Bill Walsh is dead. II

[Blueblood]

I'd like to get some thoughts from the college football fan's perspective...

... and yes, I am posting just 10 blocks from the furd campus. Kinda' strange.

Great coach and leader.

[indyfrisco]

Aside from my trolling int he main forum on this, the football world did actually lose a legend. While his team was filled with great talent in San Fran, he was instrumental in building that giant. Montana, Rice, Craig, Lott, etc.

RIP

[Killian]

He may have been the best FB coach, ever. Outside of two platoon football and the forward pass, he may have come up with the most innovative football concept with the West Coast Offense.

[the_ouskull]

Assuming that you don't feel like Sid Gillman and Don Coryell invented the West Coast Offense and just didn't put a pretty bow of a name on it.

the_ouskull

[Terry in Crapchester]

One thing that really sticks out at me by Walsh, in addition to being an extremely innovative coach, was his ability to find and evaluate talent. It's easy to forget in hindsight, but if you look at the centerpieces of the 49er offense, none was exactly a slam-dunk:

• Joe Montana was an on-again, off-again starter during his college career at ND. His career college numbers are surprisingly weak, much weaker than most in here probably would expect.
• Jerry Rice had eye-popping numbers in college, but also had plenty of detractors due to the fact that he accumulated those numbers at a 1-AA school (Mississippi Valley State) which ran what many at the time considered a gimmicky offense (5 WR as the standard set).
• Roger Craig was somewhat overshadowed by Mike Rozier at Nebraska. Also, Craig, who went on to set the standard for receiving out of the backfield, caught only 16 passes in his college career.

A great coach, and well ahead of his time.

[PSUFAN]

Walsh blasted Pitt for firing Walt Harris.

I can only assume that he was really pissed at The Cardinal, and wanted to set them up for a 1-11 season - and a loss to a 1-AA team.

Or maybe he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about when he said that folks in Pittsburgh didn't "appreciate" Harris.

[Goober McTuber]

[*]Jerry Rice had eye-popping numbers in college, but also had plenty of detractors due to the fact that he accumulated those numbers at a 1-AA school (Mississippi Valley State) which ran what many at the time considered a gimmicky offense (5 WR as the standard set).

1-AA? Perhaps he played well against a number of SEC teams.

[MgoBlue-LightSpecial]

^Rack

[the_ouskull]

Assuming that you don't feel like Sid Gillman and Don Coryell invented the West Coast Offense and just didn't put a pretty bow of a name on it.

the_ouskull

Don't you think Gillman and Coryell were more long pass oriented?

Yeah, they were, and if Montana had the arm strength, maybe Walsh would have been too. Regardless, I'm not taking anything away from Walsh. I think that he was a great coach and a supurb talent evaluator.

the_ouskull

[Terry in Crapchester]

I just came across this. A good retrospective on Walsh from the perspective of a ND fan:

http://www.blueandgold.com/content/?aid=4073

Remembering A ‘Fantasy Coach’
by LOU SOMOGYI
Senior Editor

Everyone is aware of fantasy football leagues, but for nearly a half-century many Notre Dame faithful have also engaged in fantasies of a premier NFL coaching plying his trade for the Fighting Irish.

When the Irish football program began to flounder in the 1950s, the perceived answer to its malaise was 1938 Notre Dame graduate Joe Kuharich, who led the 1951 San Francisco Dons to an unbeaten record before being named NFL Coach of the Year in 1955, his second season with the Washington Redskins. The Irish were set to hire their fantasy coach in 1956, after Terry Brennan went 2-8, but an 11th-hour reprieve for Brennan delayed Kuharich’s hiring until after the 1958 campaign.

Alas, Kuharich finished 17-23 in four seasons (1959-62), leading Irish fans to dream about Vince Lombardi as a fantasy coach. Lombardi was one of Fordham’s famed “Seven Blocks of Granite” in the 1930s that was instructed by line coach Frank Leahy. A devout Catholic, Lombardi had a fondness for Notre Dame – but by 1962 he had made the Green Bay Packers “Titletown, U.S.A.” Fortunately, the Irish still hit the mother lode with the less heralded Ara Parseghian from Northwestern University.

After Parseghian’s resignation in 1974, the new fantasy coach was the Miami Dolphins’ Don Shula, who led his charges to back-to-back Super Bowls in 1972 and 1973. During Dan Devine’s roller-coaster debut season at Notre Dame in 1975, there were mid-season reports that Devine would be fired, replaced by Parseghian for the remainder of the season – and then Notre Dame would hire Shula in 1976.

Rumor-mongering knows no era.

The most recent NFL fantasy coach for Irish faithful was Jon Gruden, who grew up in South Bend while his father served as a backfield coach for Devine. Gruden purportedly was on the cusp of succeeding the deposed Bob Davie in 2002 before Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis intervened with his employee.

But no fantasy coach was on the minds of many Notre Dame followers longer than the late, great Bill Walsh, first in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s.

Hired in 1979 by the moribund San Francisco 49ers (2-14 in both 1978 and in Walsh’s first season in 1979), Walsh selected Notre Dame’s Joe Montana in the third round of his first NFL Draft. By Year 3 (1981), the 49ers finished 16-3 and were the Super Bowl champs.

