Debunking the Myths of the West Coast Offense

March 5, 2001 (NHS) -- Okay, we've let it slide long enough. The media's love-affair with the "West Coast Offense" has reached the point of unnatural perversion, and it looks like once again only the NHS is going to stand up and present the truth behind the hype.

The phrase "West Coast Offense" (WCO) is easily the most abused in football circles. For misguided fans and sportswriters across the country, it's their way to refer to the 49er-style offense of throwing short passes that was supposedly "invented" by Bill Walsh in the 1980s and now employed by the most brilliant minds in the NFL. It's become a phrase that connotes success, winning, and a haughty attitude of the intelligent, proper way to play football. ESPN's Chris Berman has even gone so far as to call it the "enlightened" form of offense.

Of course, it would take many pages to properly vent our revulsion with all this -- and we hope to devote a chapter to what's wrong with the WCO someday -- but for now, we are going to trust that real football fans understand, and we will simply sum up our disgust with the usual label of the WCO as a wimpy and cheesy brand of football. In the same vein, while we can't cover everything here, let's expose the truth behind the more important myths about the media's perception of the WCO.

To illustrate our points, we will be referencing two thoroughly reprehensible articles, one by our buddy Dan Pompei at The Sporting News, the other by Mark Kriedler at ESPN, both notorious 49er smoochers. Do not read these articles on a full stomach as they've been known to produce effects ranging from nasuea to projectile vomiting.

Myth: the WCO was invented by Bill Walsh and the 49ers

If you really think about it, the misconception by the sports public that throwing a lot of short passes was invented by the 49ers and the intellectual property of Bill Walsh is simply amazing. We've already detailed how Walsh, in reality, invented nothing. He simply continued doing what was being done in Cincinnati and rode the NFL rules changes of the late 1970s to success (you think it was coincidence that the Bengals also led their league in completion percentage and made the worst-to-Super Bowl transition in 1981?).

The very name "West Coast Offense" is flat-out wrong, because its roots are entrenched firmly in the midwest. Former Minnesota Vikings coach Bud Grant pointed out that Walsh "learned most of what he knew from Paul Brown. And he never gave Paul Brown any credit. Paul Brown was the greatest innovator in the coaching field that ever came along. But Walsh invented the game." (In case you didn't get it, that last sentence was bitter sarcasm.)

"You talk about the West Coast Offense," Grant said, "When we had Tarkenton here, that's exactly what we were doing -- short passing, dumping the ball to Foreman in the flat. Jerry Burns was doing that before Bill Walsh ever got in the business of doing it. Bill Walsh knew the value of having a PR department to put out his stuff. So your question is, does that bother me? No, it doesn't. It would bother me if it represented dollars or something. But it doesn't -- it represents ego. I could live with more dollars, but I can't live with more ego."

'Nuf said.

Myth: defenses can't figure it out

Show us a person talking about how unstoppable the WCO is, and we'll show you a person who knows nothing about real football. Being amazed that the WCO is successful today is like being amazed that a touchdown is worth six points, for the simple reason that both are true because NFL rules make them so. The reason it seems like defenses can't defend the WCO is because the NFL changed the rules to take away that ability.

In the late 1970s, a series of rules changes opened up the passing game in order to increase scoring and make the game more palatable to the fickle masses (the 49er fans-in-waiting). "Probably most important were the restrictions on hitting wide receivers," wrote Glenn Dickey of the S.F. Chronicle, "Middle linebackers from Dick Butkus to Jack Lambert had leveled receivers coming across the middle of the field, but the new rules prevented that."

The result of these rules changes was that in 1980 it looked like to the untrained laymen -- a.k.a. the 49er fans that now make up such a huge contingent of the media -- that a brand new pattern called the "slant" was born and Bill Walsh was the father, when, in fact, the short passing game had been around for years. It was only the result under the new rules that changed.

But how come no other teams were running that style at the time? Under the old rules, trying to make the WCO work was a much different animal. Back in the '70s, it took incredible Hall Of Fame talent like Tarkenton's Vikings had to succeed with it. Walsh and the Bengals were forced into it because of serendipity -- an arm injury to their deep-passing QB, Greg Cook. Walsh has admitted that if not for that injury, he never would have thought to throw so many short passes.

