by Bill Walsh
I witnessed a football version of Post-it Notes many years ago when I was an assistant coach with the Cincinnati Bengals. See if it applies to your own resourcefulness in evaluating situations and figuring out what to do with “glue that doesn’t stick.”
Early in the second half of our game with the Oakland Raiders, Bengals tight end Bob Trumpy (later a well-known announcer) came out of the huddle and lined up on the wrong end of the line of scrimmage—the left instead of the right side, as the play called for.
Trumpy recognized his mistake almost immediately and tried to correct it by sliding over to the right side before the ball snap. The Raiders were utilizing a complex pass defense at the time, so when they saw Bob shifting from one end of the line of scrimmage to the other—legal, but not done—all hell broke loose.
Oakland defensive backs began frantically flapping their arms and screaming, running around and creating havoc as they tried to react to the bizarre movement of Cincinnati’s wandering tight end. Three of them actually collided in the middle of the field. The whole scene was kind of funny, although nobody was laughing on either bench. We lost yardage on the play, and when Bob trotted to the sidelines with a sheepish look on his face, he muttered to head coach Paul Brown, “Sorry, Coach. It won’t happen again.” He was wrong.
When we got back to Cincinnati and the assistant coaches looked at the Oakland game film, Bill Johnson, the offensive line coordinator, ran Trumpy’s play over and over for us on the projector. At first the room was filled with laughter as we saw the mayhem Trumpy’s mistake had precipitated. One man, however, wasn’t laughing—Bill Johnson. He was thinking.
Finally, he stopped rerunning the play, turned to us, and asked, “Fellas, what would happen if we put Trumpy in motion intentionally and worked plays off it?”
There was silence in the room; everyone sitting in the darkness recognized the interesting possibilities this might offer. In fact, I was awake most of that night thinking up ideas that would let us capitalize on Bill Johnson’s revelation, his crazy idea of how to turn a lemon into lemonade, an accident into an asset.
Putting the tight end in motion caught on quickly around the NFL because it created new problems for the defense. Soon every team in the league had added it to their playbook. And it all started with a botched play.
What’s your own version of Trumpy’s lemon and Johnson’s lemonade? Is it right there in front of you, unseen because your thinking is rigid and resistant to originality and change? How effective are you at turning nothing into something, something into something that changes everything?
The West Coast Offense: From Checkers to Chess
Here’s an example I’m proud of from my own coaching career. It profoundly—but unintentionally—changed the way NFL football is played. You may find in its genesis inspiration for extending your own receptiveness to innovation, for seeing what others don’t see.
The West Coast Offense, considered by many to be one of the most dramatic changes in football during the last fifty years, was nothing more than my attempt to make the most out of what I had to work with as quarterback coach for the Cincinnati Bengals. And what I had wasn’t much—a recent expansion franchise with perhaps the least overall talent of any team in the AFL (soon to merge with the NFL).
Among other things, the Bengals absolutely could not move the ball on the ground, because other teams were just too strong for us. That left the pass as our only option. Unfortunately, our quarterback, Virgil Carter, wasn’t much of a passer in the traditional sense of having a strong arm capable of throwing deep with accuracy. In fact, somebody told him, “Virgil, if you want to throw the football more than twenty yards you better fill it with helium.” (After he was released by Chicago, we acquired Carter on short notice to replace Greg Cook, a young quarterback with tremendous potential and a great arm. I have seen very few quarterbacks with his talent. Sadly, Greg tore his rotator cuff during his first season with the Bengals and never fully recovered.)
In studying films of Virgil and watching him in practice, I determined that while he didn’t have much of an arm, he was composed under pressure and could read defenses and was nimble physically and quick mentally. Carter was very intelligent—a Scholastic All-American while at Brigham Young University. Additionally, he was able to throw short passes pretty well. But dependable long strikes? No, that wasn’t him.
