I'm offended by this dinky offense
Posted: Thu September 24,
1998
 Sports Illustrated
NFL writer Paul Zimmerman checks in each Thursday with analysis
of trends and players to watch.
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At its best the Walsh Offense, also known as the Cincinnati
Offense, and currently mislabeled the West Coast Offense,
is what you have seen the 49ers running for almost 20
years. At its worst it was what Arizona and Philadelphia
showed us last Sunday
night.
First, let's get our terminology straight, OK? The term
"West Coast Offense" was originated by
Bernie
Kosar in 1993 when he came to the Cowboys. I asked him what kind
of an offense they ran and he said, "You know, that
West Coast Offense ...
Norv
Turner and
Ernie
Zampese from the Rams ...
Don
Coryell and
Sid
Gillman on the
Chargers."
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Walsh developed a unique horizontal passing game.
(Otto Greule/ALLSPORT)
| In addition to being a very heady quarterback, Bernie was
obviously a serious student of football history because he
had neatly wrapped up the whole progression of a system.
Gillman's offense at the Chargers back in the '60s, copied
by Don Coryell
across town at San Diego State, then adapted again by the
Chargers when Coryell became their coach in 1978, brought
to the Rams in 1987 when Zampese, who had been Coryell's
first lieutenant, joined the L.A. staff, where he worked
with Turner, who brought the
system to Dallas in '91. Split the seams with your tight
end, throw timed, precision patterns to your wideouts with
a lot of comebacks at 15-to-18 yards—it was vertical
and very pretty to watch. It was like slicing a
pie.
(That was, and is, the true West Coast Offense, and Kosar
was the first person I heard label it as
such.)
Meanwhile in Cincinnati a young offensive assistant named
Bill
Walsh had just lost his terrific rookie quarterback,
Greg
Cook, a big, strong-armed kid who was a cinch to rewrite all
the passing records. With Walsh running the offense Cook
averaged a dazzling 17.5 yards per completion in 1969; no
quarterback has come near that number since then. If his
career hadn't ended with
a shoulder injury and Walsh had him for, say, another 10
years, who knows what kind of numbers Cook might have put
up and what the system would have looked like—probably
something like the great point-a-minute attacks of the Rams
in the early
1950s.
But Cook was gone and in came
Virgil
Carter, mobile, clever, not blessed with a strong arm, but an
accurate thrower, adept at reading defenses. And so Walsh
developed a horizontal passing game, with rollouts and a
lot of underneath stuff and optional reads and breakoff
patterns, with the last
read always the man closest to the QB, usually a back coming
across the middle. Then in 1979 Walsh brought his
Cincinnati system to San Francisco, where his quarterback
was
Steve
DeBerg.
"He told me, 'I don't know how many games we'll win
with the material we have,'" DeBerg says, "'but I
do know one thing. If you run the system right, you'll
complete more passes than any quarterback in the NFL.'
Damned if I
didn't."
A year later
Joe
Montana replaced DeBerg as the starter, the next year the Niners
won the Super Bowl, and it was away we go, five Super Bowls
with either Montana or
Steve
Young running the system that Walsh had originated for Virgil
Carter in Cincinnati. And now everyone's calling it the
West Coast Offense. What the hell ... San Diego, L.A., San
Francisco, it's all West Coast, isn't it? Why be correct
when you can settle on a
catch phrase? So you'll forgive me, please, if I don't call
it by that name. It's the Walsh
system.
I'm sick of hearing how a team's ailments will immediately
be cured by a new coach, or offensive coordinator, arriving
to install that system. If you don't have the people to
make it work, it won't work. The zone blitz will eat it up.
I saw that in Week
2 when Seattle devoured Arizona, offensively coordinated by
Marc
Trestman, who had a brief tenure at San Francisco. I saw it again
when the Cardinals played the Eagles last week. Oy, what a
collection of dink passes going
nowhere.
Jake
Plummer, a down-the-field thrower last year, completed 21 passes,
only one of them longer than 10 yards—the last one a
crossing pattern to his tight end through a deserted zone.
Philly's
Bobby
Hoying was a little better. Three of his 13 completions were
longer than 10 yards. Then he got knocked out of action,
and in came
Rodney
Peete, who got the ball downfield a little more and led the
Eagles on their only scoring drive of the
night.
One of the theories of the Walsh system is that you throw
to your receivers short and let them run long, provided, of
course, the pass catches them in full stride. If it
doesn't, if they have to work at making the catch, then
they get nailed right away,
and you've got that four-yard completion on third and
eight. The shifting spectrum of the zone blitz is designed
to clog the short passing lanes. One way to combat it is to
run at it, hitting the bubble created by a man dropping off
the line, but it's
not that easy to read. And a running game in general is
something more talked about than executed. Blocking skills
have eroded. The athletes on the defensive side of the ball
are superior to their offensive counterparts; a man can be
out of position and
still make the
play.
But the Walsh system rules the NFL. Offensive football is
increasingly boring to watch. How many dink passes can you
take?
Dan
Marino is a dinker.
Kordell
Stewart is mired in a bog of five-yard gains.
Jerry
Rice is now a 10-yard threat. Oh sure, the great ones such as
Brett
Favre and Young and
John
Elway, coached by people with a real feel for the passing game,
still run high-tech offenses, but pass routes are getting
shorter and shorter. Which leads, naturally, to a chart.
Yards per completion, which I consider a very telling
statistic, last year's
final numbers compared to 1998 after three games (QBs who have
seen only limited action this season are not
included):
| PASSER | YDS. PER COMPLETION |
| AFC | 1997 | 1998 |
| Jeff George | 13.5 | 12.7 |
| John Elway | 13.0 | 13.5 |
| Kordell Stewart | 12.8 | 9.3 |
| Mark Brunell | 12.4 | 12.2 |
| Steve McNair | 12.3 | 9.1 |
| Dan Marino | 11.8 | 9.9 |
| Warren Moon | 11.8 | 11.4 |
| Drew Bledsoe | 11.8 | 14.3 |
| Neil O'Donnell | 10.8 | 10.1 |
| NFC |
| Jake Plummer | 14.0 | 8.9 |
| Chris Chandler | 13.3 | 15.0 |
| Tony Banks | 12.9 | 12.2 |
| Brett Favre | 12.7 | 11.4 |
| Steve Young | 12.6 | 14.2 |
| Bobby Hoying | 12.3 | 9.0 |
| Scott Mitchell | 11.9 | 11.9 |
| Trent Dilfer | 11.8 | 11.5 |
| Troy Aikman | 11.2 | 12.7 |
| Danny Kanell | 11.2 | 9.1 |
| Erik Kramer | 10.9 | 10.4 |
| Kerry Collins | 10.6 | 14.5 |
|
Final
tally: Fourteen quarterbacks down from '97, six up, one even, but
more telling is the number of dismal, single-digit
yards-per-completion averages—six of them. Last year
there were none. OK, it's early in the season, things
might change. But what
I really wish would change is the mentality that says
horizontal is best. And please, do me a favor and don't
call this the West Coast
Offense.
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