, “because if Young can go in there and do it, then Walsh looks like another genius again. You know, he really believes that genius tag. But the genius really wears number sixteen [Montana’s number]. That’s the genius, and he [Walsh] was messing with him.”

And yet when Young eventually took over the San Francisco 49er offense for good, he led the league in passing five out of his first six years, won a Super Bowl, and wound up with his face on a bust in the Hall of Fame. Perhaps because Young had played for other NFL teams, he appreciated better than most what Walsh had brought to the passing game. “When I was at Tampa,” Young told sports writer Glenn Dickey, after he took over the 49ers quarterback job, “the coaches told me to hold the ball until the receiver came open. By that time everybody was on top of me. Now I have a progression of receivers, and I hit the first one who’s open. It might be only a three yard gain, and maybe I could have waited and hit a receiver another ten yards down the field, but I’ve completed the pass, moved the ball, and added to the frustration of defensive linemen trying to stop me.”

Young, like Montana, came to be viewed as a born star whose success in pro football was inevitable. But before Young arrived there were others, and no one in their right minds mistook them for first-tier NFL quarterbacks. In 1986, for instance, Jeff Kemp, Dartmouth College graduate and son of future vice-presidential candidate Jack, stepped in for the injured Montana for ten games. Kemp was five eleven and had trouble seeing over the heads of his blockers. To clear the view, Walsh had the linemen go out after the pass rushers rather than fall back, as they typically would do. The tactic was less effective in delaying the rush but it did, momentarily, create a window through which Kemp might glimpse the field. The bill for his view arrived milliseconds after he released the football, when some monster hammered him into the ground. In his career leading up to the moment he replaced Joe Montana—a career spent entirely with the Los Angeles Rams—Kemp had completed fewer than half his passes. That year in San Francisco he completed nearly 60 percent of his passes, for an impressive 7.77 yards per attempt, and posted one of the highest passer ratings in the NFL. Then Kemp, too, was injured. His replacement was a fellow named Mike Moroski, so obscure that any question concerning his NFL career would be considered out of bounds in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Moroski had been with the 49ers for exactly two weeks before he became, by default, their starting quarterback. He completed 57.5 percent of his passes.

Eventually people must have noticed. As Walsh performed miracle after miracle with his quarterbacks, a more general trend emerged in NFL strategy: away from the run and toward the pass.* In 1978, NFL teams passed 42 percent of the time and ran the ball 58 percent of the time. Each year, right through until the mid-1990s, they passed more and ran less until the ratios were almost exactly reversed: in 1995, NFL teams passed 59 percent of the time and ran 41 percent of the time. It’s not hard to see why; the passing game was improving, and the running game was stagnant. Every year NFL teams ran the ball thousands of times, and every year the league averaged between 3.9 and 4.1 yards per carry. With just the tiniest, seemingly random variations from year to year, the yield from this mill was monotonously consistent going all the way back to 1960. Some teams did a bit better, of course, and some did a bit worse. The league as a whole, however, never figured out how to make the running game yield even a fraction of a yard more than it always had. It was possible that the running game awaited some innovative coach to figure out how to make it work more efficiently. And it could be that the steel industry is just awaiting the CEO who can find gold in its mills.

The passing game behaved like an altogether different and more promising business. In 1960, an NFL pass netted you, on average, 4.6 yards. That was better than running the ball, but then you had to consider that a pass was still twice as likely to cost you the ball. Quarterbacks threw interceptions a bit more than 6 percent of the time while running backs fumbled the ball only about 3 percent of the time. The trade-off must have seemed unappealing to NFL coaches, as passing attempts per game actually fell a bit through the 1960s. By 1975, teams were throwing the ball, on average, just 24 times each game. Then something happened: teams began to pass more each year than they had the year before until, by the early 1990s, NFL quarterbacks were throwing the ball, on average, 34 times per game. All else being equal, this should have been a disaster for those quarterbacks. In a business with normal returns, the more you produce of a good the less you can sell it for. The passing game didn’t exhibit normal returns. From a yield of 4.6 yards each throw, the average gain climbed steadily from the late 1970s until the early 1990s, until it settled in at around 7 yards per passing attempt. Each attempt was significantly more likely to be caught by a receiver. Right through the 1960s, NFL quarterbacks hit on fewer than 50 percent of their passes. In the 1970s, quarterbacks not only began to throw more often but to complete a higher percentage of their passes. Again, the trend was gradual but relentless, until the early 2000s when, on average, NFL quarterbacks made good on 60 percent of their throws.

The more closely you examined the passing business, the stranger it appeared. You might think, for instance, that the more the quarterback threw the ball, the less picky he’d be about where he threw it, and the more easily a defense could anticipate the pass and intercept it. Apparently not: the more often pro quarterbacks put the ball up in the air, the less likely it was to be intercepted. From the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, the interception rate fell steadily—from 6 percent all the way down to 3 percent. By 1995, a quarterback was no more likely to be intercepted than a runner was to fumble the ball. The running game was a dull, barely profitable business that exhibited little potential for growth. The passing game looked like a booming software company: the more quarterbacks produced, the bigger their profit margins. Adding to the mystery, the passing boom occurred as the number of teams in the league, and the number of games each team played, expanded. There were twice as many pro quarterbacks in 1995 as there were in 1960, and more nearly always means worse. In this peculiar instance, more meant better. In 1960, NFL quarterbacks threw 7,583 passes and completed 49.6 percent of them, while throwing 470 interceptions (6.2 percent of all passes were intercepted). In 2005, NFL quarterbacks threw 16,430 passes, completed 59.5 percent of them, and had 507 of them intercepted (only 3.1 percent of all passes were intercepted).