Virgil’s skills weren’t considered premium assets for an NFL starting quarterback, but that’s all there was. Consequently, I began creating plays that tried to make the most of Virgil’s “limited” abilities—first one play, then another and another.
What I came up with called for Carter to throw lots of short, quick-release, timed passes to any one of multiple receivers running exact routes, usually within twelve yards of the line of scrimmage. No helium was required, because Virgil seldom had to throw the football more than fifteen yards.
In designing appropriate plays I was constantly choosing and mixing receivers from a choice of running backs, wide receivers, and tight ends. While each individual receiver’s running route was not complicated—simple, by position—collectively it was complex and made almost dizzying to the defense by the fact that over the years I eventually began “hiding” the same play cosmetically by altering our formation at the line of scrimmage.
Thus, receivers for the Bengals (and later the Chargers, Stanford University, and the 49ers) could line up in different spots before the snap but run a route to the same location and be ready for the quarterback’s pass, whether it came from Virgil Carter or Joe Montana. When you do this for scores of plays—and nobody in the NFL was doing it, in part because of the difficulty in creating, teaching, and executing the complexities of the system—you have an almost exponential multiplier of factors and “fool ers” the defense has to figure out instantaneously; often they would think they were seeing something brand new while the quarterback was, in a sense, seeing something “old”: his receivers in the same places seconds after the ball snap, even though the basic formation and routes run were quite different. (Conversely, I would also have receivers run routes to different locations off the same basic formation at the line of scrimmage.)
To make it all work, I “stretched” the field horizontally to create more room—used all available space from sideline to sideline—to avoid bunching our receivers and their defenders just beyond the line of scrimmage. (The width of a football field is much greater than most fans appreciate—- 53.3 yards. I used all of that width, slightly less than half the length of an NFL field, in designing plays, thus turning the approximately 15 yards of depth—Virgil’s most effective range—and 53.3 yards of width into a wide-open war zone being hit not by long bombs but short ones. At least, that was the plan.)
Over the years, I created an array of pass options that the defense had to figure out, usually in less than 3.5 seconds. Often it was over—the lightning-quick short pass completed—before they knew what hit them.
Because the passes were often just beyond the line of scrimmage, slower linebackers and safeties were forced into coverage against quicker running backs whom I “converted” into potential receivers. This was a key to maximizing yardage on our pass plays, because I counted on the backs and tight ends to run for yardage after they caught the ball.
In the middle of this seeming bedlam, the quarterback’s job—and Virgil was the first of them—was to immediately scan the field, locate an open receiver among up to five possibilities amid an attacking pack of rushers, and throw a precise pass. Not an easy task.
Of course, that’s where we capitalized on Carter’s “limited” skills: great composure, nimble feet, good ability to read defenses, ability to throw short passes with accuracy. The skills necessary to run my offense were not lesser skills than those of the traditional strong-armed quarterback; they were different skills—equally valuable, perhaps more so, and uncommon. No strong arm? No problem. Perhaps the greatest quarterback of all time, Joe Montana, carried a résumé that lacked
mention of a powerful throwing arm.
Of course, my many short-pass plays and their cosmetic variations—“looks”—would open up running and downfield passing opportunities, which we exploited. Ideally, we would present an ongoing assortment of plays that kept the defense off balance and vulnerable.
That’s how NFL offensive football was changed from checkers to chess. A defense good at checkers but not chess was at a major competitive disadvantage. The Cincinnati Bengals offense started playing advanced checkers with my offensive designs. By the time I got to San Francisco, I was teaching teams how to play advanced chess. The media called it the West Coast Offense.
While all of this was initially being developed—and once I began it was in development throughout my career—there was never a thought in my mind that it would alter football in any radical way. Rather, I was looking at a situation that had little going for it and trying to get something going. I was forced to be innovative to a degree I didn’t foresee.
