Bill Walsh was a true NFL revolutionary

Filed in archive on July 31, 2007

AP Photo

When I was 16 years old, I saw the San Francisco 49ers win the Super Bowl at the Pontiac Silverdome. I was there to witness one of the great game's of all time.

As quarterback Joe Montana led a remarkable last-minute, length-of-the-field drive, capped off with a perfect touchdown pass, to lead San Francisco past the Cincinnati Bengals, I marveled at the spectacle of this historic event.

What I didn't realize then was that this victory was the climactic moment for a man who would revolutionize the way professional football is played. The man was Bill Walsh, who passed away this week, finally succumbing to leukemia, with which he was diagnosed in 2004.

As I sat on the 35-yard-line about half-way up the Silverdome that day, I watched the game as a huge football fan, although quite inexperienced with the nuances of offense and defense.

As Roger Craig caught pass after pass out of the backfield, I wondered briefly how he was able to do this so easily. While I pondered Craig's impact, Jerry Rice would run a 10-yard square-out and tiptoe just beyond the first-down marker, leading the 49ers ever-closer to paydirt.

It was thrilling, but the technical aspect of this offensive wizardry was out of my grasp.

Now, 26 years later, I have a much better understanding of Bill Walsh's West Coast Offense, a complex short-passing attack that keeps defenses off balance with multiple patterns and different receivers.

In the next few years after the first of three Super Bowls for Walsh, half of the coaches in the NFL were installing some version of the West Coast Offense. Today, almost every team has a variation of this offense that it uses at some time in games.

This and the 29 NFL head coaches that are in some way connected to him is Bill Walsh's legacy.

Walsh was affable and he was brilliant.

Not many people are remembered this way.