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On this day in 1931, legendary NFL head coach Bill Walsh was born in Los Angeles, California. I recently read a short biography of Walsh and it reminded me of a fact that seems lost in today’s NFL – that the greatest coaches of all time are the ones that are the best teachers, not the ones who rant and rave and put on a big macho act. Paul Brown was an innovator in that he was the first to introduce classroom training and film study to the NFL. Vince Lombardi has a reputation as a taskmaster but in reality he was one of the best “teaching” head coaches of all time. He was a teacher before he decided to go into coaching. Tom Landry was as stoic a figure on the sidelines as there’s ever been. His method was all about teaching and preparation throughout the week in practice, not yelling and screaming on the sideline on Sundays. Chuck Noll, who played for Brown in Cleveland, always had a reputation for being low-key in Pittsburgh. Noll was a no-nonsense coach, but like the others was all about having his team prepared. Joe Gibbs always had a Mr.Peepers persona, peering out through his eyeglasses, but he too was a great “teacher”. 

Walsh was the ultimate in football coaches who you’d never guess were coaches if you met them on the street. He was professorial to the point where he came across as arrogant. Old school football people always scoffed at Walsh’s “West Coast” offense, which substituted a short “dink and dunk” passing game for the running game. His offense took the opposite approach of the norm, which was that you had to run the ball effectively to set up the passing game. Walsh would pass the ball to set up the running game. It wasn’t a particularly physical style of football, which is what drove football purists crazy, but it was definitely an extension of Walsh’s personality – a scholarly approach to the game rather than the usual “three yards and a cloud of dust” approach. Walsh had the knack for bringing in players who fit his system and were mature to the point where they didn’t need constant babysitting and policing (see this year’s Dallas Cowboys or Minnesota Vikings for examples of that). Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Roger Craig and Matt Millen were not only the team’s best players but also the hardest working. In his early formative years, Walsh was not a great athlete, or a top student either. Obviously he was a genius when it came to football though. When he worked at San Jose State as a graduate assistant coach, the head coach wrote this note in his personnel file: “I predict Bill Walsh will become the outstanding football coach in the United States.” There was a great quote in that biography on Walsh that sums up his scholarly approach to the game. ESPN analyst Beano Cook said this about him: “If Bill Walsh was a general, he would be able to overrun Europe with an army from Sweden.” Walsh was definitely one of the NFL’s greatest coaches of all time, and deserves the “genius” label that he used to seem to relish wearing. When he passed away in 2007 the league lost a great resource, and if there’s one thing current NFL owners can learn from him, it’s that every once in awhile when your team is struggling and your knee-jerk reaction is to blame the coach for “losing control of the locker room” and fire him, maybe a closer look at what kind of players are in that locker room should be in order.