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NFL History: The Ohio River Offense


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EXCELLENT article about the history of the "West Coast Offense", and how it was actualy created in Cincinnati, by Bill Walsh, who was an assistant to Paul Brown at the time.

 

Great references to Greg Cook, Virgil Carter, Ken Anderson, and especially Sam Wyche and his juggernaut 1988 offense.

 

 

http://www.nfl.com/ohioriveroffense

 

 

 

On Dec. 29, 1985, the New York Giants beat Walsh's San Francisco 49ers in the playoffs, 17-3. Annoyed at the media for anointing Walsh a genius, Giants coach Bill Parcells sneered, "What do you think of that West Coast offense now?"

 

It was the first known use of the term. Although the moniker would stick to Walsh's scheme, he never accepted any terminology other than "Midwest Offense" or "Cincinnati Offense."

 

New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, a bipedal pigskin encyclopedia believed to own the world's largest private library of football books, noted in 2013 that Walsh's scheme should be known as the Ohio River offense. Walsh, however, eventually conceded that the Ohio River designation was "probably not sexy enough." Among members of the Walsh coaching tree, there's an irritated sense that the use of the term "West Coast offense" is a telltale sign of laziness.

 

If Walsh's offense was a natural byproduct of Greg Cook's strange turn of fate, the misnomer was a natural byproduct of a monumental lapse in judgment at the end of Brown's Hall of Fame coaching career.

 

Having essentially invented modern football over five decades of coaching, Brown moved from the sidelines to the owner's box in 1976. It was clear, even then, that Walsh was the brightest mind on the staff.

 

As Brown saw it, however, the progressive-thinking Walsh was too soft to assume head-coaching responsibilities. When Brown tapped Bill "Tiger" Johnson as his successor, Walsh instinctively understood that he had to flee his mentor's pervasive shadow -- or risk being typecast as an assistant.

 

"His heart had been broken. He contemplated getting out of football," Walsh's son, Craig, said on NFL Network's "Bill Walsh: A Football Life." "He was just absolutely devastated and didn't know if he could continue. ... He learned later that Paul Brown had blocked him from a number of different coaching opportunities, by giving him a bad review, by saying things that flat out weren't true."

 

Armed with the belief that he was being blackballed as an intellectual lacking toughness, Walsh spent one year on the Chargers' staff, then settled for the head job at Stanford. Soon thereafter, the DeBartolo family purchased the San Francisco 49ers and immediately began searching for the next Paul Brown.

 

"Eddie DeBartolo grew up in Northern Ohio, in Youngstown. He idolized Paul Brown," former Bengals safety Solomon Wilcots said. "Paul Brown had gone to Miami of Ohio, he had won a national championship at Ohio State. After World War II, he started the Cleveland Browns and went to the championship game in 10 straight years. So the DeBartolo family admired Paul Brown. If they can't get Paul Brown, they decided to get Paul Brown's protégé. And they went and got him. That's how Bill Walsh ended up there, and the rest is history."

 

The DeBartolos recognized from afar what Brown failed to appreciate in eight years of partnership. Bolstered by new rules favoring the passing game, Walsh flooded the field with receivers and running backs in San Francisco, pioneering an up-tempo system that took defenses years to solve. He presided over the triumph of the more telegenic forward pass at the expense of an old-school, smash-mouth, grind-it-out style that had spectators and sportswriters pining for complexity and excitement in the 1970s.

 

 

Bill Walsh and legendary coach Paul Brown worked together in Cincinnati to formulate the earliest variations of the West Coast offense.

In 1981, Walsh's high-percentage system produced both the regular-season Most Valuable Player (Ken Anderson, who was running it in Cincinnati) and the Super Bowl MVP (Niners QB Joe Montana).

 

"The Browns' Brian Sipe won (the MVP award) the year before," Pittsburgh quarterback Terry Bradshaw pointed out in Kevin Cook's "The Last Headbangers," "and Sipe didn't have enough arm to break a windowpane! Suddenly Anderson's going 20 for 22 against our Steelers defense! I marveled at that. The West Coast offense was the modern approach, and pretty soon Montana and Walsh are going to take it to a whole 'nother level. It was a new evolution, the start of what we see today."

 

To Brown's credit, he afforded Walsh the autonomy to develop his own philosophy, as well as an innovative offense that would revolutionize football in the decades ahead. The Bengals paid a steep price for Brown's failure of foresight, however, falling to Walsh in Cincinnati's only two Super Bowl appearances to date, seven years apart.

 

The Cincinnati faithful can hardly be blamed for wondering if the 49ers' domination of the 1980s by way of the West Coast offense could have been their own dynasty, via an unstoppable Ohio River offense. Trumpy was left, once again, to lament a scenario in which his hands would have been decorated with Super Bowl rings if not for a simple twist of fate.

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