It worked well enough to give us a fighting chance. In fact, with Virgil at the helm of my unorthodox but evolving offense, the Bengals won the AFC Central division that year with an 8-6 record in spite of losing six of our first seven games while I was thinking up and installing my new plays. In retrospect, this may be one of the more amazing feats I’ve ever been part of. Although we lost in the play-offs to the eventual Super Bowl champions, the Baltimore Colts, 17-0, the effectiveness of my new offensive scheme was startling.
By then I had spotted an unsung but promising quarterback at Minnesota’s Augustana College, Ken Anderson. We drafted him, and his wider range of skills allowed me to expand my offensive ideas much further. When Virgil was injured, he soon became our starting quarterback.
Ken was a quick learner and eventually became so adept that he is the NFL’s all-time leader for a season’s completion percentage—70.60 percent. Another of my quarterbacks is in third place—San Francisco’s Steve Young with 70.28 percent.
Quickly, what I had put together in a growing package of plays—short and less risky passes to multiple receivers flooding the secondary—became our stock in trade. Eventually, variations of it were incorporated by every team in the NFL and many at the college level. It was born of necessity, bred of innovation and creativity applied to existing—and so-called limited—assets.
And here’s an interesting but very irritating footnote: For my effort in coming up with a successful new way of doing things, I received the disparagement of many in the NFL, especially old-timers who dismissively called it the nickel-and-dime, dink-and-dunk, fancy-pants, or finesse offense—even the swish-and-sway. Their condescension stemmed from the fact that my approach didn’t rely on the traditional brute force, grinding ground game, or spectacular “long bomb” pass of old-time NFL football. It wasn’t physical enough for them.
Mine was a different approach to gaining yardage, controlling the ball (and clock), and scoring touchdowns. In a sense, the naysayers were seeking victory, but only if it came the old-fashioned way. They were locked into the past and unwittingly locking themselves out of the future. Leaders do this to themselves and their organizations all the time.
My new system eventually became the media’s vaunted West Coast Offense because it defined our teams in San Francisco and five of those teams won Super Bowl championships. However, a more accurate name would be the Cincinnati Offense, the Walsh Offense, or perhaps the Lemonade Offense—my response to being given lemons in the form of a team with no ground game and a quarterback without a strong arm.
Ironically, in San Francisco’s first Super Bowl appearance we played Cincinnati. Their quarterback, Ken Anderson, threw for 300 yards with twenty-five completions, two touchdowns, and a 73.5 percent completion rate. Both the number of completions and percentage rate set Super Bowl records.
Anderson “outpassed” Joe Montana’s 157 total passing yards, fourteen completions, and one touchdown, but Montana’s nearly error-free performance earned him the title of Super Bowl MVP. Cincinnati got “nickel-and-dimed”—outscored 26-21—by an offensive scheme that was created, in part, while Anderson was my quarterback. They also were sty mied by a tremendous San Francisco defensive effort, especially late in the second half of the game.
Later, in Super Bowl XXIII, we faced the Bengals again, this time coached by Sam Wyche, a former quarterback I had worked with during my Cincinnati days who later became one of my assistant coaches with the 49ers. And watching both of those San Francisco Super Bowl victories against Cincinnati was the president of the Bengals, my former boss, Paul Brown, a man who had aggressively worked to prevent me from ever becoming a head coach in the NFL.
So that was the new direction I brought to NFL offensive playmaking—turning the concept of relying on the running game for yardage and ball control on its head, replacing it with a reliance on short passes to multiple receivers running exacting and intricate, precision-timed routes.
It was a change whose complexities were often misunderstood by observers. Howard Cosell once was critical of a call I made because he wasn’t aware of just how complex and precise our receivers’ routes were. He exclaimed with exasperation during the Monday Night Football broadcast, “How could they [i.e., Bill Walsh] call for a twelve-yard pass play when they needed fourteen yards?”