Walsh’s handling of Montana was a primer in the proper care and feeding of a quarterback. Montana barely played as a rookie in 1979 while learning and absorbing the intricacies of Walsh’s sophisticated offense. In Year 2, Montana was inserted in specific situations where he could succeed with certain plays. Steve DeBerg was still the starter, but in one early-season game, Montana was inserted in red-zone situations, where he completed 4-of-6 passes, with two touchdowns.

In a mid-season game against the Dallas Cowboys, though, a game Dallas won 59-14, Walsh did not insert Montana. It was neither the time nor the place to get him annihilated by the Cowboys’ all-out pass rush in a desperate situation for the 49ers. However, by the end of the season, Montana had gradually worked himself into the starting role, prompting the trade of DeBerg.

Walsh was 9-26 in his first 35 NFL games, including a 1-2 start in Year 3 before the magical run in 1981. It coincided with Notre Dame’s precipitous drop to 5-6 in Gerry Faust’s first season. For Irish fans such as yours truly, who idolized Montana during his days at Notre Dame, the 49ers became our “adopted team” to fill the sudden void of the Irish no longer being a bona fide national title contender.

In his second season at Notre Dame (1982), Faust hired Ron Hudson as his new offensive coordinator. All that needed to be said about Hudson was he was a “West Coast Offense” aficionado who had learned the Bill Walsh system. Any time you invoked Walsh’s name in football, it was like the munchkins bowing in silent reverence when the mention of “the great and powerful Oz” was uttered.

Indeed, Hudson became somewhat of a folk-hero after his first game, a 23-17 victory over Michigan in the first-ever night game at Notre Dame Stadium. Quarterback Blair Kiel, who completed only 42 percent of his passes his first two seasons, was 15 of 22 (68.2 percent) with the short, controlled passing attack in the victory over the Wolverines.

Nevertheless, Faust’s era would never find consistency, making Walsh all the more a fantasy coach during the 30-26-1 record from 1981-85. But like Lombardi in the 1960s and Shula in the 1970s, Walsh was too established in the NFL to move to the collegiate ranks.

Following his retirement after winning the 1989 Super Bowl (his third), Walsh became Lou Holtz’s worst nightmare. While San Francisco was winning Super Bowls in 1988 and 1989, Notre Dame embarked on a school-record 23-game winning streak and returned to the summit of college football.

But by 1990, option quarterback Tony Rice had graduated and was replaced by pro-style specialist Rick Mirer. By 1990, the sophomore Mirer was publicized in some circles as the best college quarterback prospect since Roger Staubach or maybe Joe Namath in the early 1960s.

This became a bane for Holtz, who was esteemed as an “option coach” but perhaps not as advanced with pocket passing games. Moreover, when Walsh became the NBC-TV analyst for Notre Dame home games in 1991 (with Dick Enberg as the play-by-play man), it became popular to write “just think if Bill Walsh could coach Mirer” letters to Blue & Gold Illustrated.

In private moments, Holtz relayed how the NBC telecasts and dissections of his play-calling were making his life more difficult for him – but it became even more challenging when Walsh was hired as Stanford’s head coach in 1992. It was the ultimate no-win situation for Holtz. If the Irish beat the Cardinal, it was because they had much superior talent. If they lost, it showed just how inferior he was to Walsh.

Even before the game, Holtz laid it on thick: “I have told our football players this: ‘He’s a great coach and we aren’t going to outcoach Bill Walsh.’ Our players are gonna have to play hard, because if this game is won on the sideline – and there aren’t as many won on the sideline as you think – it isn’t gonna be won on the Notre Dame sideline.”

Indeed, Walsh and Co. stunned the Irish in Notre Dame Stadium in 1992 by a 33-16 count, tallying the last 33 points of the game. It was the lone defeat during Notre Dame’s 10-1-1 campaign. Furthermore, Mirer was only 13 of 38 and tossed an interception into the end zone.

“Just think how great Mirer would be if Walsh coached him.”

In private, one member of the Notre Dame training staff joked outside the locker room how a pair of forceps might be needed to pry out the football Walsh shoved up Holtz’s rear end. As fabulous as Holtz was, Walsh was practically a deity.

After his 10-3 debut at Stanford in 1992, Walsh was 4-7 and 3-7-1 his next two seasons at The Farm, including 48-20 and 34-15 losses to Holtz’s Irish. He finished 17-17-1 in those three seasons before retiring. It added credence to the theory of how no matter how much of a coaching genius you are, the lack of horses can humble even the greatest jockey.

Without the presence of Walsh, though, Montana might have just become another journeyman pro quarterback – the same way John Huarte might have just been another so-so Irish QB sans the presence of Parseghian.

Walsh never did become Notre Dame’s fantasy coach, but his union with Montana helped perpetuate the glory and tradition of Irish quarterbacks. It was a boost during the leaner Notre Dame times in the 1980s.

I remember the timing slightly differently. I was at ND in the 1980's, and even then some folks were holding onto the idea Shula coaching ND to replace Faust. But you heard Walsh's name bandied about in that context as well.

Definitely a great coach, and you can't blame ND fans for wanting him, however realistic it was.