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The real West Coast offense
Posted: Friday October 29, 1999 07:19 PM
When you get old, you get cranky, and lots of things bug you -- things that might seem insignificant to others. I get nasty when I read (or hear), "Everyone must do their own..." Singular antecedent. EveryONE must do his or her... I go absolutely wild when I hear some TV yutz remarking (and they all say it), "There's lots of ways." Huh? There is ways? Are English teachers listening to this? But that's kid stuff compared to the way I feel about the term "West Coast Offense." I've belabored the subject many times before. But here it comes again, this time keyed by a very interesting conversation I had the other day with the current darling of the offensive coordinator set, St. Louis' Mike Martz, who has put together the NFL's most dynamic attack. We talked about the Real West Coast Offense, the one he coaches. There are three practitioners of the Real West Coast Offense, three men whose roots go right back to the beginning -- to Sid Gillman of the San Diego Chargers in the 1960s, and before him, Francis (Shut-the-Gates-of-Mercy) Schmidt at Ohio State. The current trio is composed of Martz, whose offense ranks second in the NFL; Washington's head coach and offensive coordinator Norv Turner , whose attack ranks first, six total yards ahead of Martz's offense; and Ernie Zampese, whose Patriots attack ranks No. 5 in the NFL in yardage. There is a very strong connection here, and it goes back to Gillman. "I was a San Diego high school kid in those days," Martz says. "I used to love to sit in old Balboa Stadium and watch Gillman's offense at work. I mean, it was just so great to look at -- Lance Alworth and Gary Garrison, and John Hadl throwing the ball all over the place. Paul Lowe and Keith Lincoln running. It was an awesome experience." It was a beautiful offense that had everything going for it. At times it reached unheard-of levels, such as the 610 yards the Chargers put up when they murdered Boston in the 1963 AFL Championship. Push the ball downfield, work the seams, hit the receiver on the break. Everything timed to the max, every step carefully charted, receivers and QB all working together. And a punishing ground game to back it up. No one could coach offensive football like Gillman did in the '60s. He said the seeds of his offense were sown when he was a graduate assistant on the 1934 Ohio State staff, working under Shut-the-Gates-of-Mercy Schmidt (so named because he took delight in running up big scores). But San Diego had another hotshot coach in those days, Don Coryell, working across town at San Diego State, building a succession of fancy records with prospects who'd either slipped through the cracks at USC and UCLA or had been rejected by them. Coryell and his staff were frequent visitors at Gillman's pre-season camp. They loved his offense. They absorbed a lot of it, although Coryell added wrinkles of his own. Two bright young assistants on Coryell's San Diego State staff were Joe Gibbs and Zampese. Gibbs took the offense with him to the Redskins, adding innovations such as the Bunch -- three wideouts bunched together, darting off into confusing patterns -- and the two- and three-tight end alignments, when he wanted to go to maximum protection. Zampese took it with him to the L.A. Rams, where he eventually became offensive coach. Turner worked under Zampese in L.A., absorbed the Zampese-Coryell-Gillman offense and then took it with him to Dallas, where he became offensive coordinator on Jimmy Johnson's Super Bowl teams. His Cowboys attack looked a lot like Gillman's did, especially the emphasis on absolutely perfect timing between Troy Aikman and his receivers. Once, in 1993, I talked to a backup Miami quarterback named Hugh Millen, who'd been in the Dallas camp earlier that season. "I can't believe the things the receivers get away with here," he said, "the sloppy way they run their routes. They'd never get away with it under Norv. If he told them to run their break at seven yards, that was it, not a foot more or less, because that's where the ball was going to be. And if they wouldn't, he'd get somebody who would." Turner took the offense with him to Washington. For two years his quarterback coach was Martz, who had worked under him -- and Zampese -- on the Rams. And that's the link that binds these three offensive coaches whose systems are having such success right now. This is the bloodline of the Real West Coast Offense. How did the term get its name? From Bernie Kosar, when he was a backup quarterback with Dallas in '93. I was doing a piece on the Cowboys. I asked him