Howard didn’t understand the extraordinary precision required for successful execution of the play. We couldn’t have the receiver running approximate routes and inexact distances each time; the route called for on that play was twelve yards exactly—not eleven, not thirteen, but twelve, and to an exact spot on the field. Additionally, what Howard and many others missed in the early days was that 60 percent of the yardage on our pass plays came through running after the catch. A twelve-yard pass was designed to produce an additional seven-yard gain on the ground.
One executive summed it up like this: “It’s not real NFL football.” He viewed it as gimmicky, smoke and mirrors, neither substantive nor long-lasting. He was wrong. The complexities of the offense I created as compared to his “real” way were as dissimilar as a Rolex to a sundial. (Few inventions are created out of nothing. What I was doing had its roots in the theories of others who had modernized the passing game, most notably the brilliant Sid Gillman.)
Those who were clinging to the past had apparently forgotten the past. Early in its evolution, football did not even allow the forward pass. In fact, it was brought into college football simply as a device to make the game safer. Eddie Cochems, head coach at Saint Louis University, immediately and enthusiastically embraced the new alternative to always running the ball. In 1906 his team went 11-0 and outscored opponents 407-11. He faced, I’m sure, traditionalists who looked down their noses at what he had incorporated as part of his search for victory. It’s often the case that a “game changer” takes a while to change the way the game is played.
Lessons of the Bill Walsh Offense
My new short precision pass-oriented offense was ostensibly created out of nothing. In fact, it was created out of existing assets that only needed to be “seen” and then capitalized on in new ways. There are several elements in its evolution that are worth evaluating as they pertain to your own leadership.
1. Success doesn’t care which road you take to get to its doorstep. The traditionalists—rigid and resistant in their thinking—who sneered at the new passing system I was creating were soon trying to figure out why it was beating them and how to copy it.
2. Be bold. Remove fear of the unknown—that is, change—from your mind. Respect the past without clinging to it: “That’s the way we’ve always done it” is the mantra of a team setting itself up to lose to an organization that’s not doing it that way any more. Paul Brown didn’t flinch when I came to him with my revolutionary ideas—a completely new system of playing offensive football. By nature he was an innovator who wasn’t afraid of change.
3. Desperation should not drive innovation. Here’s a good question to write on a Post-it Note and put on your desk: “Wha
t assets do we have right now that we’re not taking advantage of?” Virgil Carter’s “limited” skills, the 53.5 yards of width, and the availability of five potential receivers were all available assets even before desperation drove me to utilize them creatively. While waiting to get what you want—a “quarterback with a strong arm”—make the most of what you’ve got.
4. Be obsessive in looking for the upside in the downside. My evaluation of Virgil Carter’s “weak” résumé, his so-called limited assets, led directly to utilizing them productively. Why? Instead of looking for reasons we couldn’t make it work, I sought solutions that would make it succeed.
Welcome Skeptics to Your Team
There was a time, and perhaps still is in some organizations, when all hell would break loose if someone raised his or her hand during a staff meeting and asked, “What happens if this does not work? What then?” Others—usually the boss—would brand that person as a negative thinker, maybe even a loser. Today, of course, it’s different. The marketplace is volatile, constantly changing with new products and competitors.
In your own challenges, are you receptive to new, even unorthodox ways of getting things done? Bill Johnson was when he perceived potential in a tight end who botched a play; so was the Post-it Notes guy who figured out how to sell glue that didn’t stick; so was Cincinnati head coach Paul Brown when I started bringing him my new, unconventional, nontradi tional ideas. He was a master at thinking both inside and outside the box.
Unfortunately, too often we find comfort in what worked before—even when it stops working. We get stuck there and resist the new, the unfamiliar, the unconventional.
If Virgil Carter had been a strong-armed, accurate quarterback, would I have had the inspiration to design the new offense? Had Greg Cook not been injured, would I have forged a short-pass system? Would Paul Brown have encouraged me to look for a new and even better way of doing things? It’s impossible to know.
