That Michael’s fortune might come to him from the game of football, rather than the last will and testament of Sean Tuohy, was suddenly thinkable. The first person, credible to Sean, to hint that Michael Oher might have a real future in football was Nick Saban, the head coach at LSU, fresh off a national championship. Michael was on the Briarcrest basketball court, playing a pickup game, when Saban walked into the school. Saban of course couldn’t speak to the boy, but he didn’t need to. He’d seen his tape. Now Saban watched him as he moved around on the basketball court. When Michael dribbled the ball between his legs, drove to the basket and rose up and dunked, Saban balked. There was no way, he said, that Michael Oher weighed more than 285 pounds. He demanded to see the boy on a scale. That was easy: Briarcrest had bought a new scale, just for him. When Saban saw that Michael tipped the scale at 345 pounds, he said, “If he isn’t a top fifteen pick in the NFL draft three years from now, someone done him wrong.”
In the frenzy, Hugh Freeze learned exactly what he had on his hands. Not just a big ol’ lineman. Not some cement block, interchangeable with other cement blocks of similar dimensions. A future NFL left tackle. “All of those college coaches,” said Hugh, “and I mean every last one of them, said, ‘He’ll play on Sundays. At left tackle.’”
That is what had them all so excited: Michael Oher fit as perfectly as any high school player they had ever seen the job description of NFL left tackle. And left tackle, as guardian of the quarterback’s blind side, had become one of the most highly compensated jobs in the game. Hugh had played Michael on defense at first, and then, when that didn’t work, moved him to right tackle. And so Michael Oher had never actually played left tackle. That was understandable: the left tackle wasn’t a big deal in high school because the passing game, and thus the pass rush, weren’t quite so important. Hugh now understood that in big-time college football, and in the NFL, the left tackle was some kind of huge deal. You find the freak of nature who can play the position brilliantly and you have one of the most valuable commodities in professional sports.
After spring practice Hugh informed the boy who had been playing left tackle that he was being moved to right tackle. Michael Oher was taking over his position.
CHAPTER FIVE
DEATH OF A LINEMAN
A BOY HAD COLLIDED with an event. The boy was in many ways unlikely. He had never thought of himself as a football player, and didn’t have the first idea what the fuss was all about. The event was a shift in football strategy that raised, dramatically, the value of the one role on the football field the boy was uniquely suited to play. Of course, any kid in America in 2004 thought to have a shot at a professional football career was going to get his share of attention. But if Michael Oher had been just any ordinary offensive lineman he wouldn’t have been viewed as a future NFL player. It was the existence of the new prototype—or, more accurately, the stereotype—of the NFL left tackle that made him so interesting to football coaches. They took one look at him and knew exactly what he was born to do. The market for football players had reshaped the offensive line and, in effect, broken out this one position and treated it as almost a separate occupation: What caused that?
The answer lay buried in the history of football strategy. Football history, like personal history, is cleaner and more orderly in retrospect than it is at the time. It tends not to have crisp beginnings and endings. It progresses an accident at a time. As the left tackle position evolved, it experienced as many false starts and dead ends and random mutations and unnatural selections as the other little evolutions deep inside football. But the Oakland Coliseum, on December 28,1975, was, in retrospect, a seminal moment.
The playoff game is in its final minutes, and the Cincinnati Bengals trail the Oakland Raiders 31–28. The Bengals have the ball on the Raiders’ thirty-seven-yard line and are driving furiously. High up in the Coliseum, in the Bengals’ wing of the press box, an assistant coach named Bill Walsh selects the next play. Walsh knows that whatever play he calls, he won’t be able to change it. There won’t be time. The Bengals’ head coach, the legendary Paul Brown, wants to be seen to call the plays and has created a time-consuming “process” to preserve the illusion. Invisible and unacknowledged, Walsh relays the play over the phone to a fellow assistant coach on the sidelines, Bill Johnson. Johnson whispers the play to Brown. And then Brown, all eyes in the crowd on him, pulls aside a player, barks out his instructions, and pushes him out onto the field to tell the quarterback. Bill Walsh runs the Cincinnati offense; Paul Brown seems to. It doesn’t bother Walsh, much. The press box offers what he calls “the clinical atmosphere” in which he thrives. Looking down from the press box one can more easily see what goes right, and what goes wrong. And he is about to see his play go very wrong.
It begins promisingly enough. Wide receiver Charley Joiner cuts across the middle and breaks free. Bengals quarterback Kenny Anderson is the league’s most accurate passer and seldom misses an open target. Then a familiar shadow rises behind him. Oakland has a blind side pass rusher, named Ted Hendricks and known as “the Mad Stork.” All day long Walsh has fretted about what might happen if the Bengals need to pass, and the Mad Stork knows they need to pass; all day long he’s worried about just this moment. “We tried to have a running back pick Hendricks up,” he says. “And he did. Most of the time.” Now Joiner’s open, and Kenny Anderson is about to release the ball when out of nowhere—Bam! The Mad Stork buries him. And just like that it’s over. The moment the Mad Stork slips the running back’s block, the Bengals’ season is as good as done.