Today, any chimp with a modicum of accuracy, from Montana to Young to Bono to Gannon to Garcia, can be successful running the WCO, and it's all thanks to the changes in the rules. If even a 49er-homer like Dickey can process the impact of those rules, it boggles the mind that the rest of the media and public at large don't get it.

Myth: Walsh and the 49ers are responsible for the most successful offenses in the NFL today

Ok, so its clear that what we have today is a bunch of idiots posing as football pundits, feeding their audience a steady diet of ignorance. But it's also true that every time you turn around a new coach is being hired who came from the "Bill Walsh school". Obviously, those in the NFL making the decisions know best, right?

Well, the reason for its virus-like spread gets back to what we just summed up above: it doesn't take much talent to complete a bunch of short passes (even Pompei concedes that "the West Coast offense also is a solution to a league of imperfect passers"). Coaches are being asked to turn franchises around instantly, and the WCO is like fast food. Why wait around to cook a meal when you can drive thru at McDonalds?

So while the media is correct in noting its spread throughout the NFL, the problem here, once again, gets back to thinking that Walsh is the "father" of the offense and tracing the credit of every successful team running a version of it back to the 49ers. Pompei claims "five of the top 10 offenses (Broncos, 49ers, Giants, Saints and Raiders)" run it. Kreidler adds in the Ravens and Minnesota. The championships of the Packers and Broncos in the mid-1990s are frequently lumped into the "WCO family", too.

In reality, aside from the lip service of saying "they run the WCO", most of those teams are decisively different not only from each other, but especially from what Walsh was doing in Frisco in the '80s. The Broncos and Packers possessed the ability to throw the ball deep and pound out a consistent ground attack. Both Elway and Favre had cannons for arms and fired downfield often. The Broncos also had a power running back like nothing the 49ers ever possessed in Terrell Davis. Today's Saints and Giants use Ricky Williams and "Thunder & Lightning" as their main attacks.

To lump all these teams together in the same pot is lunacy. Even Packers coach Mike Holmgren had to protest comparisons. "I get tired of hearing [about] the 'West Coast offense,' " Holmgren said. "I think that's kind of a lazy term, really. I mean, it was kind of a cute little deal at one time ... It's not the same. If I got out and showed you plays from our playbook then and our playbook now, you'd go, 'It's quite different.'"

But that hasn't stopped the media from crafting the "Father Bill" image, and the extent the media will go to in order to give credit to Walsh is astounding. Our favorite example might be Kreidler's explanation of the connection between Giants coach Jim Fassel and Walsh: "Long before he came to prominence with the Giants, Fassel was cutting his teeth with the Stanford football program. As the 1970s spun into the '80s, Fassel was recruiting and bringing to fame a quarterback named John Elway at precisely the same time that, a few miles up the road in San Francisco, a coach named Bill Walsh was adapting the thin framework of the West Coast offense to a struggling 49ers franchise."

Pardon our confusion, but what the hell is the connection here? Yes, Fassel was at Stanford, but not at the same time as Walsh -- he never worked for Walsh or the 49ers. And does his recruiting of Elway have anything remotely to do with Walsh?

As far as we can tell, the link here seems to be that Stanford is located near San Francisco, and like some divine radioactive fallout, this geographic proximity to The Almighty Genius must have allowed some pearls of wisdom to seep into Fassel's cellular structure that ultimately were responsible for the Giants being in the Super Bowl twenty years later.

In sum, when you peel the rhetoric and propaganda, fact is that there are very few teams running an offense that relies almost exclusively on the short pass to the extent of the 1980s 49ers. The last time we can confidently say a 49er-like WCO team won a championship was the Cheater Bowl after the 1994 season, when the illegally bought 49er defense finally overcame Steve Young's lack of arm strength.

Myth: the WCO is the future of the NFL

Is it true that the WCO is the "enlightened" path, as our favorite fat-faced ESPN sportscaster would claim? If you're a real football fan, the thought that we will still be watching mediocre NFL quarterbacks throwing cheesy two-yard dumpoff passes twenty years from now makes you sick to your stomach. But take heart: we're here to present some evidence that the NFL may be entering a new Golden Age, where teams actually have running games, defenses, and -- gasp! -- throw the ball more than five yards downfield.

