The Blind Side: Bill Walsh

Previously:

The Blind Side: LT

Lawrence Taylor's importance as a defensive player was important because NFL quarterbacks were throwing more passes. And the reason they were doing that was coach Bill Walsh.

When [Walsh] arrived in Cincinnati in 1968... to run the passing game for Bengals head coach Paul Brown, he faced a new problem: comically inadequate football players.
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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.
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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 three0step 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.
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Walsh had created the contraption to compensate for the deficiencies of his quarterback, but an offense based on a lot of short, well-timed parses 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.
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Next, by shortening -- and timing -- the passing game, Walsh reduced its two biggest risks: interceptions and incompletion.
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In 1971, Virgil Carter, who had never completed as many as half of his passes, somehow led the entire league in completion percentage... 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... In 1974, Anderson led the league in completion percentage and total yards and yards per attempt...
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Walsh left Cincinnati... 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.
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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 quarterback, Steve Deberg... the next year, in Bill Walsh's system of well timed passes, the seemingly inept Deberg threw more passes... than any quarterback in the history of the NFL.

Lewis argues that the next two quarterbacks for the 49ers, Hall of Famers Joe Montana and Steve Young, owed a huge amount of their success to the Walsh offensive system.

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.
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This single strand of the history of the game -- the strand that would become the rope tied around Michael Oher's waist and haul hum up in the world -- is clearer than most. Over time, the statistics of NFL quarterbacks, on average, came to resemble the statistics of Bill Walsh's quarterbacks -- because other coaches borrowed heavily from Walsh. The passing game was transformed from a risky business with returns not all that much greater than the running game to a clearly superior way to move the football down the field. As a result, the players most important to the passing game became, relatively, a great deal more valuable. The force that pulled on the rope around Michael Oher's waist was the mind of Bill Walsh.

With the passing game so important in NFL offenses, it becomes easier to understand the impact a genius pass rusher like Lawrence Taylor could have.