what the offense was like. "Oh, you know, the West Coast Offense," he said. "Turner and Zampese and Don Coryell and Sid Gillman. That thing." (Bernie obviously had a good knowledge of NFL history). I used the quote. It was picked up by a West Coast wire reporter, except that he got it screwed up and he attached it to the San Francisco attack that Bill Walsh had used in San Francisco's Super Bowl run of the '80s. What the hell -- San Diego, L.A., San Francisco -- it's all West Coast, isn't it? And that's where it stuck. At first Walsh was quite upset by the misnomer. "Call it the Walsh Offense, or the Cincinnati Offense," he said, "but not the West Coast Offense. That's something completely different." Walsh's concept came about in 1970, when he was offensive coach with the Bengals. The year before he had had one of the great rookie quarterbacks in NFL history, Greg Cook, a big, strongarmed kid who could also throw with touch. In 1969 Cook averaged 18 yards per completion, a mark that never has been approached since. The attack was long-ball, obviously. Even the tight ends got downfield. Bob Trumpy, Cook's No. 1 target, averaged 22.6 yards a catch, an unheard-of number for tight ends. Trumpy's backup, Chip Myers --Walsh often used two tight ends at once -- averaged 20.6. Even rookie Bruce Coslet, the third man in the rotation, got into the act, recording 39 yards on his one catch. Then Cook went down with a shoulder injury. His career was finished. In came Virgil Carter in 1970 -- smaller, agile, quick-thinking. Carter was able to go through his progressions quickly and throw on the go; not blessed with a big arm, but accurate. So Walsh crafted an offense to suit him, a horizontal offense with a lot of motion and underneath routes and breakoff patterns, an attack that now goes by the misnomer "West Coast Offense." Once I asked Walsh what his system would have been like if he'd had Cook for 10 or 12 years. "Completely different," he said. "It would have been down the field." So he was annoyed at first when his offense was misnamed, but after a while, as it kept gaining more and more notoriety, he just shrugged. What the hell? Which brings us back to Mike Martz and the Real West Coast Offense, as practiced with much success in St.Louis and Washington and New England. "I couldn't have had two better mentors than Ernie and Norv," Martz said the other day. "We talk all the time. Ernie's the guy who really expanded the system, who put a twist on it. He kept finding different ways to get guys the ball, off different formations. But certain basic principles still apply. "It's such a timing-oriented system. You want to get the ball downfield, yes, but you want to get it out quickly, and the timing portion is critical. There are no shades of gray. You've got to run in and out of your breaks -- boom, like that -- and you've got to be exactly where you're supposed to be." I congratulated him on the trade that brought in running back Marshall Faulk, who, in the last two weeks, has supplied a nice change of pace to an offense that was beginning to look one-dimensional in favor of the pass. "That's another thing that's critical to the system," Martz says. "Power running. You've got to be able to run the ball when you go to a three-wide receiver set, and you've got to run with power. By that I mean behind zone blocking, which is a big departure from the San Francisco system. Theirs was man-blocking, with a lot of cut-blocks and misdirection. Ours is straight power. Not many people realize this, but if we hadn't have gotten Marshall we were prepared to go with another excellent zone-blocking runner, Robert Holcombe. It takes a certain type, a guy who can run with power, who's good at picking his way through. Stephen Davis is doing that in Washington now, and that's a big reason why their offense is so good. Terry Allen 's starting to come around in New England. "The good thing about zone-block running is that you can keep pounding away. You don't have the negative yardage plays." I asked him whether he'd ever, in his younger days, talked offensive football with Gillman or Coryell or Zampese, before he joined his staff. "Gillman?" he said. "Oh no, I was just a kid then and he was a God. I met Coryell a few times but I was too shy to talk football with him. When I was an assistant at Arizona State (1983-91) I used to go over and watch Ernie's system with the Rams, but it was too complicated for me to grasp. I admired it, but I didn't understand it. Believe me, I was very thankful when I got a chance to work with him." And so are the high-flying Rams, St. Louis
variety.
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