Certainly, the 49ers rode the WCO to four championships in the 1980s. But, as we've asked before, how much of the success of the offense had to do with environmental factors? A convincing argument can be made that in combination with rules changes, easy schedules, referee favoritism, etc., the "gimmick factor" was a strong player in its success. The Niners were the weird, lone exception in a league built around strong running games and vertical passing games. 1980s defenses were built to stop the rule, not the exception, and as we know, defensive strength and pressure is wasted against the 49ers because they simply avoid confrontation with the "long handoff". That's the simple reason why the 49ers were often able to overcome the supposed invincible Bears and Eagles defenses running the 46, notwithstanding the giddy media's conclusion that the reason was just "Joe was the best ever".

Today, as the WCO has spread, its success is waning, which is exactly what you expect. Defenses adjust to stop the philosophy of the day, and as more and more teams want to control the ball with short passes, finally we have seen developments to counter it on the other side of the ball. Schemes like the zone blitz are being used, and the focus on front seven defensive personnel is now speed in order to focus more on disrupting the underneath stuff. Meanwhile, teams that turned down the fast food and have the ability to execute the more difficult vertical passing game, such as the Rams, are the top offenses and feasting to the tune of setting new NFL records.

The spread of the WCO has not translated into championships as the media would lead you to believe. Obviously, the 2000 Ravens and 1999 Rams did not win the last two Super Bowls on slant passes. Further, if we examine all the participants in the NFC and AFC championship games over the last 3 years, what we see is out of the 12 finalists, only four teams ran an offense that could be even remotely called WCO-related. Of these four, the 2000 Raiders, with Rich Gannon at the helm, were really the only team that ran a pure Walsh-style of it, with complete reliance on short passes, some gaudy rushing statistics in reserve, and no deep passing game of which to speak. The two Vikings' teams won a lot on the bomb to Moss, while the 1998 Broncos won because of the strong arm of Elway and the tough running of Davis.

So perhaps NFL execs should think twice before jumping on the WCO bandwagon, because it seems a more realistic assessment of the WCO offense in the framework of the game today is that it can make a team competitive in a short amount of time -- under the watered down rules, the WCO allows any pansy-armed yet accurate QB to be successful running it -- but it is no longer something defenses aren't used to seeing. It may still help "imperfect passers" and make mediocre teams seem good, but the 1980s are over, and it can no longer make good teams seem great.

Myth: it's a style of football that everyone enjoys

Perhaps Pompei's worst comment of all was that the WCO "gets the blood pumping like never before". It's the assumption that football fans everywhere find it an exciting style of football. If you ask us, being a fan of the WCO is like exalting Brett Butler instead of Mark McGwire.

Whenever someone talks about the state of professional football, it's usually griping -- and the popularity of the WCO is a big part of the problem. Everyone is complaining about parity, that there are no great teams, and that mediocrity is the rule in the NFL. Well, guess what? Part of the reason the NFL appears like such a watered-down, mediocre product is because so many teams are throwing boring, dink-off, two-yard slants instead of exciting downfield passes. It's like watching a volleyball game with no spiking allowed.

Will the media ever put together the concept of the growth of the WCO and the rise in obvious blandness? No. That's because the media establishment has already erroniously concluded that because the 49ers were able to beat the Bengals, Bengals and Chargers, their offense was great, and the supposed spawn of that offense ergo must be great, too.

As Norman Chad wrote to mock his media brethren, "Walsh is credited with pretty much every innovation in football since the shoulder pad." Indeed, if we were to all just swallow what the media says, you'd think that before Walsh came into football, teams just stood and stared at the football for three downs then punted.

Instead of praise, what we should be hearing is that the WCO is a pathetic, spineless manner of football that wins on paper under today's rules, but without honor. Football grew into greatness because it was once the ultimate arena. In order to step into it, you needed a willingness to fight the man across from you, one-on-one, in order to determine the winner. The tragedy of the WCO is that it allows teams to cheese around their opponents instead of facing them -- because, as many a smug Niner fan has remarked, "it wins, doesn't it?" -- and it's that mentality that is killing the NFL spirit.

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