“I made up my mind right then,” said Walsh, “there had to be a better way. And if I was ever in that situation again, I’d handle the blind side rush differently.”
It took six years before he found himself in that situation again—calling plays in a playoff game that must account for a great blind side pass rusher. But when he did, the situation was far more alarming.
Now it’s January 3, 1982. Walsh drives with a friend to Candlestick Park, before his first and possibly last playoff game as an NFL head coach. His team, the San Francisco 49ers, is about to face the New York Giants, with a newly energized defense coached by Bill Parcells. The Giants’ rookie linebacker Lawrence Taylor presents the greatest systematic threat Walsh’s offense has ever faced; how Walsh copes with it will inform the future of football strategy. Walsh’s coaching career is still something of an iffy proposition—six months earlier Walsh decided to quit football altogether, then reversed himself. He’s still in an odd place, professionally: the most innovative offensive mind of his generation and nobody understands what he’s thought up. Lose this game and they might never know.
The week before, the Giants had won their first playoff game against the favored Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles’ head coach, Dick Vermeil, was a good friend of Walsh’s. “I talked to Dick before their game,” said Walsh, “and asked him how he was going to handle Lawrence Taylor. He said, ‘Stan can take him. Stan can get out there.’” (Stan was the Eagles’ left tackle, Stan Walters.) “Well, Stan didn’t get out there.” And Stan Walters was no chump. He’d been to the Pro Bowl twice and the year before, 1980, had not allowed a single quarterback sack. Taylor ate him alive, and seemed to take special pleasure in the havoc he created inside the mind of Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski. In describing his signature hammer blow, Taylor said, “I hit Jaworski that way—with an over-the-head ax job. I thought his dick was going to drop in the dirt.” Watching tape of Taylor, Walsh worked overtime to answer the question: how to keep this beast off the back of his new young quarterback? It wasn’t Joe Montana’s body parts that Walsh was worried about. It was his ability to run this intricate little passing game, Walsh’s greatest creation.
Walsh took an unusual view of quarterbacks: he thought they were only as good as the system they played in. After they’d led their team to victory, people pointed to their air of confidence, their cool under pressure, and the other intangible virtues of the presumably born leader. If
they led their teams to Super Bowls, these prima donnas became all but irreplaceable, in the public mind. The intangibles were nice, thought Walsh, but they weren’t the reason quarterbacks succeeded or failed. “The performance of a quarterback must be manipulated,” said Walsh. “To a degree coaching can make a quarterback, and it certainly is the most important factor for his success. The design of the team’s offense is the key to a quarterback’s performance. One has to be tuned to the other.” His offense would make heroes of his quarterbacks. But that didn’t mean he had to believe in them personally.
Walsh’s career to that point had been as quixotic as his view of the football offense. He’d played minor college ball, at San Jose State. As a coach he had bounced back and forth between college and the pros without sticking in either place. One year he was an assistant with the Oakland Raiders, the next he was the head coach of something called the San Jose Apaches in a chaotic semi-pro league soon to implode. When he arrived in Cincinnati in 1968, at the age of thirty-seven, to run the passing game for Bengals head coach Paul Brown, he faced a new problem: comically inadequate football players. “We were an AFL expansion team,” said Walsh, “and you just didn’t get any quality players. We got the dregs, players who never should have been in pro football.” The newfound Bengals clearly weren’t going to frighten or push anyone off the line of scrimmage. If they were going to move the ball, they were going to need to pass the ball.
But the Bengals’ small players were all, by NFL standards, as defective as the big ones. His new quarterback, Virgil Carter, was a case in point. Carter wasn’t able to get the ball more than about 20 yards downfield in any form other than a slow desperate wobble. Walsh’s job, as he saw it, was to create a system that suited Virgil Carter’s talents: guile, nimbleness, and an ability to throw accurately, as long as he didn’t have to throw far. “We couldn’t dominate anyone with the run, so Virgil became our central performer,” he said later. “And so that’s how it all started. When I was forced to use Virgil.”
Walsh’s solution to Carter’s weak arm was to teach him to use the field in a new way. He spread the field horizontally; that is, from sideline to sideline. He had the receivers run short routes timed precisely to the steps of the quarterback. If Carter took a three-step drop, they ran one sort of route; if Carter took a five-step drop, they ran another. Carter didn’t wait for his receivers to come open but threw to where he expected them to be—usually just a few yards away. The process was further speeded up by reducing the number of decisions the quarterback was forced to make. His presumed precision means that he doesn’t need to pay nearly so much attention to the defensive formation. His short, timed passes, if executed properly, can be completed against any defense. On any given play there might be as many as five Bengals receivers running pass patterns. But when Virgil Carter came to the line of scrimmage, he had already made up his mind to which side of the field he would throw, so he had reduced the five potential receivers to a short list of three: a primary, an alternate, and an outlet. He saw how the defense had lined up and made a pre-snap decision about the viability of his primary receiver. And so, as he dropped back to pass, he had at most one decision to make: alternate or outlet?
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, Ste
ve 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 Blind Side Page 10
